Category: Hong Kong film
-
The first act of Hard Boiled is fantastic. Between Woo’s glossy, smooth jazz but with bite tone and Chow Yun-Fat’s glorious lead performance; it’s all like butter. There’s a big, intricate shootout with Woo (and his editors Ah-Chik, Kai Kit-Wai, and David Wu) doing masterful work, there’s some workplace humor with cop Chow being on…
-
When The Killer introduces second-billed Danny Lee, it certainly seems like Lee’s arc is going to be the most important in the film. He’s a Hong Kong cop who starts chasing professional hitman Chow Yun-fat and gets in the middle of Chow’s fight with crime lord Shing Fui-on, with tragic results for everyone involved. And…
-
Enter the Fat Dragon is about Hong Kong super-cop Donnie Yen (already in a pound of makeup before he puts on the fat suit, presumably to look more age appropriate for love interest Niki Chow) who goes too far one too many times and finds himself busted down to the evidence room. After Chow dumps…
-
Until the third act, Super Inframan at least keeps a brisk pace. The movie’s got almost nothing going for it—other than Chen Yung—yu frankly courageous very seventies score and even it’s a small blip of goodness, not a positive feature—but at least it moves. It doesn’t drag through the entire third act, there are a…
-
2046 is a very strange sequel. Because it’s most definitely a sequel to In the Mood for Love. Tony Chiu-Wai Leung and Lam Siu Ping are playing the same characters, a few years after that film. But the way writer and director Wong deals with the previous film and its events… he intentionally… well, I’m…
-
Chungking Express has two parts. First part is lonely young plainclothes cop Kaneshiro Takeshi counting down the days to his birthday, which is also thirty days since his girlfriend of five years dumped him. Simultaneously, sort of middle person drug trafficker Brigitte Lin loses her latest batch of mules (once they’re loaded up with the…
-
Much of Police Story operates on charm. If it’s not co-writer, star, and director Jackie Chan’s charm, it’s charm of the scenes. There are some painfully uncharming moments–mostly Chan’s frequent neglective abuse of girlfriend Maggie Cheung–but even when Police Story is in its stunt spectacular mode, there’s charm. The film doesn’t open with charm, however.…
-
Three is about a dirty cop (Louis Koo), a determined doctor (Zhao Wei), and an injured criminal (Wallace Chung). It’s not real time, but its present action is probably seven hours–in an under ninety minute runtime–so it’s close. Zhao is supposed to be getting more and more tired because she refuses to go home from…
-
In the Mood for Love runs under a hundred minutes. Its present action is somewhat indeterminate, but less than a year total and a few weeks for the longest continuous sequence. As for the length of that continuous sequence, I’m not sure. There’s such a smoothness to William Chang’s editing. It’s calm and measured. It’s…
-
Director Wong crafts Days of Being Wild as a series of vignettes, only with the film’s principal character never the protagonist of any of these vignettes. Wong and editors Kai Kit-wai and Patrick Tam go for lyrical transitions (or none at all); combined with the emptiness of Wild’s Hong Kong (busy places at times they…
-
Who would have thought a movie just called Drug War would be so amazing? The original Chinese title appears to be just as simple, director To and his amazing batch of writers–War is the probably the best four person scripted film ever–must have known they didn’t really need a flashy title. To’s direction is astoundingly…
-
The Great Magician is a madcap romp through rural early twentieth century China. It never says rural–Peking is mentioned a couple times–but it feels rural, where a somewhat dimwitted warlord (Lau Ching-wan) can still be powerful. The time period’s a little confusing too. Moviemaking plays a significant part in Magician and all the example films…
-
Tedious and self-indulgent mystical-ish ghost story about psychologist Angelica Lee taking a hypnosis drug and seeing, you know, ghosts. Lots of underwear stuff because her dude (Guo Xiaodong) is an underwater photographer. (Writer-director Hark can’t shut up about the water in the bad narration). Okay time killer until the third act, when it all falls…
-
I never know how to describe Ashes of Time. The first–and probably last–time I tried, I described it as a mix of Magnolia and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As difficult as it is to describe, it’s got to be impossible to advertise–a character-based martial arts film, where fight scenes lack any visceral impact. Wong stylizes…
-
Even with rats doing cute tricks–and maybe because of it–Invincible Enforcer is an unwatchable piece of… of something. I’m not even sure the correct noun. It’s my first or second attempt at a Shaw Brothers production and what’s really amazing about it is the editing. It’s got all the fast edits of a modern Hollywood…
-
A-1 Headline is a good, old fashioned newspaper movie. There’s the conflicted editor, the smarter than he gets credit for photographer, the amusing guys around the office. Even the newspaper office looks like a good movie newspaper office: rows of desks, yellowing fluorescents, and antiquated computers. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t have a particularly interesting mystery.…
-
Watching Fighting for Love is frustrating. Rapid-fire dialogue–straight out of a Howard Hawks comedy–is difficult to get in subtitles, especially poorly translated ones. Still, the charm of the actors comes through and Fighting for Love is probably the best mediocre romantic comedy I’ve seen in a long time, at least of the recently-made (since 1998)…
-
Charming if problematic romantic caper comedy about divorced professional thieves Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng who have to do another heist together; they’re still in love, of course, which complicates things. The film works because it keeps the character count low and–for the first half–makes sure the cuteness and the charm are in full effect.…
The Stop Button 