by ·Comments Off on Mad Detective (2007, Johnnie To/Wai Ka Fai)

Fabulous action thriller, visually stylish with wild acting and a great, complicated script. According to Masters of Cinema it was the “year’s largest grossing film at the Hong Kong box office.” According to IMDB, it made nearly $5,000 at the U.S. box office. This is why a remake is inevitable (thanks to the producer of Rush Hour, can’t wait).

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Ho (Andy On of Black Mask 2 and New Police Story) is new on the police force, investigating the disappearance of another officer. Bun (Ching Wan Lau of Black Mask 1 and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts) is the unhinged “mad” detective, actually an ex-detective fired from the force for cutting his ear off but still an utter master of deduction through his unusual methods of instinctually empathizing with killers and victims. It’s part Training Day (crazy partner) and part Silence of the Lambs (dangerous non-cop assisting investigation), except that Bun is a good guy.

Bun visits a crime scene and imagines himself participating:
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In fact, he begins to emerge as the only good guy, as he gets deeper into the conspiracy (the disappeared cop was killed by his partner Chi Wai (Ka Tung Lam of Election 1 & 2), who is going on crime sprees with his murdered partner’s gun) and Ho reveals himself to be a useless coward. Bun claims to see people’s inner personalities (including “Fatso” and a strong violent dude, both Breaking News vets, and “the calculating woman” who makes all of Chi Wai’s decisions) – in the shot below, Chi Wai’s many personalities ride in the back seat while Ho appears as a scared little boy.

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So in the end it’s less Training Day meets Silence of the Lambs than MPD Psycho meets Herman’s Head. May (Kelly Lin of Boarding Gate) exists as two characters – she’s Bun’s tough ex-wife, an inspector on the force who warns Ho about his erratic behavior, and in Bun’s mind she’s still his loving wife, always by his side at home and at dinner parties with Ho and his worried girlfriend Gigi.

Inspector May:
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During the shootout finale in a hall of mirrors (of course there are mirrors), Ho becomes the new Chi Wai, displacing guns and covering up who shot whom to keep himself out of trouble, controlled by his brand-new commanding woman inner-personality, a terribly good, scary ending.

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Looked to me like To and his cinematographer were using whichever camera Mann shot Miami Vice with, but IMDB says it’s 35mm so I’m way off.

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AUGUST 2021: Watched again in HD, still great. Guess that English-language remake isn’t gonna happen.

APRIL 2024: And again with Maria, who said at least the first ten minutes was good before it went straight into the deep end.

by ·Comments Off on Royal Tramp I & II (1992, Jing Wong)

Trying to clear my head of CJ7, I grabbed the first Stephen Chow movie I could find at the store, and hit paydirt. Not as artistically ambitious as most of the movies I like, but as entertainment it is supreme, better than Michael Bay’s filmography to date and probably a thousandth as expensive. Plus these are only two of the six films Wong is credited with directing in 1992 alone. Take that, Mr. Bay.

I’d check the IMDB every ten minutes during part one trying to keep characters straight and to locate superstar Brigitte Lin… finally figured out that she shows up at the very end (the final shot!) of pt. 1 to set up her starring role in pt. 2. But then she’s not even that big a deal in 2 – it’s another jumble of too many characters (sometimes crossdressing to make it even more confusing for me). Just a ton of penis jokes, more than I think I’ve ever heard in one place before. Supposedly very clever wordplay in the dialogue, but I don’t guess that translated very well in the subs. I found it funny anyway. Not the greatest most showoffy action scenes, but they’re alright. Just so much going on, impossible to get bored while watching this. Trying to lay out all the plots and alliances here would take longer than re-watching the movies, but in short…

Stephen Chow is Wei Shu Bo, works at a brothel or someplace, rescues the lead dude (Chan) of an anti-government organization, joins their group and is sent to the emperor’s palace to do some shit, but befriends the emp (Ning) and his sister (Princess Kim). In each movie he tries to protect them from a traitorous super-powerful white-haired dude, first Obai then Fung (who works for King Ng of Ping-Si whose son Prince Ng is to marry Kim, who is in love with Stephen Chow, who is also having sex with Brigitte Lin and the Swan twins, but I get ahead of myself). Actually Chow is powerless but lucky throughout part one (the empress or queen, the one who later transforms into Brigitte Lin, kills Obai but Chow takes credit), working as apprentice to eunuch Hai, then when Chow has sex with Lin in pt. 2 he gets most of her powers. Chow has a friend Dor Long who shows up a lot, and there’s a girl named Ah Or or maybe Sister Bond who I never figured out who she was and nobody else seems to know either. Oh and Lin’s teacher the one-armed nun is a big deal in the first half of pt. 2.

Stephen Chow had been in 30 movies by now so I assume he was pretty well known. He started his writer/director career a couple years after this.
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Lin starred in Police Story, Zu Warriors and Peking Opera Blues, Swordsman II & III, New Dragon Gate Inn, Bride With White Hair, then she pretty much stopped acting after doing two Wong Kar-Wai films and getting married in ’94.
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I didn’t get screenshots of the first movie, but the queen was Sharla Cheung (costarred with Stephen Chow in a bunch of things), the eunuch was Stephen Chow fave Man Tat Ng (also in Happy Together), and Obai (hilariously credited as O’Brien on IMDB) was Elvis Tsui of the Sex & Zen movies and a hundred others.

The emperor’s sister, Chingmy Yau (below), costarred with Jet Li in some other Jing Wong films in the 90’s as well as the HK version of Street Fighter. The emperor, Siu-Lun Wan, hasn’t been in much else. The mysterious Sister Bond, Sandra Ng Kwan Yue, has been in a hundred movies with titles I recognized from the other filmographies I looked at.
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King Ng is Paul Chun (appeared with Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan movies back in the 70’s), his son the prince (who gets castrated by the princess if I haven’t mentioned) is Ken Tong (of a bunch of movies with knockoff titles of more famous movies, incl. a semi-sequel to Royal Tramp starring Tony Leung).
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Lan Law, the one-handed nun, has been acting since the 50’s, appeared in Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.
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The puppetmaster Fung, Shi-Kwan Yen, was in a lot of stuff in the 70’s, some high-profile films in the 90’s, and hasn’t done much since Iron Monkey in ’93.
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Oh wait, forgot to mention the best part. At the end of part one, it freeze-frames on Brigitte Lin, and the credits come up, declaring “PEPSI / SEVEN-UP”. A soda advertisement in the credits!

by ·Comments Off on CJ7 (2008, Stephen Chow)

I started off the year talking about how there are so many great movies I’d like to see, it’s stupid to waste time watching bad movies… see also “The Finding Forrester Effect“. And here I am watching two bad ones in a row (this and Doomsday). Sure both viewing decisions were vaguely auteur-based since I’ve liked work by these directors before, but wasn’t Finding Forrester itself directed by a renowned film auteur? Oh well, there is no discovery without risk.

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Chow plays a poor, uneducated, overworked, widowed single father. On top of that, his son is bullied at school, failing his classes, and can’t play sports because his shoes are falling apart. On top of THAT, Chow falls off a building at his construction job and dies. and his son cries and cries, and so does his nice teacher, and so do the only other people in the movie theater besides myself.

On the other hand, there are poop jokes and dream sequences, and the kid has a cute flubbery alien that his dad found at the dump.

Back on the first hand, the alien is beaten and squished and drowned and exploited and abandoned. Finally it kills (?) itself to resurrect Chow, god only knows why.

Movie alternates between bland and cruel. When it’s not making one of its main characters suffer, it’s not doing anything particularly exciting or interesting either. The good parts (most of them involving two extremely oversized middle-schoolers) are few, and not good enough to make this a movie worth watching.

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It’s rare that we get a foreign film here in Atlanta less than two months after its opening date in its home country. I guess this didn’t play the festival circuit and was maybe pre-sold for US distribution after the 1-2 punch of Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. Anyway, it closed in a week and we’ll hopefully never hear from it again. Better luck next time in Kung Fu Hustle 2…

by ·Comments Off on Breaking News (2004, Johnny To)

What this movie has in common with Children of Men:
– nice monster long-shot opening the movie
– cool shootouts and motorcycle chases with no edits

What this movie has in common with Infernal Affairs:
– a cellphone chase between hero and villain
– actress Kelly Chen (the psychiatrist in IA), who I didn’t like in this one with her one facial expression, the “I’m in control” impassive look with the head-down eyes-up intensity.

Pretty good action hostage flick, ridiculous in parts, a fine waste of time. Not one but TWO fat comic-relief characters… and one farts a lot, so he’s the funniest. No cops die, all the baddies die (despite their inexhaustible supply of grenades). Most of the movie is set is a huge ugly apartment building. Oh and the title refers to the media manipulation going on by both sides. The media turns out to be very easily manipulated, and come out as the big losers in the end… by me, at least… that’s not a point the movie makes.

Good enough intro to Johnny To’s world. Still have to check out Election sometime.

by ·Comments Off on The God of Cookery (1996, Stephen Chow)

Official New Year’s Eve Movie of 2006/07. Means our 2007 will be full of award-winning food, harsh competition, street fights, amazing bouncing meatballs, redemptive plastic surgery, obsessive crushes, big-money revenge schemes, meditation, and Chinese people.

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Martin says if we liked this, we need to see The God of Gamblers, The God of Gamblers II, The God of Gamblers III, The God of Beggars and The Gods Must Be Crazy. All in good time. Myself, I’d rather start with Fight Back to School (which Videodrome actually has).

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Katy liked it, and says it’s a joke on the Iron Chef show.

by ·Comments Off on Infernal Affairs (2002, Andrew Lau & Alan Mak)

Crimeboss sends Andy to cadet school to be a police mole, and Policeboss kicks Tony out of cadet school to be a gangster mole. They spend a few tense scenes trying to find out each other’s identity and sabotage their own team’s operations. Eventually everyone’s paranoid… and then the gangsters kill Policeboss. Even though Andy swore loyalty to Crimeboss, he’s been working closely with Policeboss for 10 years, and he takes the death hard, ends up killing Crimeboss himself. Another police mole blows Tony away at the end, and Andy kills him, ending up head of the police division himself, with nobody (apparently) knowing where he really came from.

Great movie, tense in all the right places, uses quick flashback cuts to pack a lot of backstory into a pretty short movie. Could easily have been as long as Heat. I wonder if Scorsese’s remake will be.

Oops, director Andrew Lau and star Andy Lau are not the same person.

Starring:

Leonardo Dicaprio:
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Matt Damon:
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Mark Wahlberg:
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Vera Farmiga:
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Alec Baldwin:
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and Jack Nicholson:
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