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

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.

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.

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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