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Hong Kong Ain't Got Shit on Us Reviews from New York's Hong Kong Film Festival. Some of the movies in Walter Reade’s HK film festival are a couple of years old, but the big screen and mysteriously near-empty halls make the screenings enjoyable. Though the festival is still running, it’s too late too see these, so take them as rental tips: Infernal Affairs 1, 2 and 3 Tony Leung is Yan, a scruffy, kvetchy gangster who is really an undercover cop, Andy Lau is Ming, a prissy cop who is really a triad mole, and Infernal Affairs is a skillful thriller without an ounce of fat on it. Night-and-neon cinematography and rapid-fire editing intensify the twisty story of two moles trying to uncover each other’s identity. Their respective girlfriends have little to do and deserve less, but one of the best things about Infernal Affairs is the richness of the minor characters, including Anthony Wong as cop boss Wong and Eric Tsang as blonde capo Sam. The huge success of Infernal Affairs prompted a prequel, Infernal Affairs 2. The emotional texture of the relationships, especially the backstory of Wong’s relationship with Sam, add narrative heft to the scattered double-triple-quadruple crossings. The numerous quotations from the earlier movie are slightly annoying, but give you time to work out what's going on, and sometime-rapper Edison Chen is impressively befuddled as young Ming, the dazed protégé of Sam’s mistress. Infernal Affairs 3 wrings the last drops of interest out of the series. This one is supposed to take place before and after the first movie, and the thin story about an increasingly crazy Ming and his coldfish nemesis Yeung (Leon Lai) is bloated with hallucination sequences, moralizing siloloquys and lovey-dovey cutesiness. The gooey romantic scenes between a clean-shaven Yan and his therapist (Kelly Chen) have all the erotic frisson of watching two Hello Kittys mate. After the therapist blabbed on and on about her stolen candy bar, I couldn’t wait until she caught a shot to the head, and that’s as suspenseful as this movie gets. Verdict: 1 will make you throw your panties at Tony Leung, 2 will divert you while you eat your popcorn, and 3 will make you wonder where the exit is. Time and Tide A cupcake bodyguard (Nicholas Tse) in an off-the-books racket befriends a mysterious man (Wu Bai) whose wife is the daughter of the gangland boss that the cupcake’s organization is trying to protect and mystery man’s former friends are trying to kill. The plot makes little sense and matters less; most of the movie is one long, frenetic, hi-tech chase sequence, punctuated by superhuman fight scenes. You can sort the good guys from the bad ones because the good guys are sentimental about pregnant hoes while the bad guys are super-brolic. For added entertainment, the dreadlocked Asian Brazilian-but-speaking-Spanish mercenary’s cheesy English one-liners are mistranslated (!) in the English subtitles. Stunningly shot and road-runnerly paced, Time and Tide is a distracting spectacle that feels unsatisfying after the fact. Verdict: only view in a theater where other people will be making funny remarks. Running on Karma Brolic stripper and ex-martial arts monk Biggie (Andy Lau) can see people’s karma. When there’s a murder in the club in which he strips, Biggie helps a rookie cop (Cecilia Cheung) crack the case. They begin a bittersweet friendship which confronts Biggie with her past life as a brutal Japanese soldier, and his past as a monk. This impressive, engrossing movie weaves many threads ― the gruesome murders, deft action sequences, low-key romance, the mean boss cop treating our heroine badly, the wu shu-ingest Indian since Bodhidharma, philosophical reflections on violence ― into a suspenseful, satisfying story with a surprising ending. I have to give props to any movie which can put a man in a comically grotesque muscle suit and make him convincing as an honorable, intelligent hero, not to mention an action movie whose philosophical ruminations are affecting rather than cheesy, not to mention an HK movie in which style emphasizes substance, rather than trying to distract from the lack thereof. Verdict: buy copies for yourself and all your friends. Throw Down Judo freak Tony (Aaron Kwok) comes to a club to challenge the manager Sze-to (tanning salon ad Louis Koo) to a match. Ex-judo champ and permanent drunk Sze-to has more important things on his mind, like gambling and stealing enough money to pay his boss, his loanshark and his ailing judo master. Meanwhile, unsuccessful singer Mona (Cherrie Lin) schemes to jump-start her career. Throw Down starts out as a screwball comedy with rapid-fire dialogue and wierdly emphatic mise-en-scène, and then it grows subtle and various, with Sze-to’s surprising big secret off-handedly revealed. That almost everyone in this movie knows no greater happiness than judo, despite injury and possible death, makes for fun-filled fight scenes, sweaty homoeroticism and melancholy existential comedy. Plus the movie’s a homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata. Verdict: buy a bootleg. Breaking News Hong Kong cops (Nick Cheung and others) lose face in the media after a failed bust in which the bad guys (Ricky Ren and others) escape. The cops try to redeem their rep by swooping down on the apartment building where the bad guys are hiding out, while an icy police bigwig (Kelly Chen) tries to orchestrate the crisis into a media-pleasing show. The movie is more interested in telling jokes than anything else ― the chases are adequate without being exciting and the cop roles are perfunctorily written, but the jokes on the media and the spiky kid hostages are funny. The media-savvy lead bad guy (Ricky Ren) gets to be charming because he’s played by a pop star, never mind about all the cop deaths played for tears, and Kelly Chen finds her métier as someone who is supposed to be annoying. Verdict: borrow from a friend. PTU Slo-mo pseudo-heroics and chase scene sight gags signal the satirical intent of this sluggishly-paced cops-and-robbers movie, but the jokes aren’t funny enough or frequent enough to make up for the lack of the satisfactions of a policier. This movie is what happens when a comedy sketch stretches out to feature length. Verdict: don’t even take a free copy.
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