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Film-crazy in the City

Thrilling, chilling and menacingly cute Asian movies come to town.

by Rasil | 2005.06.21

It's getting easier for people in New York to have the kind of fun people in other countries take for granted. There's still nowhere to watch Nigerian exorcism comedies or Egyptian thrillers, but Bollywood gangsters regularly riddle rivals with bullets in the basement of the Virgin Megastore and sometimes Chinese killers are shopped to the cops in the East Village.

Subway Cinema's New York Asian Film Festival is biased towards Korean and Japanese movies whose wackiness the curators can describe in slightly patronizing white hipsterese, but its capacity for fun is just about wide enough to allow something for everyone. Last year, they brought Infernal Affairs and Running on Karma into town, as well as When the Last Sword is Drawn, which starts out with a samurai musing that his melancholy stems from not having killed anyone lately, and gets better from there. This year's lineup of martial arts extravaganza, anime, J-horror, K-romance, "is it or isn't it" sexploitation, sensitive social concern, etc kicks off with the cop soap opera Crazy N' The City.

Crazy N' The City (HK, 2004), like Bullets Over Summer or Expect the Unexpected, is a light-hearted comedy of everyday life which swerves into and out of distress and grief. The characters may be stock — the blasé older cop (Eason Chen), the overeager rookie (Joey Yung), the flirty jailbaits, the neighborhood crazy (Francis Ng) — but they're depicted with enough attention and empathy that they don't feel rote. And for all its cliches, Crazy N' The City also has its affecting moments, like when the two divorcees dissonantly reprise old arguments they had with their exes. Crazy N' The City feels real without being boring or slow, and how rare is that?

If you liked Kung Fu Hustle, you'll like Arahan (Korea, 2004), which is having its NY premiere — it has a loser with great chi, hidden martial arts masters, cartoony visual jokes, expensive special effects. It also has allusions to Korean history: one Buddhist master dies from breathing tear gas during a demonstration, a sacred site is ruined when it becomes an Army training ground but recovers some of its powers as a War Memorial, the Bad Guy is a monk whose rage for power is incited by human suffering. The Bad Guy monk, whose stubble, pout, curls, fur-collared coat and abs of startling delineation make him look like something out of a Reaction ad, incarnates the Tempation of Positivism, I guess. Two-thirds of the way through, I started fantasizing about the Hot Curry Pan at Panya, but if you don't mind special effects subbing for fight choreography, Arahan will do fine for you.

The festival will also have the NY premiere of the thriller One Night in Mongkok (HK, 2004), in which a gang rivalry spurred by a shouting match between two fake watch vendors implicates widening circles of people, including a too-perky hooker (Cecilia Cheung) and a hired killer (Daniel Wu) who have come into Hong Kong on a day pass from Mainland China. The day is Christmas Eve and as the hours drain out, the cops (Alex Fong and co.), the killer, the murder broker (Lam Suet), the prostitutes and pimps, pace through the same blocks, finding and avoiding each other. Based on a true story, nicely textured, well-paced, the movie is weakened by perfunctory acting from its glamorous leads.

The vote slip handed out at the festival reveals that the audience favorites over the years have been movies of menacing levels of "feel good" sugariness; maybe if enough people show up for movies with less diabetes-inducing pleasures, there will be more thugging and fewer Korean babes being shrivelingly winsome.

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