THE HEAVENLY KINGS

The Heavenly Kings (四大天王)

Daniel Wu and company ham it up and form a boy band, replete with coordinating pastels and dopey dance moves. But their foray into the world of Cantopop is more than some new kids on the block trying to make it big. Rather, the erstwhile singing sensation known as Alive set out to expose the industry's machinations, whether in music or the marketing of, with the resulting quasi-mockumentary as their vehicle. The success is debatable but the film is an amusing, over-the-top diversion.

The dubious idea first comes to Andrew Lin as a way of boosting his sagging career, and he lures a few friends who might help the cause. Daniel Wu (beloved action hero, romantic lead, and L'Oreal facial cream spokesperson) is at the top of the list followed by Terence Yin (the snarky bad guy in bad movies) and Conroy Chan (biggest acting credit to date is marriage to actress Josie Ho). Incidentally, none save Yin would even qualify for a local singing contest much less a lush recording contract - and they don't get one, at least one that requires less than a 10 year commitment. But that's merely a pebble on Alive's path to super stardom. They drum up a scheme, one that includes illegal downloading, to generate publicity for their first single.

The plan pans out and the media bites, but the artificial bounce to their singing career doesn't last long. The band needs cash for music videos, concerts, and blinking fan signs, so it's off to a noxious wedding photo promotion shoot. Then their manager, concerned about the lack of a cohesive image, invites a Liberace-channeling fashion designer to propose a few outfits, all of which get a big fail.

It's their mini-tour though that the strain of being pop princes really start to emerge. Chan and Yin prove themselves to be regular party animals, something that doesn't sit well with resident anal retentive Wu or the staid Lin. As the inevitable personality clash threatens the group, the audience wonders, will Alive make up or break up? Will the boys remain friends? Will Andrew Lin actually get a job after this?

The bigger question, really, is whether any of this matters. Is this the expose that will save Hong Kong entertainment from synergetic black hole of EEG and Gold Label, the city's two main pop factories? Director Wu enlists the aid of various industry insiders, including producer Davy Chan, songwriter Paul Wong, singers Miriam Yeung and Karen Mok, real Heavenly King Jacky Cheung, and repeat offender Nic Tse, to help us navigate the treacherous and unseen netherworld of Hong Kong musicdom. They paint quite an unflattering and disheartening picture for anyone who actually cares about artistic integrity - and that's where this caper starts to unravel. Those interested in quality output already understand the overly manufactured nature of the industry, so the movie hardly breaks new ground. And those who would be surprised by these revelations are probably the ones who thought Alive's first song Adam's Choice was a bit of musical genius.

Yes, the film provides some healthy, well-earned laughs; these guys know how to have a good time, and the animated sequences are off the wall. But that said, it appears to suffer from a case of multiple personality disorder. It wants to bill itself as a devastating indictment on Hong Kong entertainment but remains very much a product of the same system it sets out to critique. The whole cast of characters just proves how inbred the industry is. Is Nic Tse, platinum member of EEG, the best guy to ruminate on artistic integrity? EEG, the same company that introduced us to Twins, Boy'z, and Edison Chen - music and movies! Daniel Wu meanwhile has had his share of those generic, throw away pop culture collaborations that he attacks here. I sense that the men of Alive are trying hard to be subversive, but what they reveal instead is an industry leaves little room for maneuvering. In the short run, they pull a fast one on the city, but it grows increasingly difficult to differentiate reality from the pretense of it, as they prove when their song nets a Best Song nomination at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Which leads me to think, maybe Alive really doesn't care and Andrew Lin really does just need a job. That would explain the fair amount of toilet humor, literally, and general frat boy stunts. They seem to derive more pleasure out of jerking everyone around than anything, and one gets that sense as the film nears its end when Lin unleashes some moments of brilliant deadpan. Maybe that's the best, least cynical way of looking at this. At one point, Miriam Yeung suggests that the industry is one big game. You're going to get played, so the only way to succeed is to accept the rules and play along. Although Alive doesn't play by all the rules, they certainly don't change any, and the game goes on.

English Trailer (better quality than the Chinese one)

The original Adam's Choice (阿當的抉擇) MV. It's slightly out of sync, but that was never the point.

Alive @ HK Film Awards

COP UNBOWED

Cop Unbowed (誓不低頭)

I’m usually wary of any Hong Kong movie that features more than two major TVB stars at a time, so I should have avoided this one with its quintuple threat of Alex Fong, Yoyo Mung, Michael Tse, Sam Chan, and Leila Tong. But what can I say, I like to live dangerously. The movie has a promising start. Cop Lam Long (Fong) rides in on a motorcycle one dark, rainy night wielding a long-ass sword, and a baseball cap. He’s greeted by a mob boss Mr. Dick (Ko) and buddy Fung (Tse) who have his wife Ka Wai (Mung) bound and dangling from a clothesline. Fung accuses Long of killing his boss’s very young girlfriend (Tong) to cover his own crime, and after much bloodshed and slow-mo swordplay, Long kills Fung, rescues his wife, and speeds away. Bad ass.

But then the movie actually begins. Fast forward 10 years and Long is running a small seaside restaurant. He and his wife share a warm but quiet relationship; each remains haunted by the past (she also suffered a miscarriage) and tries to insulate him/herself. Long’s disinterest is countered by his energetic friend Curry (Chin Ka Lok) who works at the restaurant along with his younger cousin Yuki (Yu Chiu). Curry spends an inordinate amount of time getting into fights, one of which prompts a teenage punk hyperactive enough for a Twins movie to pester Long into recognize him as a godson. The ubiquitous Lam Suet also pops in and out as Long’s police buddy for no reason except that Lam Suet is in every movie. When Hau (Sam Chan) finally enters as the restaurant’s new hire, the stage is set for some truly intense moments of revenge, betrayal, and maybe even more sword fights. But then the movie is left to mold for the next 40 minutes. We get glimpses of Mr. Dick who still wants Long’s head, an innocuous romance between Yuki and Hau, and some questionable fish metaphors but nothing in the way of plotting that drives the story to an inevitable climax. Instead, the characters remain largely static before rushing headlong into a predictable and poorly executed ending.

Sam Chan bears some fault for this. He has potential, as evidenced by later scenes, but he’s still a television lightweight and in no position to have entire plots pivoting around his characters. Hau is supposed to be one of Long’s primary antagonists and it would have been exciting to comb through the generational and cultural rifts (Hau was raised and educated in the West) between the two. Excepting a few scowls though, nothing Sam Chan does indicates any tension in that relationship; he seems more like a quiet kid who frowns a lot rather than someone with an agenda and enough resentment to fuel it. Likewise, Yoyo Mung wastes what little she’s given to work with. She’s a fair actress but lacks charisma, especially the kind that should sustain her through a 90 minute film. She comes off better on the small screen where she has the luxury of 20 episodes to develop a character. Chin Ka Lok, on the other hand, overcompensates with antics that are amusing but a little too overwrought for this film. This seems to be the case with Yu Chiu as well, who seems well-suited for comedies. As with too many female characters in Hong Kong cinema, hers exists just to look cute and to pine after the new guy, a role she easily fills. The strongest performance here belongs to Alex Fong, and not just because I like to see him sport the wife beater. He does his trademark brooding act, something he always manages with sincerity. The man deserves so much better than the B movies he’s usually propping up. When he gets a compelling script, he can center a film (One Nite in Mongkok) and when opposite top actors, he always holds his own (Lifeline, Your Place or Mine).

Nevertheless, the main shortcoming is choppy storytelling. There’s some good camerawork that hints at something better but even average mob dramas need a plot worth the hour and a half. Half the film is spent in dull anticipation, with an over-reliance on angled close-ups of a ticking clock, silent dinners between Long and Ka Wai, and Hau looking like a sullen schoolboy, while the comedic presence of some of the minor characters disrupts more than lightens the mood. Nice try, but better luck tomorrow.

HOME SWEET HOME

Home Sweet Home (怪物)

Add this to the list of movies that make you want to jump out the window; it's that depressing. Not exactly a horror film, it starts as a thriller and bleeds into a drama. Regardless, it still challenges, exhausts, and profoundly disturbs. The young and picturesque Cheng family has just moved into their new flat, but things soon sour. Their son (Tam Chan Ho) sees something that sets him wailing and his mother, May (Shu Qi) spies a dark figure through the air vents. They manage, however, to pass a peaceful night. When they are invited to a neighbor's birthday party the next day, the shy and solitary May reluctantly accepts. But in the chaos of a flash storm, her son disappears, and thus begins a physical and mental chase that leaves everyone wishing they’d just had a better real estate agent.

Unsure at first what to make of the disappearance, the police, led by Lam Suet, think that May might be slightly left of sane, and their suspicions only increase when she starts crawling through the air ducts in search of her son. May insists that someone is scrabbling the dark of the complex with her kid in tow but there's little proof. She finally manages to get a finger, literally, on some evidence, but this doesn't ease the mounting skepticism of her mental state. The police do offer up a suspect though, Yan Hong (Karena Lam), and we learn that she and her family were once squatters where the apartment now stands. After her husband died in an accident, she and her son disappeared from the records.

The movie shifts here from a couple of crazy women giving chase to a kind of deconstruction of madness, at least an earnest attempt at one. Yan Hong is, of course, the woman lurching around with May's son whom she takes as her own, and while she previously had just been someone in serious need of a bath and new clothes, her story pushes forward a larger critique of society. Or again, it tries to. Both women might do well to learn how to win friends and influence people, but their faults hardly merit the cynicism and inattention that envelopes them. After losing family members or facing eviction, they are left even more isolated, their misery compounded by a wholesale breakdown of society, at least for them. The ineffectiveness of all social safeguards - government, neighbors, family - only hastens their flight to the margins and, in the case of Yan Hong, brands her a monster which is the Chinese title for this film.

The moralizing is not too heavy handed and makes this a somewhat effective piece. At the very least, an actual plot and functional characters are in place - though on the latter point I think May's characterization would have been strengthened by greater interaction with her husband (Alex Fong in little more than a cameo). Maybe because of his small role, however, we have two challenging female characters reinforcing each other, always a cause for celebration in Hong Kong cinema. Even in her distress, May evinces some sympathy for Yan Hong, a feeling reciprocated later on, however briefly. Where the film suffers though is in the emotional avalanche that it unleashes as May's desperation, fueled by the general incompetence and indifference of those around her, comes to a head. It rightly asks much from its audience but is unable to provide a disciplined response. If the movie imagines itself a vehicle for examining social responsibilities, injustice, and even mental health, it cannot succeed by simply releasing a torrent of misery. Both characters are pushed to such extremes that by the end, there is little left for us to grasp and reshape; the final effect is that the audience becomes just as consumed despair as Yan Hong and May.

THE DEATH CURSE

(Looks like someone had to sit through his/her own movie.)

The Death Curse (古宅心慌慌)!

A "horror" movie, possibly because Twins and Boy'z share a double billing. I imagine the movie gods over at EEG and Co are running out of ways to stuff multiple stars in a film so they've come up with this delicious slice of stupid. Charlene Choi plays sassy (read: bitchy) Ding Si who regularly lashes out at the adoring mail man (Laurence Chou) who regularly reads her mail. They find that her father whom she has never met has summoned her to a family reunion. On arriving at his massive estate out in the boondocks, she discovers a gaggle of her brothers and sisters (you guessed it, the other Twin, Boy'z, plus Raymond Wong and others) previously unknown to her. Unfortunately, the happiness is cut short because their father has just died. This hardly affects Ah Si, however, who is just angling for her inheritance. Enter Lawyer Cheung played by Alex Fong - as in his first name is Lawyer - who's executing the will. He informs the brood that Papa Ding left them oodles of money, the estate, and some fruit trees but that they must partake in a few crazy rituals before anyone gets their share, namely gathering at midnight for the next seven days to light incense and then hugging each other. Yes, hugging each other. This pleases some of the lot, like Ding Bat (Steven Cheung) and Ding Ling (Gillian Chung), who just want everyone to get along. Hothead Ding Lik (Raymond Wong) meanwhile is the male answer to Ah Si; he would rather bond with his father’s money than with his siblings. Then there is the other Boy('z), Ah Mo (Kenny Kwan), whose main purpose is to throw in some cracks about an unintentionally incestuous relationship between him and Ah Si a few summers back.

The movie quickly vaults into juvenile horror that mostly involves hallucinations and Papa Ding's dead body, which for some reason is propped in a chair in what appears to be an air conditioned cabin. Nothing happens in the way of plot much less characterization for the next hour. No one seems to give a rip about their dead daddy, and they instead tumble from one creepy hijinks to another. The scares are pretty generic and inconsequential and could have been shuffled or replaced entirely. The only thing that saved this movie was a somewhat predictable ending done with such cheeky relish that I couldn't help cracking a few smiles. The last twenty minutes delivered on the promise of an intriguing albeit ridiculous premise of a family reunion between pubescent strangers. Alright, delivered might be a bit strong, but the climax goes the distance with some of the movie's absurdities. At one point, the guys find themselves literally going crazy in a locked cage. A somewhat incapacitated Si has the antidote - honey - but is just out of reach. She nevertheless manages to dip her foot in it which means, yes, a couple of rabid boys must lick honey off Charlene Choi's toes. Also, the requisite feel-good popstar ending is achieved and mostly palatable because the mush factor dissipates quickly. Still, the movie straddles spoof and pseudo-seriousness without settling on either or on a consistent middle ground. That probably suits the EEG crowd but means this horror-comedy on training wheels is passable fare for the rest.