Fight Back To School - A Stephen Chow comedy written by Barry Wong (Hard-Boiled and the ridiculously prolific writer/producer/director Wong Jing, and directed by Gordon Chan (Fist Of Legend). The plot is in the Kindergarten Cop/Hot Fuzz vein, with Chow playing a supercop who has to go undercover at a high school to find his boss' lost gun (shades of Stray Dog). Hilarity ensues.
The humor is much more subdued relative to Chow and Wong's The Royal Tramp, which mixes its slapstick with a dizzying array of puns that barely make it into the English subtitles. The film also lacks the over-the-top visual inventiveness of Chow's later films like Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer. But it's a pleasant and entertaining comedy, with typical fine performances from Chow and his perpetual sidekick Man Tat Ng and the occasional fun action sequence.
Days Of Being Wild - Wong Kar-wai's breakthrough second film, winner of five HK Film Awards (Picture, Director, Cinematographer (Christopher Doyle), Actor (Leslie Cheung), and Art Direction) and rated #3 on the HK Film Awards 2005 list of the Best Chinese Films of All-Time. It's the first film in the trilogy that concludes with In The Mood For Love and 2046 (a film which makes a lot more sense if you've seen this one, BTW).
There isn't a plot so much as a dense web of character relationships (Su Li Zhen loves Yuddy, Mimi/Lulu loves Yuddy, the cop loves Su Li Zhen, Zeb loves Mimi/Lulu, Yuddy hates his mom). It's also arguably the most mellow of Wong's films, without the distortions of perspective, camera speed and film stock that he'd play with in his later films, or the overwhelming soundtracks of those films (or anything like the "Take My Breath Away" sequence of As Tears Go By). Instead, the recurring song on the soundtrack is a light Latin number, contributing to the mellow vibe.
The cast is wonderful, only Wong's collection of talent in Ashes Of Time really tops it. Leslie Cheung plays Yuddy as a kind of nihilistic James Dean: apathetic and irresistibly attractive. Maggie Cheung's restraint brings out the desperation in the quiet Su Li Zhen, while Carina Lau chews up the screen as the vivacious Mimi/Lulu. Jacky Cheung isn't given a lot to do as Zeb, but his goofy charm still manages to work. And Andy Lau is solid as the stand-up cop, given a difficult task in that Wong constantly films him with the brim of his hat covering his eyes.
This was Wong's first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and while it isn't as flashy as their later work (there is one nice tracking shot towards the end of the film, but no slow-motion, for example), it is always interesting. They suffuse the film with a greenish light, giving the film a dreamlike haze and adding to the sense to mustiness and humidity of the time and place (some video transfers filter this out, beware).
This is the first Wong film to tackle what have become his thematic obsessions: time, memory, lost love, travel, Hong Kong in the 60s. And while later films have dealt with these subjects in more depth, they've also been more direct. The obliquity of Days Of Being Wild is part of its laid-back charm, the characters are often desperate, but the film never is. Wong consistently asserts self-defeating repression among the members of the generation that came of age in the '60s (as opposed to the hyperbolic young people of the '90s as seen in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together, many of whom achieve happier endings than the characters in Days, In The Mood and 2046). In Days that repression finds its most general expression, going so far as to assert a kind of generational ubiquity to its events with the film's coda (featuring the great Tony Leung getting ready for a night on the town).
This really isn't much of a contest. Nor should it be, this being the first round. Fight Back To School is a nice and enjoyable film. Days Of Being Wild is a masterpiece, one of the best films of the 90s, Asian or not.