Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 36 - 40Metade Fumaca (Kam-Hung Yip, 1999)
Lost to Peppermint Candy (verdict by roujin)If nothing else, the soundtrack for
Metade Fumaca should probably make it to the fourth round of our 1990s Far East Soundtracks Bracket. It's really nice. I agree with roujin about the other good elements here, too — the performances, the cinematography, the quirky sensibility, etc. Nicholas Tse, in an early role, does a fine job of acting cool of looking pretty — but nowhere near as pretty or cool as Shu Qi in her brief, typecast role as Unobtainable Ideal. But the standout in the cast for me was Sandra Ng Kwan Yue, who, it turns out, is married to Peter Chan, director of
Comrades, Almost a Love Story, which features a great supporting turn by Eric Tsang, the star of
Metade Fumaca. It's all connected! Anyway, the main narrative of this film does feel pretty half-baked, but the film never really takes that narrative very seriously, so I didn't find that too be as big a flaw as roujin did. The movie is much more interested in its many non sequiturs, like the scene of the two leads sitting under a piano in the rain, having a heart-to-heart conversation (see roujin's verdict for a screenshot); or the moment where a gang rumble gets preempted by a meteor shower, with all the prospective combatants looking up to the night sky in shared joy. All told, it seemed to me to be the ideal round one film, along the lines of
Suicide Bus and
Postman Blues — films that are good enough to be worth a look (and might have surprised the right viewer) but not necessarily good enough to advance to round two.
An Affair (Je-yong Lee, 1998)
Lost to Ley Lines (verdict by roujin)An impressive film. Movies this innocuous don't usually piss me off so much. But
An Affair is just insultingly bland and uncreative, with a script as simple as its title. It's like it wants to be
Red Shoe Diaries redone as a K-drama, so in between the scattered sex scenes we have to suffer through long stretches of the two protagonists staring off in different directions, with one of them in the foreground, the other slightly out of focus in the background — just so we know we're watching art and not softcore porn. The plot turns, such as they are, are all so generic, it almost feels like satire. To add a bit of conflict, the filmmakers just have the cuckolded husband randomly tell his wife — and I'm paraphrasing, maybe — "Oh, that guy you're sleeping with behind my back that I don't know about yet, I invited him over for dinner because that will theoretically make for a tense scene between the three of us, okay?" That's the script firing on all cylinders. After roujin posted his verdict, I wrote, "Your review of the totally boring-sounding
The Affair makes me think you would have bumped
Sense and Sensibility up a star rating if you'd watched an Asian dub of it. Or maybe it was the sex." The thing is, the sex here isn't even that hot — certainly not compared to the opening of
Happy End. And, hell, even the first five minutes of
I Like You, I Like You Very Much had better plotting. Clearly roujin is a horrible person.
Give It All (Itsumichi Isomura, 1998)
Lost to Not One Less (verdict by Melvil)Just look at that screenshot. It's
The Virgin Suicides meets
The Sandlot! Okay, maybe not so much. I actually already
reviewed this movie (without having seen it) right after Melvil posted his verdict, and I pretty much stand by what I wrote there. The lack of character development was a huge obstacle to my engagement. The six girls on the crew team are barely distinguishable from each other. I'm curious if that's true in the source novel as well, or if the filmmakers were just more interested in oars cutting through water, a general atmosphere of nostalgia, and the legs of young girls (Etsuko's cut-off jeans were sweet, it's true). It looks and feels like a good movie (the cinematography is quite nice, and I really liked the color palette, which reminded a lot of
Tokyo Biyori's), but I just couldn't get invested at all. Melvil liked this film a fair amount more than I did. It pretty much much lost me at the script-by-numbers frame device prologue.
The Scent of Green Papaya (Anh Hung Tran, 1993)
Lost to Picture Bride (verdict by Thor)I'm not sure what to do with this one. Going into it, I was very mindful of Thor's having labeled it "[o]ne of the most potent examples of arthouse ponce ever perpetrated", so I a little on the defensive the whole time. It is definitely a very good looking film (especially once I tracked down a unbrightened copy with the correct aspect ratio), showcasing great set design and cinematography. A lot of reviews remark that it's slow and minimalistic and lacks tension, but I was engaged the whole time, so screw those guys. The child's-eye perspective of the bulk of the film was occasionally a bit precious and overly familiar (for some reason I kept thinking of
Fanny and Alexander, even though my memories of that film are completely hazy), but it's still all very pleasant, to borrow Thor's description. The final third ("ten years later") suffers from being an overly obvious Cinderella tale. I can almost understand why it annoyed Thor so much, but I found that the aesthetics were interesting enough to overcome the thematic and narrative flaws. The piano score, which is a virtue of the film throughout, is especially well used at this point, taking over the soundtrack as the prospective lovers move around each other in silence. The Buddhist implications of all this were lost on me, but, regardless, it's an entertainingly pretty film, troubling in a few respects and possibly in need of another look. Arthouse ponce!
Young and Dangerous (Andrew Lau, 1996)
Lost to Swallowtail Butterfly (verdict by roujin)Not much to add to roujin's verdict here. He perfectly summed up
Young and Dangerous when he wrote, "It reminds me of the movies I used to see on Saturday afternoons on the WB cuz I had nothing else to do and it was on." It's very watchable and reasonably fun — but very slight (thematically, narratively, visually, viscerally, what have you). The handheld camerawork keeps things lively, I guess, but the strobe effect during a couple of the action scenes is just stupid. Ekin Cheng (aka Dior Cheng) is a really bland lead, the kind of actor who'd be killed off in the first season of a WB drama when the writers realize that his prettiness isn't enough to make him telegenic. Jordan Chan is so much better as the sidekick Chicken, stealing every scene he's in — except when Simon Yam shows up briefly and makes everyone else look like an extra. Francis Ng has fun with his role as the antagonist Ugly Kwan; the performance didn't quite work for me but points for trying. Anyway, yeah, this was way better than
Fudoh: The Next Generation and is worth a look, if you're interested in Hong Kong cinema — but, like
Metade Fumaca, it's a nice round one film, not necessarily a round two film.
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