Subjects for Further Research Capsule Reviews

Anthony Chan:

A Fishy Story — February 15, 2017

Did you know there’s a Maggie Cheung variation on Breakfast at Tiffany’s that makes extensive use of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and in which the two down and out neighbors/lovers are repeatedly thwarted by lascivious men, rich women and an extremely aggressive transportation union? Well, there is and it’s wonderful.

Evans Chan

We Have Boots — January 27, 2020

Evans Chan’s We Have Boots, premiering in its current form at Rotterdam, takes a more traditional view of the Umbrella Movement, focusing on several of its leading figures as they awaited trial for their activities (the charges amount to things like “inciting to incite to being public nuisance” and other trumped up nonsense). It appears to have been filmed in 2017 and 2018, and then re-edited with new footage as the 2019 protests broke out (it goes right up to New Years 2020, a mere three weeks ago). The result is a bit unwieldy, but never less than fascinating. Like the movement itself it lurches from activist to activist, back and forth through time (the story of 21-year-old activist-turned exiled legislator Agnes Chow is particularly compelling, as is that of activist Tommy Cheung, who gets sentenced only to community service and thus is one of the film’s few main figures who is still eligible to run for office). Factions within the Umbrella Movement are explored, particularly its uglier, nationalist, and anti-Chinese groups (Pepe the Frog makes a couple of incongruous appearances, as a symbol for Hong Kong nationalism, or simply a cartoon misappropriated by a very different culture I don’t know, but it’s definitely weird). A picture gradually emerges of the Umbrella Movement as a generally peaceful, idealistic moment, with the crackdown that followed it and the persecution of its leaders ultimately leading to the darker, more violent and much bigger and longer lasting 2019 actions.

The film’s title comes from a poem by African-American writer Nikki Giovanni (“We begin a poem / with longing / and end with / responsibility / And laugh / all through the storms / that are bound / to come / We have umbrellas / We have boots / We have each / other.”). It’s one of the many links between the Occupy movement in Hong Kong and its inspirations in the United States (Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is quoted at length as well). Occupy was, after all, a global movement, one whose final effects have yet to be determined, here, there, or everywhere. In the U.S., a generation of activists have moved into electoral politics, hoping to reshape the Democratic Party and counter the increasingly crude forces with which capital defends itself from within the system. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young activist very much like the students of the Umbrella Movement, even had a similar slogan to Giovanni’s line in her run for Congress against an entrenched machine opponent: “They’ve got Money. We’ve got People.”

There are of course important differences between the last decade in Hong Kong and in the U.S. (for one thing, Ocasio-Cortez is allowed to run for office here, unlike Agnes Chow in Hong Kong), and this wonderful series gives so much great context to it, reminding us that every place has a unique history and politics of its own, that it is dangerous to conflate them and us, to view another’s experience only through the lens of our own small corner of the world. But the commonalities are vitally important as well. Because ultimately it’s all one struggle: of the powerless against the powerful. And there are more of us than there are of them.

Jacob Cheung:

Cageman —January 15, 2020

Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong get a much more sympathetic look in Jacob Cheung’s 1992 Cageman. It’s about a run-down men’s hostel where the residents literally sleep in chicken wire cages, stacked on top of each other in a big concrete block. For most of its length, it’s a genial comedy about misfits, many of them refugees from the Mainland at one time or another (the midcentury wars led to a massive expansion of the colony’s population, far more than its housing or economy could accommodate), banding together in a spirit of community despite the dire poverty that surrounds them. It’s a type of film with a long tradition in Hong Kong (and around the world, see for example various adaptations of The Lower Depths, or Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons), best exemplified by Chor Yuen seminal 1973 comedy The House of 72 Tenants, the smash hit film that almost singled-handedly revived Cantonese-language cinema in Hong Kong¹.⁠ It’s got an amiable cast of character actors, led by Roy Chiao (A Touch of Zen, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), Teddy Robin Kwan (a Cantonese rock star who was a frequent bit player in 80s Hong Kong comedies), and Chinese-American actor Victor Wong (Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness), and the film patiently details their lives as a young ex-con comes to live with them and two local politicians make grandstanding stays at the hostel. The politicians are there because the building is slated to be demolished, to make way for developers, but the men refuse to leave: desperate as they are, and as terrible as their living conditions may be, it’s still their home, and living in a cage is better than having no home at all. The final moments of Cageman are truly harrowing, as the cops inevitably arrive to drag the men away. “Officer, please don’t break my cage!” one of them cries, a lament as horrifying as it is heart-breaking.

[1]It was the top film of that year, even beating out Bruce Lee at his peak of popularity. Mandarin film had been squeezing out Cantonese for a decade, led by Shaw Brothers domination of the local market. After 72 Tenants, Cantonese films saw a resurgence, eventually all but eliminating Mandarin from the market. The outlook for the dialect is not good however, as seen in one of the better short films in the Ten Years compilation.

Lawrence Ah Mon:

Gangs — January 14, 2020

If the communal spirit gives Cageman at least a little bit of hope, even that is missing from Gangs, the 1988 debut film from director Lawrence Lau (also known as Lawrence Ah Mon). Much like Ringo Lam’s School on Fire, which was released the same year, Gangs follows a group of high school kids that are inevitably drawn into a Triad gang war. But where Lam’s film focused its outrage, blaming the plight of Hong Kong’s poorest teens on the ways specific institutions (schools, police, government, family) have failed them, Lau’s kids have no protective institutions in sight: they are simply alone in a world of gangs, violence, greed, and crime. They slowly get picked off, one by one, killed, maimed, drugged, prostituted, drowned, kidnapped, burnt, and so on, until nothing at all is left. A decade later, Hong Kong cinema post-Handover would be dominated by a series of films about teen Triads launched by cinematographer-turned-director Andrew Lau called Young & Dangerous. His blow-dried and gorgeous gangsters would learn life lessons about honor and loyalty and brotherly bonding over some dozen or so films in the late 90s and early 2000s. They bear roughly the same relation to Lau’s film as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor does to Elim Klimov’s Come and See.

Ricky Lau:

Mr. Vampire — July 15, 2013

Fun.

Added January 15, 2022:
The first time I watched this, I remember thinking there wasn’t nearly enough Lam Ching-ying in it, that he was sidelined for a bunch of mediocre Ricky Hui hijinks. And I didn’t remember Moon Lee at all. But this time, I barely noticed Hui — Billy Lau is the annoying one, but he really isn’t on screen much either. Instead, Lam dominates the film, at least any scene that Moon Lee doesn’t steal (Me describing the cast to my wife, who sat down in the middle of the movie for a bit: Lam Ching-ying was a great stunt man and martial artist, a close friend of Bruce Lee; Ricky Hui was part of a famous comedy family in the 70s; Moon Lee is, well, perfect). Far from detracting from the whole, the slapstick comedy bits are perfectly balanced with the action and horror elements. It really is an ideal combination of everything that made early 80s Hong Kong film so great.

I think the first time I saw it, I was expecting another Encounters of the Spooky Kind, and was disappointed that it didn’t have enough action and that the comedy was sillier and that it lacked Sammo’s hard edge. I had the same problem with The Dead and the Deadly when I first watched it. But rewatching clarified that film’s greatness, just as this rewatch has done for Mr. Vampire. Odds are I’ll rewatch Encounters and be disappointed by it.

Where’s Officer Tuba? — July 21, 2020

Sammo Hung in his meek, cowardly character is a cop in the police band who witnesses the dying words of supercop David Chiang and agrees to get revenge for him. But when he backtracks on his pledge, Chiang haunts him, mostly by screwing up his attempts to woo Joey Wang (inexplicably interested in Officer Tuba).

A pretty good fight sequence at the end (Yuen Wah is one of the bad guys, but doesn’t do much), and its nice to see Chiang with a big role a decade or so after his Shaw Bros heyday. But this is mostly just gags that didn’t make it into a Winners & Sinners movie mapped onto a Happy Ghost plot.

Derek Chiu:

№1 Chung Ying Street — October 1, 2018

Like 1987: When the Day Comes, documenting revolution in the mode of commercial pop cinema, without sacrificing the pointed didacticism of the former or the emotional power of the latter.

Pair with Yellowing for perspectives on the Umbrella Movement. Or with The Wind that Shakes the Barely to extend the ideals and contradictions of revolution even further across time and space.

Po-chih Leong:

Jumping Ash — July 7, 2017

The intersection between Hollywood exploitation and the Hong Kong New Wave, though the former may be the accidental byproduct of watching a cropped and dubbed version of this, apparently made for some kind of TV broadcast. Co-directed and co-written by Josephine Siao (with Po-chih Leong and Philip Chan, respectively), it’s a typical cheap 70s cop vs heroin dealers actioner, a Shaft knock-off with better fight scenes. Siao gets top billing, but she’s barely in it, instead it’s a vehicle for the generically hunky Callan Leong, an honest cop on the trail of a gang lord played by Nick Lam, who looks exactly like a Chinese Edward Arnold. A key film in the move toward realistic location shooting in Hong Kong, its handheld, documentary style images of the Kowloon Walled City and other iconic street level locations alone compensate for the looseness of the plot.

Patrick Lung Kong:

The Story of a Discharged Prisoner — July 4, 2015

Basically what would happen if the cast and crew of one of those Wong Fei-hung serials (the same villain (Shih Kien), one of the same choreographers (Lau Kar-wing) the same penchant for locking people in basements, the same reliance on ingenious devices, in this case a wardrobe containing a clown car’s worth of anonymous henchmen) got together to make a noir-inflected social problem film. On the evidence of this one film, I guess that would make Patrick Lung Kong the Phil Karlson of Hong Kong.

Bears about as much relation to A Better Tomorrow as The Killer does to Le samouraï or Reservoir Dogs does to City on Fire. Which is to say, not much at all of what’s really important in a movie.

Michael Mak:

Sex and Zen — July 23, 2020

What goes around, comes around.

Tong Kai:

Shaolin Intruders — January 16, 2011

Someone is killing the heads of the top kung fu clans, and all signs point to the Shaolin Temple. Three heroes investigate (after being accused themselves of the crimes) and must fight their way (non-fatally) through the temple before they are allowed to ask any questions. It’s a flimsy plot premise, but stronger than something like Heroes of the East (though that film is a lot of fun) and the fight sequences are very good. Director Tong Kai was a choreographer early in his career with Lau Kar-leung, and the similarities show. It’s hard to pick the best sequence, as all of the Temple fights are well done, but the showdown with the abbot on a room full of benches (prefiguring one of my all-time favorite fight sequences: the battle on the crowd in Jet Li’s The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk) would probably take it if I had to pick one.

Wang Xiaoshuai:

Chinese Portrait — June 12, 2019

The highest profile director in the 2019 Austin Asian American Film Festival⁠ is probably Wang Xiaoshuai, a key figure of the Sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, but nonetheless one whom I only know from his cameo in Jia Zhangke’s The World. The AAAFF has his Chinese Portrait, an experimental documentary that consists of nothing but dozens of single shots of people (mostly) in China. The shots last for only a few minutes each, and mostly are of people in their work environments. Usually they have a person or two staring directly at the camera not moving, while other things move in other parts of the frame (the wind, other people, molten steel, sheep). But some of the shots have no people at all, but are instead of the land, the water, the sky, or buildings in various states of newness or collapse. Some shots are of individuals, some of large groups. Some have the feel of a slice of life, as of a bustling open-air café at night, made unnerving by the fact that two of the patrons are staring directly at us while normal life goes on all around them. The name of the film and the compositions strongly recall still photography. We are accustomed, in such pictures, to people looking directly at us without moving. But it’s uncanny in a motion picture and the incongruity, the stillness within a moving frame, is not entirely unpleasant. It reminds us that these images, while appearing to show us a real China, are themselves constructs. By mixing one art form (still portraiture) with another (cinema), Wang gives us something that isn’t exactly either. Taken individually, any one of these portraits could be an interstitial scene from a narrative film, a pillow shot or an establishing shot, in an otherwise wholly constructed narrative. But of course, they still are that, we just can’t know what narrative these images are sliced away from. Taken as a whole, it might present an image of China itself, in all its individual contradictions and rhymes (urban and rural, digital and industrial, old and young, etc). Or it might just be China staring back at us, wondering why we’re so reliant on such dichotomies to make sense of their/our world.

Wong Tin-lam:

The Wild, Wild Rose — March 21, 2017

Grace Chang takes a 180 from the wholesome everygirl of Mambo Girl into this adaptation of Carmen by Wang Tin-lam, father of the notorious Wong Jing and character actor in many a Johnnie To film (he’s the large boss in the Election films, for example). She’s a showgirl of loose sexuality who specializes in singing Mandarin versions of Bizet songs and who has a well-hidden heart of gold. When an uptight pianist spies her prostituting herself to raise money for a friend’s wife’s surgery, he’s smitten with her generosity, or rather, the generosity gives him an excuse to give into his very repressed desires.

From here, it’s a bit like The Blue Angel, except if the Dietrich character actually really loved the Jannings sap. The result is the same: he ends up destroying himself, but not because of the twisted wiles of a devil woman, but because his fundamental weakness manifests itself in nonsensical patriarchy (refusing to allow her to sing even though he can’t get a job). Her essential decency, and concomitant disregard for the inane mores of her terrible world, are the cause of her destruction, the worthless doofus she can’t help but love is only the instrument.

Wang’s direction is solid, not as fluid as Evan Yang’s work in Mambo Girl, but he builds a nice noirish atmosphere. The musical numbers are outstanding, but entirely confined to the stage, which is in keeping with the noir vibe. As in Mambo Girl, there isn’t an actor on-screen that can hold a candle to Grace Chang.

Derek Yee:

Viva Erotica — April 14, 2016

“Why make films?”

Leslie Cheung plays an artistically ambitious young director who, after a series of box office failures, is convinced to take a gig directing a Category III film, Hong Kong’s rating for graphically violent movies and/or soft-core pornography. Shu Qi, in one of her earliest roles, is the Triad girlfriend tasked to star in the film. It’s a remarkable performance, beginning as a shrill ditzy cliché and gradually turning not just into a real person, but a real actress (she gives a monologue late in the film that contains the seeds for all her future work with Hou Hsiao-hsien). Directed by Derek Yee and Lo Chi-leung, the film features a brief appearance by Lau Ching-wan as a director named Derek Yee. When his latest film, an arty melodrama, flops, Lau runs off a pier and commits suicide. That Leslie Cheung would do much the same thing less than a decade later makes his depiction of a depressed artist here almost unbearably poignant.