Asian Beauty Appreciation

Let’s start with the title Overheard 2. Now wouldn’t this title alone lead you to believe that this film would, should, or could be a sequel to Overheard which I reviewed here. Then add in the following:

Same Three Lead Actors - Lau Ching Wan, Louis Koo, and Daniel Wu

Same Directors - Alan Mak and Felix Chong

Same Screenplay Authors – Alan Mak and Felix Chong

Same Producer - Derek Yee

Same Underlying Themes – Covert Electronic surveillance and Insider Trading

I’m not crazy, am I? Every indication would lead us to believe that Overheard 2 was a sequel to Overheard. Only it isn’t. Which brings us to the question: Is this shameless marketing?

In China, there is a state agency which we shall label SARFT. Yes, that is an acronym, and sorry, but no – I didn’t make up the acronym. This agency aka State Agency for Radio, Film, and Television are the folks that decide what is or isn’t acceptable content for the few billion Chinese people. They also oversee the Internet as it pertains to content and access within China.

Now I have already told you that I wasn’t able to access my blog while in Yangshuo in China earlier this month. Now you and I, and possibly a good number of the few billion Chinese people, will find a small barrier/speed bump created by SARFT for Overheard 2.

In Overheard, our three stars played Hong Kong cops who were conducting a covert surveillance to uncover financial shenanigans by corporate honchos in the form of stock manipulation and insider trading. Only these cops decided to follow up, with their own money, and get in on the insider info and make a bundle for themselves instead of submitting the incriminating sound bytes. But Big Brother SARFT had decreed that crime cannot go unpunished – hence our three eavesdroppers could not be brought back for a Round 2.

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What do a stock broker, actually a bank rep who handles investments for clients, a homicide detective, and a low-level triad enforcer have in common? This is the question that famed Hong Kong film director Johnny To puts before us in his brand new film, Life Without Principle.

Johnny To has received world-wide acclaim  for his stylish and hard-hitting films in the cops and crooks genre but he doesn’t limit himself to just those. In fact, I’ve reviewed a couple of his more recent films - Vengeance which had a relatively low police presence, and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart which was basically a romance. Besides those, I have personally seen close to a dozen of his older films.  That was one of the plusses of living in Manhattan – my proximity to the NY Chinatown where I could easily buy Hong Kong films on DVD. This time I caught his new film, which opened about a month ago on the 20th of October, at a real movie house – the UA Cinema in Taikoo, Hong Kong.

Okay, okay – enough off topic chatter. Let’s get back to the film. The first of the three main characters that we meet is the cop. Richie Jen (below) plays Inspector Cheung. As we first lay eyes on him, he is working a case that he caught. He’s on-site of a fresh murder. One old timer, a pensioner, has murdered another. This event doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but the murderer and the Inspector will cross paths again.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Inspector Cheung’s wife, played by Myolie Wu, is hot to buy an apartment. He thinks they need to discuss it further. But she is vulnerable to the real estate broker’s sale pitch (and not so subtle pressure tactics) about how time is of the essence, and that other buyers are preparing offers. So Cheung and Mrs are looking at getting a hefty mortgage.

Lau Ching Wan (below) plays the triad guy known as Panther. He’s a guy in his 40′s and he’s well known in the triad world. He serves as a bagman, he sets up dinners, he’s a go-fer, and above everything else he believes in loyalty. Panther will run around trying to raise bail money when that’s needed for one of his associates.He’s very well known in the Hong Kong triad circles, and everyone in his triad is his ‘sworn brother’.

Today, he’s going to need a ton of money and he’ll need to get it fast because one of his triad buddies has been running an internet investment house, and the market is turning, and his client has threatened him with mayhem or worse.

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It has been said that there are only two kinds of men in the world: Those who cheat on their wives, and those who want to. At least this is what is said more than once in the 2011 Hong Kong romantic comedy Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. Co-directed by the illustrious duo of Johnny To and Wai Kai-Fai, the film proposes a possibility for us to consider; that there is a third kind of man. At least that is what the film’s female lead wants.

She is Zixin, played marvelously by Gao Yuanyuan. She’s a financial analyst. She’s been dumped by a guy, and nearly sleepwalked herself into a tragic accident with an automobile on a Hong Kong street. At the last second she is snatched out of harm’s way by a seedy, scruffy, wino drunk. He is Fang (Daniel Wu has the role). Turns out he is, or rather was, an award winning architect who burned out on success and now the only thing he looks forward to is his next drink.

She works in an office tower and across the way, in the next building, we find Cheung. Louis Koo has the part.  He is the CEO of an investment bank. He has just two rules (actually three but bear with me a minute). Rule Number One - we never lose money. Rule Number Two - we never forget rule number one. Anyway Cheung and Zixin began a window to window flirtation. Ultimately she agrees to a coffee date with him via post it notes and hand held signs.

But she has forgotten that she made a date a week ago with the down and not quite out architect who saved her life for that very evening.

Meanwhile, Cheung has noticed a very busty babe working two floors below Zixin. She notices Cheung’s window flirtations and thinks they are meant for her. So a second coffee date is arranged at the same place.

Louis Koo as Cheung

There’s some confusion – Cheung is called an asshole (via a handwritten placard) by a thoroughly pissed Zixin after Cheung doesn’t show for their date and she sees him with the bimbo who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Meanwhile Fang the architect has taken Zixin’s advice, and decided to get his act together as well as getting his groove back. He waits for her but she never shows.

There’s your set up and there’s your Act One. As Act Two begins we see the fall of Lehman Brothers on a big news screen playing on the side of a Hong Kong Building.

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When you hear about electronic skullduggery, as in wire-taps, hidden voice activated microphones for eavesdropping, sorry – make that surveillance, and surreptitious cameras planted in offices, you might think of, if you are of a certain age, the goings on in a Washington DC office/apartment complex called Watergate, or if you like Asian films, you might think of Overheard, the 2009 police thriller from Hong Kong.

Overheard aka Sit Yan Fung Wan, was co-directed by Alan Mak and Felix Chong,  with Chong also having written the screenplay. These are two-thirds, with Andrew Lau being the third, of the group that created the Infernal Affairs trilogy which later became the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

We start (literally the movie’s opening images) with a colony of rats, the four-footed kind, scurrying about doing their business in a garbage strewn back alley in the lees of a Hong Kong skyscraper. Within seconds, we are far above this mean street and its night crawling denizens. This places us now in a high floor in this office tower, and a group of agents who work for the Hong Kong Police Department’s Commercial Criminal Bureau (CCB) are scurrying about doing their business which is to plant eavesdropping equipment. The target firm is E & T, a firm whose stock has exhibited such erratic price swings, that the Hong Kong version of the SEC has decided to investigate it.

The cops – Johnny, played by Lau Ching-wan, Gene played by Louis Koo, and Max played by Daniel Wu, are very good at what they do. And to prove it, the film calls for the man whose office they are bugging to make an unexpected late night return to his office while these cops are still in it. The tension is remarkable, and the suspense is truly pulse-pounding.

Of course, there is a back-up plan, called Plan B, and they go undiscovered. With the bugs in place, they will come to learn that the E & T stock’s share price is going to be artificially manipulated in a day or so.

With this – Mak & Chong present us with a moral dilemma. They’re good cops but being a cop in Hong Kong means low pay, long hours, and lots of danger. And our three cops also have some private issues to deal with.

A suggestion is floated. Let’s delete this audio exchange, let’s not report it, and let’s grab a piece of this insider trading knowledge for ourselves. We’ll buy the shares in the morning, ride the price up and then we’ll sell it off later in the day for a big profit.

There’s your set up.

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Stool Pigeon is a 2010 release from noted Hong Kong film director Dante Lam. Lam’s milieu is gritty cops and gangster dramas with plenty of bloody action usually in the form of car chases, heists, knives and gun battles, and he always adds the usual pretty girl or two to the cast. This film, which some have dubbed Beast Stalker 2, mostly because Lam has brought back his two lead actors from the original Beast Stalker in 2008 – Nick Cheung and Nicolas Tse – has all of the above.

Beast Stalker, which I reviewed here had Nick C as a crazed, half blind, contract killer and Nic T as the good cop. In this one, Stool Pigeon, it is Nick Cheung who is the cop. His duty is to recruit low level criminals or just released from jail cons and make them turn against their former cronies – in other words: become paid informants or stool pigeons.

One such ex-con is Ghost Jr., played by Nicolas Tse. He doesn’t trust the cops, and why should he? But his father died and left a massive debt of nearly a million Hong Kong dollars. With no around to pay them off, the loan sharks have pimped out Ghost’s sister, figuring if they prostitute her, the debt could be settled over time.

But Inspector Don Lee (Nick Cheung) knows this and uses it to leverage Ghost into becoming a stoolie. They want to get him into a gang of jewel thieves run by Barbarian and Tai Ping. They arrested Barbarian twice before but were not able to convict him either time. So the police higher ups want Barbarian badly, and so they turn up the heat on Inspector Lee.

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Ex is a film written and directed by a 27 year old Hong Kong woman named Heiward Mak. Despite her youth, this isn’t even her first directorial effort. Released in early June 2010, the film marked the return to the big screen in a starring role for Gillian Chung who had been tarnished by the Edison Chen photo scandal.

Ex is a relationship drama about a group of twenty-somethings in Hong Kong. Though shot in Hong Kong, and with a Hong Kong cast – the only locations I recognized were the highway and bridge leading to the Hong Kong airport, and the airport itself.

Chung as Zhou Yi, has given up her apartment and resigned her job to travel with her boyfriend Woody (Lawrence Chou). Only at the airport, while waiting for their flight, she has a fight with this boyfriend, and they break up. Witnessing this argument because they happened to be seated at the very next table are Ping, played by William Chan, and his girlfriend Cee, played by Michelle Wai.

It was kind of a forced, or staged coincidence, because Ping is Zhou Yi’s ex-boyfriend, and a device or gimmick was needed to have them in the same place. On top of that, Zhou’s passport and luggage have gone missing. So Cee agrees to put up Zhou Yi at their apartment for a few days until suitable arrangements can be made.

Do you see the possibilities of a love triangle looming? Though we are set up for it, Director Mak doesn’t take us down that path exactly. Instead of future complications – most of the film is from Zhou’s Yi’s perspective and it involves a good many flash backs to when she and Ping were a couple as well as some of her other relationships.

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Did you notice that the title is not Girl + s, instead it is Girl + $ as in Girl$. They call it Paid Dating and according to Hong Kong film Director Kenneth Bi, who helmed this film, the girls following this pursuit do not think of themselves as prostitutes. Instead they see themselves as having fun with pay.

This is a brand new film. It just opened two days ago on the 2nd of September. It attracted a lot of attention at the Hong Kong Internation Film Festival last March. And there’s plenty of buzz about it now.

While this film isn’t really about The Social Network or even social networking – chat, text, and email is how the girls do their business. Plenty of personal info is divulged and before you can say How much? or gei doh chin a?, which is Cantonese for how much, the old barter system comes into play. Cash is traded for sex.

There are four female leads and each of them are in the business for different reasons.  Three of the girl are in it for the money and more, but Bonnie Xian’s character Ronnie is actually a bored rich girl. She doesn’t do it for money. In fact, she pays the john. This Xian’s 5th film.

Bonnie (straight on view) and Michelle (half-profile)

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Calling all action film fans. Especially if you favor or love the Hong Kong style which basically hasn’t a lot of dialogue, and is often quickly paced.

Beast Stalker is a 2008 release and about the worst thing I can say about it is that the title is a bit misleading. Dante Lam previously co-directed, with Gordon Chan, the excellent Beast Cops in 1998. That film was nearly unanimously acclaimed, so using ‘Beast’ in this title might be an attempted marketing ploy for knowledgeable film folks.

Nevertheless it has all the style and chops that Lam is noted for – gritty and tense situations which are amped up by a jittery hand held camera, strong characters who are both good and bad, and some very fine use of lighting and slow motion.

The story is a bit hum-drum as it starts: A well connected criminal is convicted and being driven to prison. His gang engineers a way to spring him out of that car. Then a massive multi-car crash occurs involving a number of vehicles. One car is the one in pursuit with Sgt. Tong (Nicholas Tse, Hong Kong’s version of Johnny Depp). Another is the car driven by Prosecuting Attorney (what we call an A.D.A. in the States), The third car is the one driven by Hung (a hoodlum for hire played by Nick Cheung). And of course, the first car with the convicted but escaped criminal. Read more…

Source: Kineda

I saw this bit of news regarding Chrissie this morning on Kineda and noticed that only one person on the site has left a comment about her. I hope this one gets more comments because Chrissie is drop-dead gorgeous. Andi if you haven’t acquainted yourself with Chrissie in a while, today is a great day to do so.

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Connected (Bo Chi Tung Wah) released in September, 2008, is a taut thriller with plenty of action. Directed by the veteran and reliable Hong Kong director Benny Chan, the film has enough action with shootouts and chases to keep the 18-30 year old males involved, enough eye candy and dramatics to satisfy the 25-45 males watching on DVD, and a sympathetic but resourceful woman as the victim of a kidnapping along with a couple of cute 6 year old kids, so you can safely ask your significant other along to watch the video with you.

In a nutshell, an attractive single Mom called Grace Wong, an electronics whiz played by the wonderful Barbie Hsu, while driving a sporty convertible gets into an auto accident which was no accident. When she recovers her senses, she as well as we are brought up to speed as we all learn she is a victim of a kidnapping.

The bad guys want something from her brother and think she might have it, or might know where he is. She doesn’t have a clue but the bad guys have to resort to some real heavy-handedness to get to that point. Read more…