Gotta Be

Atu - Gotta Be

Watched three Hong Kong films in a row over the past few days. I haven't seen any for a while. Sadly the copies at the video libraries here don't have English subtitles. Since Infernal Affairs, there has been a large reassessment on how police dramas are done. I saw Special ID and Cold War and they were completely arresting (pun intended). Special ID has Donnie Yen who also choreographed the fight sequences. The action is absolutely dynamite, as you'd normally expect and the story was not bad, but it wasn't as tight as Cold War starring Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Ka Fai. There's a lot of dramatic suspense with the script and very tight plotting, something I think Hong Kong cinema didn't really refine pre-John Woo / Ringo Lam.

Modern Hong Kong cinema (from the little I know of it) has really come into a new age of style and substance instead of over the top spectacle it once used to have (The Killer, Once Upon A Time in China, Full Contact). Michael Bay has borrowed heavily from these pictures, just watch Bad Boys II and try telling me he didn't rip off the Mexican stand-off in Hard Boiled or the bus smashing down the hill scene in Police Story 1.

Having said that, on the other end of the scale, The Man From Macau was a hoot! It's so good to see Chow-Yun Fat making funny films again in Hong Kong; the box-office success evidence to the fact that it was the right move. It was so sad he was misused in the American films he was in, but nonetheless, the public still love him. The film was stupid, over-the-top and most importantly, fun. This reminded me so much of the awesome subgenre of gangster/gambling films pre-take-over, like God of Gamblers, Conman, etc. This is the 4th installment of God of Gamblers and I was beside myself with laughter from the old-style of comedy the film decided to take. Totally loved it.

Got me hankering to go back to Hong Kong.