Dirty Ho (1979)

Original title: 爛頭何

“Dirty” Ho Ching (Wong Yu) is a pretty enthusiastic thief with a certain penchant for self-taught kung fu. He’s just managed a great jewel heist and is in the process of spending some of his ill-gotten gains on some high class courtesans (one of whom is played by house favourite Kara Hui Ying-Hung) in a brothel situated on a river boat when a man in a neighbouring pavilion we’ll soon enough learn is named Wang Chin Chen (played by yet another house favourite, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui), is starting to get in a not terribly subtle bidding contest for the ladies’ interests. The size of jewel chests is compared and Ho’s found wanting, until the latter clearly wants to start a more physical kind of fight. The brothel owner calls the police who arrests Ho. However, Wang secretly shows the police a seal that identifies him as part of the Imperial Court, and orders them to let Ho go as soon as possible, while he himself takes care of the thief’s jewels.

Obviously, once released, Ho wants to get back at Wang, but loses a fight against Crimson, whom Wang declares to be his new bodyguard. Well actually, Ho loses against Wang who puppets Crimson while pretending to hide behind her back, but Ho not being terribly bright he’s not going to notice subtleties like this.

Ho does go on to further attempts at getting back at Wang, but the latter needs little effort to have things go his way. Eventually, Ho finds himself poisoned and blackmailed into the role of Wang’s martial arts student.

Unlike Ho, the audience at this point knows what’s going on: Wang is the eleventh son of the Emperor, spending his time on art, fine wine, women and martial arts training while roaming the country, and shows little interest in becoming the next Emperor. However, one of his brothers believes exactly this will undoubtedly make Wang the Emperor’s candidate of choice, and has set in motion various plans to kill this most unwilling of rivals.

Which leads to a couple of incredible scenes during which Wang is invited to sessions with other friends of the arts who try to murder him while both sides pretend to only be interested in wine or paintings. Ho, as usually not getting it, blithely pokes around the edges of these scenes.

Eventually, Wang is hurt badly enough in one of those fights that he needs to intensify Ho’s training as his body guard.

Dirty Ho is a particularly fun example of director and martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung’s ability to make deeply physical kung fu comedies that still don’t have as much of an affinity to slapstick as the Golden Harvest model (which I have grown to love over the years) shows. Instead, his Shaw Brothers comedies have a certain restraint in their physical comedy that can express uproarious humour through the incredible precision of Lau’s brilliant choreography given life through a fine cast of martial artists and actors, but that feels more like Fred Astaire than Buster Keaton (who I both love, as regular readers will know).

There’s a great sense of invention in the film’s fights, even when Lau uses ideas you will also have seen in earlier films of the genre (and that will be repeated ad nauseam in the future). There’s just such a perfection of comical timing and elegance in something like the the puppetting sequence with Liu and Hui, it can leave this viewer quite breathless. Not only from laughter but also in admiration for the intelligence of choreography, visual staging and performance on display. Liu never repeats a trick in the movie, and so every fight scene is of equal brilliance but also absolutely distinctive from the next.

The wine and arts assassin sequences are particularly fine as well, with the mix of physical violence and verbal politeness making for some poignant bits of humour.

This being a Hongkong comedy, there are also moments of outrageous weirdness – some of which might be seen as problematic for some contemporary tastes – as well as a transition to some more serious – and still incredible – fights in the climax, all of which Lau and his cast and crew handle with the same aplomb, elegance and off-handed visual class.

Mrs K (2017)

Mrs K (Kara Hui) lives what looks like a peaceful life with her gynaecologist husband (Wu Bai) and her daughter (Li Xuan Siow). Though, as a couple of very unlucky would-be robbers learn early in the film, Mrs K clearly has some experience with the gangster life and is a bit of a badass, when she needs to.

However, the good old shadows of the past come knocking, killing some of Mrs K former associates in violent and effective ways. As it turns out, a man (Simon Yam) our protagonist left for dead when she left the life (naturally with a whole lot of stolen money) wants his revenge, and he’s nearly crazy and broken enough for a Batman villain.

Evidently, Mrs K’s director Ho Yu-Hang looks back fondly at Hong Kong genre cinema of decades past. Since quite a few actresses and actors who had their heyday in the 70s to 90s are still working away admirably, it’s a pretty obvious thing to make a movie with them. Ho certainly isn’t the first director who went back to this particular well of talent – and who would blame him? – but he’s just as obviously not aiming at making a normal nostalgia throwback kind of movie. This is rather a more idiosyncratic film that shifts shape and form despite always just keeping inside of the borders of genre tradition.

So there are only a couple of action scenes in what one would on first encounter expect to be either a martial arts version of Taken or a traditional if belated heroic bloodshed film. Instead, the film shifts from a slasher-like beginning that shows Yam’s character killing Mrs K’s old associates to moments of sometimes calm, sometimes playful domestic content, goes to psychological tension, a bit of torture, some comedy, keeping what sounds like disparate elements as parts of a whole, while also demonstrating an air of playfulness. There’s even a scene where the ghosts of her old companions appear to Mrs K to the sound of a rousing Spaghetti Western trumpet to get her back into the fight.

In part, the film’s success as a whole instead as a series of disjointed scenes has a lot to do with an acting ensemble that portrays the different tone of any given scene as aspects of one story and one group of characters, understanding the way human identity shifts depending on the company we are in, and even more so how Mrs K’s identity must shift even more to be who she was and who she has become. The film as a whole seems very concerned with the concept of identity, particularly the shifts in identity brought by violence and trauma. Simon Yam’s villain was once a cop who ran with robbers to betray them to the cops but also betrayed the cops for money, has lost his identity and his memory once shot by Mrs, starts to live a new life as the member of a ship crew that becomes his family, only to lose this new family to violence that gives him back his memory as well as a lust for vengeance and that great changer of identity, insomnia. As with Mrs K, he might have built a new identity, but the old one, or really, old ones, are always just below the surface waiting for a reason to return. That Yam’s fantastic as this sort of thing should be a given.

It is an absolute joy to watch Kara Hui as the main character of a movie again, and her ability to project warmth, good humour, competence and a steely determination in desperate moments alone would be reason enough for that; she also seems to present a healthier alternative of learning to live with one’s past self than Yam does. Or perhaps, when you look at it from his perspective, she’s just been too lucky before he came back.


So, even though, or really rather because, Mrs K is not a nostalgia fest as much as a film that appreciates the very real talents of the people working in front of its camera and trusts them to not just repeat the things they always did (unlike the characters they play, perhaps), it should be of highest interest for anyone interested in Hong Kong's cinema past, present and future (even though this is – depending on the source – a Malaysian film or a Malaysian/Hong Kong/Russian co-production).

Past Misdeeds: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China, 1917. Liu Jin-Xi (Donnie Yen) lives a peaceful life with his wife Ah Yu (Tang Wei), her son from a first marriage Liu Fang-Zheng (Zheng Wei) and their son Liu Xiao-Tian (Li Jia-Min) in a country town, working in a paper mill. Shadows of a different man Liu Jin-Xi once was begin to emerge when two martial artist villains try to rob the mill.

Liu Xiao-Tian kills the men in what on first look seems like a series of exceedingly lucky accidents, making him the hero of the village. But Xu Bai-Jiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the detective investigating the villains' death, has his doubts regarding Xiao-Tian. How, after all, should one hapless butcher's son be able to "accidentally" kill two of the meanest martial artists around? Some of the physical evidence Xu Bai-Jiu finds tells a different story, too, and the detective is soon convinced Xiao-Tian must be a masterful martial artist and experienced killer who is just using this identity to hide himself from the law.

Even though Xiao-Tian must be a changed man from whoever he was before, Xu Bai-Jiu can't help himself but go after him, sniffing and asking questions and even accommodating himself at Xiao-Tian's place. Xu Bai-Jiu's own past has him convinced that his natural tendency to compassion is a weakness before the spirit of the law that needs to be purged, so he treats his sense of empathy as an illness that keeps him unable to practice the martial arts; not surprisingly, he also doesn't believe a man can ever truly change, so Xiao-Tian becomes an obsession and a riddle for him to solve.

Xu Bai-Jiu's investigation has other consequences than those he intends, too, for once it has reached a certain point, the people that made Xiao-Tian the man he once was (Jimmy Wang Yu! Kara Hui!) learn where their old friend now is, and they very much want him back, not realizing that some men do in fact change.

Peter Chan Hoh-San's Wu Xia is one those films from Hong Kong that makes me doubt the truth of the old-fartish refrain of "things in Hong Kong cinema are just so bad now" I and many other long-time fans of the city's cinematic output have been singing for about a decade now, for how bad can a regional cinema truly be if it still can produce fantastic movies like this?

In time-honoured fashion, Wu Xia mixes elements of the mystery genre with elements of the wuxia (a real surprise given its title, surely), to form a meditation on the possibility of change in people, the usefulness of suppressing impulses, and even the old question about nature and nurture that may remind some of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, just with the difference that Chan's film - unlike that of the Canadian - is not a comedy. (To digress for a parenthesis, yes, I am that weird guy who really thinks Cronenberg's film is not just a black comedy, but is also meant to be one rather than as the bloody drama most viewers seem to see when watching it; I'll only point at the nature of the sexual role-play between Mortensen and Bello as an obvious hint at that film's true nature.)

Unlike Mortensen's Tom Stall, though, Xiao-Tian isn't only truly alive when he is a monster, and his family life with Ah Yu and the children never has the feeling of somebody going through trained motions without any actual emotions; Xiao-Tian may have only locked away the monstrous parts of himself, but what's left is not an automaton, but an actual human being.

The movie's first two thirds are in large parts about exploring its two male main characters (with Tang Wei getting a handful of scenes that flesh her out as a character more than I would have expected from a film with this set-up and structure - it sure helps how much the actress is able to express with just a few looks) as mirror images of each other: Xiao-Tian as a man who has locked away everything destructive and monstrous about himself to become a human being, and Xu Bai-Jiu who has locked away his most human traits - compassion and empathy - to become a better agent of the Law. The former is a man who will not use his martial arts abilities because they are so closely connected to his worst nature, the latter unable to use his because his best nature cost him his abilities. I can't imagine what the Chinese censor thought about the film's treatment of compassion and the Law, especially since the film treats Xu Bai-Jiu as being in the wrong with his priorities; it's nice to still find Hong Kong films that dare to argue for humanist values being more important than the jackboot. Interestingly, the film also seems to express that it's easier to suppress one's worst impulses than one's best. Of course, both of Wu Xia's main characters will have to accept parts of what they've kept closed up to become fully functional human beings, possibly even heroes.

I was a bit surprised by how well Donnie Yen is able to sell his character's complexities. I do of course love the man and his generally motionless or scowling face, but he always has been a better martial arts actor than an actor, and this is a film that needs him to express himself outside of fight scenes quite a bit. Yen is still using more body language and posture than facial expression (though he has developed a surprisingly pleasant ability to smile over the years), but he is doing that very well, selling the inner changes his character goes through without having to talk about them.


The well handled philosophical discourse alone would be more than enough to recommend Wu Xia, but there is so much more to love here: there are the fantastic fight scenes - of course choreographed by Yen - that dominate the film's final third; Chan's curious yet effective decision to treat Chinese village life of the early 20th century as a peculiar mixture of naturalism and bucolic idyll and still have martial arts be more than a little magical instead of "realistic"; the relatively small but important roles of Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui who feature in the film's two most intense fight scenes; the way the film uses Kaneshiro's traditional Chinese science and medicine as the base for some CSI-inspired scenes and makes that work too without things becoming ridiculous; how Chan's direction handles action, near-mythical dramatic family conflicts, human-level emotions and moments of peace with the same assured sense of rhythm and pacing as well as a deep understanding of their importance. In Wu Xia, it's all good.

Past Misdeeds: Rigor Mortis (2013)

Original title: 殭屍

A depressed, aging actor (Chin Siu-Ho) grieving for his lost family moves into a run-down apartment house somewhere in Hong Kong to hang himself in peace, but is first disturbed by a female ghost, then saved by Yau (Anthony Chan Yau), last in a long line of Taoist exorcists now working as a cook and secret soul of the building’s community.

It is a strange community indeed, for not only seems the world of spirits and ghosts particularly close here, all of the living seem to be lost souls too: there’s Yau and his lost calling, a mentally ill woman named Yeung Feng (Kara Hui) and her white-haired child protected by the building’s lone security guard Yin (Lo Hoi-Pang), an old, dying black magician (Chung Faat, I think), and the elderly couple of Mui (Pau Hei-Ching in a particularly impressive performance) and Tung (Richard Ng Yiu-Hon). All of the living are lost in one way or the other, cast aside by life or having cast their lives aside themselves, living in a sort of companionable stasis.

Things change at the time of the actor’s attempted suicide, though, when Tung dies in a ghost related accident. Mui realizes she can’t live without her husband and makes a gruesome pact with the magician that will bring her husband back to her, at least sort of, in form of a hopping vampire. From here on, the static but peaceful life in the building quickly deteriorates until Yau and the actor take it on themselves to stop what’s going on.

The only thing I had read about Juno Mak’s Takashi Shimizu-produced Rigor Mortis before going in was that it was supposed to be an homage to the classic joys of the Mr Vampire movies. This turns out to be about half true, depending on your definition of what an homage is supposed to be and do. While the film is dominated by actors who had their biggest time in Hong Kong cinemas of the 80s, and particularly in the Mr Vampire films, and Mak clearly loves these movies dearly (as he well should), this is not an exercise in nostalgia or imitation. Instead, the film takes a look at the older films it is inspired by, and proceeds to decide what it can do with some of their elements as well as with the in the last decade or so desperately underused talents of their actors thirty years later; respecting the past but also building its own thing on it. For my tastes, this is a much more productive and dignified approach to bygone eras of filmmaking than mere imitation, and certainly the one that should result in the more individual movies.

In Rigor Mortis’s case this means that this film paying homage to a series of comedy kung fu horror films isn’t a comedy at all, but rather aims for an arthouse approach to horror with a bit of CGI enhanced fighting thrown in at the end; fortunately, this doesn’t come over as an attempt of Mak to grim-and-grittify the hopping vampire movie but feels organic, like the logical place to take the characters the film spends a loving – and not humourless – half hour or so building before things begin to get truly threatening.

Despite some moments of ruthless and even to my jaded eyes rather shocking violence, Rigor Mortis’s horror is character based. The bad things happening here are the painfully logical results of the lives these people have led and of the wounds they took in the process. Even the black magician is a figure of pity or at least compassion to a degree. Evil – such as it is – in this film is the result of good intentions, bad decisions, loneliness and plain bad luck rather than of anyone twirling his or her moustache; consequently, the film’s good guys and the film’s bad guys (if you even want to use these terms) are equally flawed and human, and the film isn’t one to point any fingers of judgment at anyone involved. The true horror of the supernatural escalation is how much it is based on simple human sadness, makes it that much more disturbing than any kind of absolute or externalized evil ever could be.

As if this humanist approach to horror weren’t already enough to praise Mak’s film, there is also the brilliance of the performances. Particularly Pau Hei-Ching (there’s one scene between her and her dead, half-undead husband that’s just heart-breaking), Anthony Chan and Chin Siu-Ho are absolutely fantastic, and also demonstrate the impressive things middle-aged and elderly actresses and actors can do if a film just lets them. The way Mak integrates former roles the actors played into the characters without coasting on their reputations is also quite wonderful.

Mak’s visual approach to the film is atmospheric, moody, and claustrophobic, with many a gliding camera movement through the labyrinthine seeming building all of the film takes place in that provide the proceedings with the feeling of the not quite real, or the not quite unreal, turning the building into a locale on the border between the land of the living and that of the dead, as well as between the realm of logic and ill-logic. It’s the kind of place where the weird and the numinous is part of day to day life in more than one way. Even the film’s monochromatic, colour-drained look makes an aesthetic sense in this context: this building with its occupants whom time has left behind is not a place for colours.

Rigor Mortis also manages the impressive feat of making its hopping vampire (who really is more a unnaturally gliding one) seem horrific and threatening. The monster design very effectively puts emphasis on this creature being the most horrible of things – the corpse of an actual human being that has come to life. It’s particularly effective because the film’s script has shown us everything there is to know about the price that was paid for this thing’s creation, and makes clear what an abomination of the man it was in life it truly is. This is not something most vampire films, hopping or not, are any good at showing at all.

The only minor quibble I have with the film is with the at best mediocre quality of its CGI (the black ghost smoke being a particularly ineffective example), but then it never is so bad it gets in the way of the incredible number of things Rigor Mortis does well, so I’m not all that annoyed by it.

On ExB: Rigor Mortis (2013)

Original title: 殭屍

Juno Mak’s sort of homage to the beloved Mr Vampire movies is something more interesting and more complex than the “homage” description suggests.

It’s something I need quite a few words to explain, so please click on through to this week’s column over at Exploder Button, where I’ll use up all of them.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,horror,juno mak,chin siu-ho,anthony chan,kara hui,pau hei-ching,reviews,other places

On WTF: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

From time to time, Hong Kong cinema still produces films to delight even the most jaded of viewers. Case in point is Peter Chan's wonderful, complex and exciting Wu Xia, a film that plays fast and loose with genre tropes, discusses philosophy and still finds time for some inspired action scenes where Donnie Yen can strut his stuff.

Read more excited rambling about the film in my column on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,wuxia,peter chan hoh-san,donnie yen,takeshi kaneshiro,tang wei,jimmy wang yu,kara hui,other places

Three Films Make A Post: In Bloody Panic Color

Hard Gun (1996): This story of a one-upmanship competition in vengeance between a cop and a gangster seems to me to be quite typical of that era of Thai cinema , at least as far as I understand it, and not only because Panna Rittikrai action directs and Tony Jaa has one of his early minor roles.

The film features some cheap yet fine action and does the mandatory clichéd melodrama well, yet permanently undermines its own strengths by an incessant barrage of comic relief of the most painful sort that never seems to know when to stop (which would preferably be before it even begins). How much enjoyment one will get from the movie will certainly depend on one's ability to just ignore those parts of the film. I found them terribly difficult to sit through.

 

Guys in Ghost Hand (1991): No, I don't have the faintest idea what the title is supposed to mean.

This Taiwanese (or HK?, things are a bit unclear) fantasy horror ghost movie thing about the ghost of a raped and later beheaded woman taking vengeance on the descendents of her tormentors starts out very weak, with seemingly hours and hours of uninvolving dialogue scenes between characters without any character and pointless guest roles by people like Wu Ma and Alex Fong. Whenever the silly supernatural menace strikes, or Kara Hui and Ku Feng appear as the squabbling pair of Taoists who are our heroes of the evening, the film becomes instantly entertaining, only to fall back into drabness soon enough.

After about an hour of this, the plot suddenly becomes jumpy like a frightened kitten. Of course, nothing in the film's last half hour makes much sense, but at least everything is very colourful and completely bonkers, which is what I want from a film like this.

 

Clash of the Titans (2010): I could live with the fact that director Louis Leterrrier's film doesn't manage to capture the (often naive) charm of the film he is supposedly remaking and turns it into something that seems to be more based on the God of War videogames than the original.

I can't live with the fact that said videogames are a lot less dumb and a lot more fun than this movie is, or with the fact that Leterrier just has no talent at all for making action scenes exciting or visceral. No film with rideable scorpions has any right to feel this drab.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,thai movies,taiwanese movies,hong kong movies,fantasy,action,panna rittikrai,tony jaa,kara hui,ku feng