Past Misdeeds: Heroic Trio (1993)

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 the most 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.


An invisible villain is stealing babies from their cribs and out of hospitals! The evildoer even mocks the police by announcing his or her victims beforehand. Not even the son of Hong Kong's chief of police is safe, as hard as the policeman responsible for the case, Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), is trying. Eventually, the local superheroine (Anita Mui) - depending on the version of your subtitles either called the copyright-endangered The Wonder Woman or the incredibly boring "Super Heroine" - takes an interest in the case, which may or may not have something to do with her being Lau's wife Tung when she's not fighting evil while wearing a mask. But alone, not even she is able to catch the invisible fiend.

Said fiend is a woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh), using an experimental invisibility device that is still in development created by a scientist she's shacking up with. Ching is in the service of someone only known as Evil Master or Old Bastard (Yen Shi-Kwan). Evil Master is a person of dubious gender (so probably supposed to be a eunuch) with a most excellent plan: make one of the stolen babies - all of whom are astrologically destined to greatness - the emperor of China and turn the rest of them into his cannibal assassins. It's quite obvious that Ching is conflicted about the whole baby stealing business, but years of brainwashing are difficult to get rid of.

Once the police chief's baby has been stolen, another costumed heroine appears. Chat aka The Thief Catcher aka Seventh Chan is more of a bounty hunter than Wonder Woman is, preferably - though not exclusively - working for money. Chat is also an escapee of the Old Bastard's assassin program, and an old friend of Ching's, who once let her friend live when Evil Master told her to kill Chat.

As a heroine, Chat is of the rather reckless sort, prepared to pull stupid stunts like kidnapping a baby herself to provoke the invisible baby stealer into action. That's the sort of plan that in a Hong Kong movie has a good chance to end with a dead baby, which it does. However, this does at least bring Chat into contact with Tung and lets the bounty hunter realize who is stealing all the babies and why. Eventually - but not before it is revealed that Tung and Ching have a common past too - the three women will throw their lots in with one another and give the Old Bastard what he's got coming.

Before Johnnie To had his own production house, he was working as a director for hire like just about anyone else in Hong Kong's industry. Most of his films of this period don't show as much of the hand of their auteur as we are accustomed from him now, and are instead realized in the directorial style of the minute in Hong Kong, making them decidedly professional and strangely impersonal affairs.

Nonetheless, some of To's movies of that time period are pretty great movies, or are even, as is the case with Heroic Trio, minor classics of their kind. Heroic Trio might be an impersonal effort by the standards of its director, but it also features action directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung, and perfectly adapts nearly everything that is great about early 90s wire fu movies to the superhero genre that wasn't exactly filled with great movies at a point in time when Tim Burton's Batman movies seemed to be as good as superheroes could get on film.

The wire fu film's combination of the insane, the bizarrely violent, the poetry of bodies in motion, the slapstick-y and the melodramatic always had clear parallels to what's great about the superhero genre (one could even argue that wuxia heroes are old-timey superheroes with swords), so making a wire fu superhero movie seems like an obvious direction to take the genre in.

Of course, obvious directions don't always lead to watchable films. In Heroic Trio's case, though, they do. Even though you can criticize To's direction as being strictly inside the parameters of early 90s wire fu, with all the Dutch angles, wobbly zooms and dramatic slow motion shots that implies, one would have to be a soulless monster not to enjoy this style of filmmaking, especially when the action sequences between the scenes of melodramatic slo-mo crying are choreographed by someone like Ching who knows how to let non-martial artists like Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung look more or less convincing in a fight, or at least as convincing as is necessary in this sort of film. Michelle Yeoh for her part doesn't need anyone to let her look good in an action scene, of course.

It's also a true joy to watch a movie featuring three female superheroes where the heroines' competence is never questioned by anyone. "But you're a girl" is just not a sentence that belongs in a film coming from a wuxia tradition so rich in female heroes, so nobody ever utters it. On a slightly more superficial level, and one slightly less feminism-compatible one, seeing our competent heroines played by Mui, Yeoh and Cheung is the sort of experience that can distract a guy from a movie's flaws quite well, too.

Truth be told, I'm not even sure I should call Heroic Trio's problems flaws at all. Perhaps, interpreting them as simple markers of their place and time would be much fairer, especially given how much more enjoyable they make the movie at hand. How, after all, can I resist a script that turns a decidedly simple basic plot into a more or less labyrinthine construction of flashbacks, side plots and contrived connections between characters? And how could I not approve of a superhero movie actually willing to kill a baby, even if it's only to give Mui the opportunity to cry some very decorative tears? And how could I not enjoy Heroic Trio's sudden, generous, bursts of ridiculous, awesome nonsense like Anthony Wong (playing the original cannibal assassin) munching on his own cut off finger, or the great moment in the film's finale when the Big Bad has been reduced to a skeleton and decides to ride Yeoh's body like a bony puppeteer? How not to love a film morally dubious enough to throw in a scene of one of its heroines mercy-killing a bunch of cannibal toddlers for no good reason at all?


If Heroic Trio is one thing, it truly is the embodiment of the whole of Hong Kong wire fu filmmaking in 1993.

In short: Blind Detective (2013)

Policewoman Goldie Ho (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man), excellent at the physical aspects of her work but not much of a detective, hires the blind master detective Johnston (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) to solve a disappearance that has bothered her since her childhood. Johnston likes reward money, good food, and solving age old cases for a living, so things should be set for a quick solution but things tend to get in the way, particularly Johnston's ways of finagling himself into Ho's apartment (so she can learn the art of detection from him, or was it because his own apartment needs repairs?), and using her to assist him in solving other crimes. Then there's this pesky little thing called love.

Blind Detective finds Johnnie To half-way between his most commercial impulses (the - very effective - tear jerkers that finance the films generally seen as more personal to him, though this just might be the result of a critical bias against certain genres) and his more involved films. On one hand, it's a sometimes - effectively - sentimental film full of physical humour and wild melodrama bringing together the stars of a successful romantic comedy, on the other one, it's also a film full of the visual energy and sheer imagination that makes To's films so special, and that he pares down for affairs like this. Consequently, I suspect this may be a film that won't taste quite right to the admirers of either one of To's extremes as a director.

To my own surprise as a definite non-fan of Hong Kong romantic comedy (or really, Hong Kong comedy at all), I found myself rather taken with the movie, the natural way it goes from light slapstick to outrageous melodrama to the sort of film that features a serial killer keeping quite a few corpses around his home and back again, the weird yet organic and elegant way To marries stylistic elements that really shouldn't belong into a single movie. This approach is rather typical of To of the last one or two decades, watching Blind Detective, however, never felt as if I were watching a film by a director coasting on his successes but rather a film made by a man still in love with the imaginative aspects of filmmaking, the possibilities of play, and the (perhaps childlike) joy of seeing disparate elements collide. Somehow, To also manages to make these things look slick.

While he's at it, To also makes a romantic comedy full of love gone wrong for one reason or the other, a cynical (or realist, depending on one's personal philosophy) view that again rubs disparately yet naturally against the happy end.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,comedy,crime,johnnie to,andy lau,sammi cheng

On WTF: Heroic Trio (1993)

If you have even the smallest place in your heart for wire fu, superhero movies or female-lead action movies, you'll be pleased by this week's column on WTF-Film, I hope.

Directed by a mercenary era Johnnie To, and action directed by Ching Siu-Tung, Heroic Trio tells of the baby-kidnapping, child-killing adventures of Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung. To see me go on about the film a bit longer, just click on through.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,superheroes,action,johnnie to,ching siu-tung,anita mui,michelle yeoh,maggie cheung,other places

Three Films Make A Post: Sixgun Sirens Shoot To Thrill!

My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002): This is the sort of movie that keeps Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai in enough money for their less marketable films - a quite sentimental romantic comedy with ghosts, as emotionally manipulative as they come. Fortunately, it's also quite funny and honest in its manipulation attempts and its sentimentality, and I for one could never resist honest manipulation.

Additionally, there's the joy of seeing the whole bubble of actors known from every other To and Wai movie with everyone looking in the best of actorly moods. It's also a joy to see a comedy from Hong Kong without rape jokes.

 

True Legend (2010): So, what happened here? The first 80 minutes of this return of Yuen Wo(o)-Ping to the director's chair after more than a decade are an awe-inspiring mix of classicist yet cleverly updated martial arts, awful but conceptually fantastic CGI and choice (thanks to the performances of Vincent Zhao and Zhou Xun; even Andy On is non-shitty) melodrama taking place in semi-mythic China. After this part of the movie ends rather tragically, writer Christine To decides to repeat the worst parts of her script for Fearless and the film crashes down in historic China, does a few sentimental and dishonest character bits that just don't work and climaxes in one of those crappy drunken boxing versus Western wrestlers sequences that never work because those wrestling types are just too slow to look interesting in a fight against a martial artist. I know, it's all based on the "true story" of Beggar So, but that's no excuse; after all, this isn't supposed to be documentary.

What do I call a film whose beginning two thirds are one of the finest martial arts films made in the last two decades, but whose final third is just utter tripe?

 

The Cavern (1964): During World War II, a group of men and one woman of various nationalities are trapped in a cave system the Italian military used as a depot. Of course there are the usual tensions among the protagonists. Edgar G. Ulmer's final film, and not his best. The film is well-acted (by actors like a young John Saxon), reasonably well-written and at times tense, but it's also a bit slow and visually not very interesting.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,chinese movies,american movies,italian movies,johnnie to,wai ka-fai,yuen woo-ping,vincent zhao,zhou xun,edward g. ulmer,john saxon,comedy,martial arts,thriller,in short

Sparrow (2008)

Kei (Simon Yam), Bo (Lam Ka Tung), Sak (Law Wing Cheong) and Mac (Kenneth Cheung) are a team of pickpockets in Hong Kong. They're not the kind of hardened squinting criminals one usually meets in the films I watch; they're rather modern and urban variations on the charming rogue archetype, getting by through dexterity and wit instead of violence.

If you ignore the bickering of people who spend way too much time with one another, the quartet leads a rather charmed life. Their carefreeness ends when a mysterious woman (Kelly Lin) "accidentally" encounters each of them, leaving the sort of impression one usually expresses through rather idiotic grinning.

Cynical people could think she is setting the gang up for some sort of trap. And she is, in a way, but not in the way you would expect.

To say more about the plot would be a cruel thing to do, so I'll just leave it at that.

 

Don't get me wrong: I may be very much in love with the films of Johnnie To, but I would never steep so low as to say he is unable to make a bad movie; perhaps even two. This is definitely not one of those, though. In fact, I'd call it one of To's best films, leading to the logical conclusion that Sparrow is one of the best films I know.

Sparrow is a comedy, at least if your definition of comedy does include films that are not made to make you laugh out loud, but rather to make you smile with joy, perhaps even a little glee; films that have a lightness in touch and outlook without ignoring the existence of darkness, instead letting the hoary old cliché about there being no light without darkness and so on and so on look downright deep.

Sparrow really does work some magic on the most cynical of hearts (mine) and it looks oh so very easy how it does this.

There's a sense of rhythm to every gliding movement of the camera and every step of the actors that - combined with the brilliant score by Fred Avril & Xavier Jamaux (who are also responsible for the soundtrack of To's Mad Detective) - nearly turns the film into a musical.

I expected Yam to suddenly break into song or slowly start to dance in more than one scene and could never shake the feeling that the film itself wanted to transform into a musical (or a bird) any minute now. A French musical to be more specific; a French musical made by a former Nouvelle Vague director to be even more specific. Or what the film calls a sparrow.

The acting is of course great. You should know most faces from many other of To's films, an ensemble of actors most directors should be jealous of.

Does the film have any flaws? I am honestly not sure. As an experience it left me kind of drunk, kind of exhilarated, both no states of mind useful for the search for errors, flaws, mistakes, pimples or rashes.

And you know what? I don't know many better things to say about a work of art than "I don't care if it has flaws.". It's a little like with people you love.

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,raves,comedy,johnnie to,simon yam,hong kong movies