The Mission

(1999) director Johnnie To
viewed: 09/04/10

Johnnie To’s lean, fast-paced gangster film The Mission is definitely a fine example of the genre.  When a mob boss narrowly escapes an attempted execution, he hires an idiosyncratic but highly professional crew of bodyguards to make sure he doesn’t get killed and to track his assailants.  Great character performances abound in this taut Hong Kong action flick.

There was a time when I watched a lot of Hong Kong films, but now they’re less common in my viewing, vying for roster space with lots of other films.  Oddly enough, I think I’ve had The Mission in my queue for almost as many years as I’ve had a queue.   Back in 2002, I caught To’s Fulltime Killer (2001) at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and then some time after that, I read an article about a number of films that To had either produced or directed that were supposed to be great and queued a number of them.  At the time, though, the only one that I managed to watch was Patrick Yau’s The Odd One Dies (1997), which I did like a lot.

I’d always head that The Mission was pretty top notch, and it is.  With a running time below 90 minutes, the film gets going before the title sequence has even finished and before you even have a total grasp on the situation.  In that sense, maybe it’s a little too quick and concise.  It took me a while to feel confident that I knew what was going on.  But the film is shot with a simple elegance and the characters are all unique and well-done, that their personalities are well-sketched even in the few brief brushstrokes.

The film also features some cool, classic Hong Kong gangster set ups, guns pointed at one another in a complicated Mexican standoff.  But perhaps the film’s best sequence has the mafia boss protected by his five bodyguards in a mall, in which they all stand stock-still, waiting for the attackers to approach.  The camera works its way around the armed men, describing angles and vantage points, hidden killers lying in wait, and just plays out as a just really cool shoot-out.

The film is what it is, a genre film, with a relatively simple storyline, but it moves quickly and deftly.  It’s kind of shocking that this film wasn’t re-made in America yet, because you can totally imagine such a thing done (right or wrong).  My only real complaint was that the DVD was a poor one.  The picture wasn’t great, but worst of all, through several “chapters”, a ghost image of one of the introductory titles appeared in the middle of the image.  I assume this wasn’t an intentional “watermark” on the film but just some degraded aspect of the DVD.  This would be a cool movie to see on the big screen.

Kung Fu Hustle

(2004) dir. Stephen Chow
viewed: 02/04/06

A few friends had oft commented on how funny Stephen Chow is to me, but as familiar as I have/had been with Hong Kong films, I had never seen any of his stuff. So, when Kung Fu Hustle was getting all the buzz for being good and funny, I finally managed to get around to seeing it.

I don’t know how exemplary of his stuff it is. It’s pretty funny. It has some classically funny types of moments in the film like when Chow is calling out the villagers for a fight and the short guy turns out to be 7 feet tall and the guy with glasses comes out as utterly buff. The visual humor is straight out of the silent cinema in a way, but still effective when done right. Chow clearly has a knack for it. It’s a clear satire/homage to the kung fu genre, with its action sequences even directed by Yuen Wo Ping and Sammo Hung. I guess this is what I considered its downside, that in some ways — and maybe this is my ignorance of the genre — that it was more homage than comedy at times.

I actually thought that it was pretty fun and I would be inclined to watch one of his more well-known films. But after asking some friends at work, I didn’t have any recommendations. Anyone?

The Eye

(2002) dir. Oxide Pang Chun, Danny Pang
viewed: 10/24/03

Gotta love a guy named “Oxide Pang,” as the one of the co-directors of this film has himself known. As for this film, which seems to largely be in Cantonese with some Thai, The Eye has a good deal of The Sixth Sense (1999) about it, minus the twists.

Mun is a young woman who was blinded as a child but is now being given an eye transplant which will bring her vision back. When her vision is returned, she comes to realize that she can also see people who are dying being transported away by shadowy figures and can see the ghosts of those who are yet untransported.

This film is pretty neat, with some clever visual designs and some moderately spooky sequences. It’s ultimately not so transfixing, though overall I thought it was a pretty good rental.

Too Many Ways to be No. 1

(1997) dir. Ka-Fai Wai
viewed: 09/12/03

Too Many Ways to be No. 1 is a pretty wacky Hong Kong thriller/comedy that I watched as part of my delving into the Johnny To productions. The visual and narrative approach bore some French New Wave via Wong Kar-Wai sort of influence, featuring a two versions of the narrative playing out in which the gang either goes to Mainland China (in which they all die) or to Taiwan (in which they all become rich and powerful. I have read that this was perhaps a commentary on the then-contemporary hand-over of Hong Kong back to the rule of mainland China. This would be an interesting read on this film, but I wish that I had found time to write about it back closer to the time that I had seen it. Because right now, that’s all I’ve got on it. It was interesting, for sure.

The Odd One Dies

(1997) dir. Patrick Yau
viewed: 08/23/03

After having read a little article on Johnny To in Giant Robot magazine, I decided to check out some more of the films that he had worked on. I had seen Fulltime Killer (2001) last year, a film that he had directed, and while perusing the magazine’s list of interesting films that he had either produced or directed, the list of films that he had worked on as a producer looked more interesting than the ones that he had directed. This is not unlike Tsui Hark, my favorite Hong Kong film icon/director/producer, whose own directoral work isn’t always as strong as the other films that he has had involvement in.

I have really liked Takeshi Kaneshiro, the male lead in this film, since I first saw him in Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995). The Odd One Dies turned out to be quite a cool, fun, and stylish romantic comedy/drama, draped on top of an odd story about a down-on-his-luck gambler (Kaneshiro) who takes a job as a hitman to square himself with the mob, but ends up subcontracting the job to a strange girl, Carman Lee, with whom he eventually falls in love.

The film has a cool look to it as well as a somewhat off-kilter narrative, perhaps somewhat influenced by Wong Kar-wai, but perhaps not. I also found it very funny in parts and all in all, very enjoyable. The scene where Takeshi Kaneshiro is running from some people and tries to escape in an elevator but the pursuer keeps pushing the button so that he can’t get away is totally hilarious. Kaneshiro keeps jumping out and throwing kicks and punches to try to scare the guy back before he jumps into the elevator again, but the guy persistantly presses the elevator call button, popping the doors back open. It’s very slapstick and overt.

Time and Tide

(2000) dir. Tsui Hark
viewed: 10/03/02

This film was strongly recommended to me by several people, one even remarked: “Best everything ever.”

I am a big Tsui Hark fan. I have been since the early 90′s, and I have often cited his Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) as one of the films that convinced me to study cinema.

But I have to say that when I saw this trailer in the cinema about a year or so ago, I wasn’t sure if it looked all that good. Cynically, I thought that it looked like Tsui Hark’s interpretation of Wong Kar-Wai’s visual style and storytelling. And as to the result, it wasn’t clear from the trailer what that would be.

After having seen it, though, I am hard pressed to know what to say. I don’t know much about the film’s background. I listened to some of the audio commentary by Tsui Hark on the DVD, but didn’t get enough information to know much about it. I would still say that the film is perhaps influenced by the work of Wong Kar-Wai, maybe in its narrative style and subject matter. The film, however, has so much going on in it that it is hardly a stylistic knock-off, or for that matter even really all that similar in the end. It has a truly unique character.

Whatever the impetus for having made this movie, it seems clear that Tsui Hark has rediscovered cinema. After a two movie tour in Hollywood helming Jean Claude Van Damme films (Double Team (1997) & Knock Off (1998), respectively), Time and Tide is amazingly more complex and ambitious than anything that he had done in almost a decade.

The film is all over the place, employing all kinds of visual effects and narrative devices to tell its story in a complex, sprawling manner.

As a result, unfortunately, I don’t know where to start with it. It really requires another viewing at least to get a proper foothold on it. I will hold back for now.