Tag: Hong Kong

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Live Action Movies Shorts

Taste Of Tomato
(蕃茄田)

Director – Li Ho – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 30m

***1/2

A human finger fragment turns up inside a tomato in an out of town vegetable plot – FREE TO VIEW in the UK in the Fresh Wave short films strand of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

Four characters in a vegetable garden out of town, three men and one woman. No names are exchanged. Some pretty basic living conditions. It’s not exactly clear what they do for a living, but snatches of conversations give hints. One talks about removing two kidneys from a man who, when they opened him up, turned out to have four. So he took out two as a favour, because the guy would probably have died had he left them in. There’s a pre-title sequence in which a man drives through a long underpass, parks at a garden in the dark then starts digging. Intimations of cloak and dagger lifestyles.

Events start to leave a strange taste in the mouth when one of them bits into a tomato and summons the others to show them it contains about an inch’s worth of dead human finger (the bit with the fingernail).… Read the rest

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Live Action Movies Shorts

Ali And Me
(我和阿里的故事)

Director – Lam Ting-hin – 2015 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 12+ – 25m

****

A cricket-obsessed Chinese-Indian, Muslim boy and a Chinese music student get to know each other after being put on neighbouring desks in class – FREE TO VIEW online in the UK in the Fresh Wave short films strand of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

Here’s a Hong Kong movie with a difference. It’s about two very different families with one thing in common: both have a boy at school That’s not the difference. The difference is that one of the families – the one with which the film starts – is Indian Muslim, which isn’t something you see represented in that territory’s cinema very often. Sent out by his mum to get Soy Sauce from the shop, he can’t resist taking his beloved cricket bat with him and joining his mates for a game. (I can’t remember the last time I saw cricket in a Hong Kong movie, if ever.)

Instructed by his teacher to introduce himself to his new classmates, he calls himself a Muslim who loves to play cricket. The class wag promptly pipes up, “Wow!… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Beyond The Dream
(Huan Ai,
幻愛)

Director – Kiwi Chow – 2021 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 120m

***

A recovering schizophrenic man falls in love with his psychiatric counsellor, who has relationship issues of her own – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

An opening a sequence throws you off guard: a woman, clearly distressed, starts removing her clothes in a busy street. Soon she is sitting huddling on the pavement naked. One passer-by stops to take pictures (the video will later go viral). A second woman (Cecilia Choi – Detention, John Hsu, 2019) and a young man (Lau Chun Him), who both know the first woman as Ling, come to her aid. Between them, they find a dull red blanket and wrap her in it in an attempt to preserve her dignity, and soon an ambulance arrives.

Having set up Ling as a character, she never appears again. Instead, the two main characters are the young man and a woman who meet in the lift as it ascends their housing block: she lives on the floor above, and he returns the blanket, which is now inexplicably a dull blue.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Once Upon a Time
in China
(Wong Fei Hung,
黃飛鴻)

Director – Tsui Hark – 1991 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 135m

****1/2

Groundbreaking, period martial arts epic features some of the most spectacular stunt sequences ever filmed, spawned five sequels and made Jet Li a star – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

The real life Wong Fei Hung (1847-1925) was a Chinese practitioner of martial arts and medicine who lived in Foshan and has been the subject of over a hundred films. Tsui Hark’s 1991 production is one of the best known and spawned a series of six movies in total, four of them with Jet Li as Wong, arguably his most iconic role.

Militia-laden American and British and French ships anchored in the harbour put Foshan in an uneasy position and Wong is concerned, as well he might be since it turns out in the course of the narrative that the Americans under a man named Jackson (Jonathan Isgar) are not only tricking local men into debt via getting them to pay for their passage to San Francisco but also trafficking Chinese women into prostitution in the New World. The film isn’t particularly interested in these misdemeanours except as providing motivation for its villain.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

My Prince Edward
(Gam Dou,
金都)

Director – Norris Wong Yee-Lam – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 91m

****1/2

A Prince Edward resident starts to question whether marrying her boyfriend as the couple have long planned is really such a good idea – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

Whatever your nationality, one of the great thrills of world cinema is when a film informs you about all sorts of aspects of a culture other than your own. That’s the case here. To call this a romantic drama is misleading because what it’s actually about is a woman on a culturally approved trajectory starting to question whether it really is something for her or whether she’d be better off finding a different life journey entirely by another route. That approved trajectory is: girl meets boy, girl moves in with boy, girl marries boy.

Perhaps there’s a second trajectory here too, suggesting that Hong Kong is a sealed, navel-gazing world caught up with looking at itself and that perhaps Hong Kongers need to get out of their homeland more, be that to mainland China to which the heroine travels for reasons of her complicated personal situation and later visits of her own volition, or be it to America, described by the film’s mainland Chinese lead as a place of freedom.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

I Still Remember
(Er Ci
Ren Sheng,
二次人生)

Director – Lik Ho – 2021 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 90m

***1/2

A young loser looks back on his life prior to running a 10K marathon to create an achievement of which he can be proud – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

If you imagine that a movie with a title like I Still Remember would be chock full of flashbacks, you’d be dead right. Lee Chi Hang (Wu Tar Tung) fondly remembers his primary school teacher Wong Kwok Wai (Patrick Tam Yiu Man) who first encouraged him when he saw him cheering on his friend Yu Leung running the perimeter of a small playground and has continued to do so through most of his life.

Whatever he does today, though, Lee can’t seem to get it right. Working at the sales company run by the now grown up Yu (Johnny Hui), he consistently achieves the lowest scores in the weekly office tables. Lee fails for a long time to notice that co-worker and sometime fellow amateur runner Cheung Chi Ling (Sofee Ng Hoi Lam) is in love with him.

Her attempts to get him to run don’t work out either.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Crossing
(Guo Chun Tian,
过春天)

Director – Bai Xue – 2018– China – Cert. 12a – 99m

***1/2

Border crossings of no return. A Chinese teenage girl who regularly travels from Shenzhen into Hong Kong becomes involved with a gang smuggling iPhones across the frontier – available to rent online in the new Chinese Cinema Season 2021 in the UK & Ireland.

Sixteen-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao) lives in Shenzhen, but goes to school in neighbouring Hong Kong. She has to cross the China-Hong Kong border on a daily basis, waved through by border officials with better things to do than stop, question or search schoolgirls. She lives in a cramped apartment. Her father is rarely there because he works the night shift at a shipping yard, where she sometimes visits him. Her gambling mother often invites friends over to play Mahjong… Read more.

The Crossing is available to rent online in the new Chinese Cinema Season 2021 in the UK & Ireland.

Trailer:

UK Theatrical: Friday, March 22nd 2019.

Festivals: London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) 2018.

Review originally published in DMovies.org.

Categories
Animation Features Movies

White Snake
(Baishe: Yuanqi,
白蛇：缘起)

Directors – Amp Wong, Ji Zhao – 2019 – China – 99m

****

A young man falls in love with a demon resembling alternately a woman and a giant snake, in this Chinese animated feature – now available on Amazon Prime

Conceived as a prequel to China’s White Snake legend which has spawned numerous adaptations including Green Snake / Ching se (Tsui Hark, 1993), this computer animated Chinese epic concerns demon sisters Blanca and Verta (voiced by Zhang Zhe and Tang Xiaoxi) who look to all intents and purposes like beautiful women but are actually demon snakes in disguise – a white snake and a green snake as you might guess from their names. With her power and form enhanced by her sister’s gift of a green hairpin, Blanca leaves the demon world and visits ours for a showdown with a human General trying to prove his worth to the Emperor by dabbling in occult rituals involving snakes. When the showdown doesn’t go as planned, Blanca finds herself alone and suffering a complete loss of memory as to who (and indeed what) she is.

She awakes in a small, human, rural village where the local economy is built on catching snakes for the General.… Read the rest

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Live Action Movies Shorts

Conditioned

Director – Chan Kam-hei – 2015 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 24m

****

A schoolgirl pretends to be a boy at home because her mother can’t deal with her being a girl – online and Free To View in the UK in the Fresh Wave short films strand of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th

Teenager Nam takes off a feminine top and changes into his/her boy’s school uniform. As a boy, s/he calls in on her grandpa to pick up a plate, waiting ’til she’s out of sight of the house to dispose of the contents in a dumpster, then proceeds home to where her mother has turned the apartment upside down ina hunt for earring. Her mother is only interested in her own looks. Does she look okay? He likes me in earrings, she says.

At night, Nam sneaks round to her friend’s, a boy who lets her wash her smalls – bra, knickers – in bowls in his bedsit sink. Only at thisa point does it become clear Nam is a she. She helps him with homework. He jokes, asking her to move I with him or can he walk her home.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Bright Spring Days

Director – Yeh Ka Lun – 2018 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 12+ – 25m

****1/2

The son of the family returns from his father in Canada to his mother in Hong Kong – online and Free To View in the UK in the Fresh Wave short films strand of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th

A block of flats seen from the walkway. Middle-aged Lai-kuen (Ellen Liu Oi Ling) spots him down below, her son Ka-kei (Sham Ka-ki from Weeds On Fire/Dian Wu Bu, Chan Chi Fat, 2016)) arriving from Canada (where he lives with his dad) pulling a wheeled suitcase. In the cramped interior of her flat, he asks about the broken door. It got stuck and the locksmith will charge $300. He shows her a mike he found on the street “so you can sing in the flat.” She asks if he wants to see Auntie Kit tonight.

So they go down to a small club with tacky illuminations on Temple Street where she sings to the audience area from a book on a music stand. While Lai-kuen and Kit (Shui Jie from Mad World / Yat Nim Mou Ming, Chun Wong, 2016 and again Weeds On Fire/Dian Wu Bu, Chan Chi Fat, 2016) chat, he helps young Chun (Lau Ching-yu) with his homework.… Read the rest