Port of Call: A

Excellent Hong Kong drama based on a real murder case from 2008. Aaron Kwok was superb in this; he goes old, with grey hair and a mustache, and really vanishes into the role. It’s a tough part, full of damaged psyches grating against each other in an endless cycle. He plays it whimsical with a ton of pain showing right under the ( Read more... )

Full Strike: B

This was pretty much OK. Very broad Hong Kong sports comedy with all the usual bits. There’s a drunken master, there’s an evil magistrate, there’s familial tension, and so on. Oh, and a random alien who lands in a UFO that looks like a badminton shuttlecock. Don’t pay too much attention to him, since he’s not actually part of the ( Read more... )

That didn’t suck.

Let The Bullets Fly is not really a Chow Yun Fat movie in the way that The Ides of March isn’t really a George Clooney movie. It’s just that when you get an actor that charismatic, a movie tends to lean towards him or her. Pleasingly enough, Jiang Wen is equally magnetic and is both the star and the director, so the charisma duel ( Read more... )

Tuesday night plans:

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Sneak preview down at the Alamo. It’s a pretty Hong Kong week for me, yep.

Mirrored from Population: One.

In a hypothetical world, someone with a huge cache of Hong Kong flicks but without clearance to show them might ask attendees of a movie marathon to stay mum about the actual movies shown.

In unrelated news, the Alamo Drafthouse Hongkongathon was way better than I’d anticipated. I was expecting a bunch of exploitation stuff and a good time, rather ( Read more... )

Should you ever happen to be in Singapore and desirous of spending a thousand bucks or so on me, this is what I want. It’s the nearly complete Shaw Brothers collection, 668 films, on one set-top box. Presumably there’s a hard drive in there. HDMI output, 720p picture quality, from the Celestial Pictures remastered rereleases. Man, that would be ( Read more... )

I took advantage of a Christmas Amazon gift certificate to fill a few holes in my old Hong Kong movie collection plus make a gesture towards catching up on more recent Hong Kong flicks. I know the Hong Kong movie scene is never going to be quite what it was back in the day, but it’s not like the last decade was a wasteland or anything. I’m behind!

( Read more... )