fun for the whole family

Hong Kong's Cantonese cinema scene is world-famous. In the recent past, Hong Kong was the world's third most prolific movie-producing city, after Hollywood and Bombay. This is the city that put Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan on the map. Cantonese cinema has influenced directors like Quentin Tarantino and directors of other Hollywood action flicks.

Until a couple weeks ago, I made a concerted attempt not to go to the cinema to watch Cantonese films. Instead, I wanted to concentrate on watching Hong Kong films from the 1980s and 1990s. That was the era Hong Kong was becoming more of an economic power in the world, with a concomitant improvement in residents' standard of living. (Also a concomitant increase in movie-making budgets!) Yet the scheduled handover of political control from Britain to China added uncertainty to the future. These two trends injected a new vitality to local movies. Thus, the 1980's and 1990's are considered by many the "golden age" of HK cinema.

So if movies made ten or twenty years ago were from the "golden age", that would make today's movies (wait for it) not from the "golden age". Do you know what convinced me that Cantonese cinema had indeed declined from years past? Here's a hint:



Yes, you guessed correctly. William Hung, infamous for singing Ricky Martin's "She Bangs" on American Idol, was able to convince a studio in Hong Kong to have him play the lead in an action film. What's worse is that my relatives here actually tried to get me to see it. "He's American, like you. Why wouldn't you want to see his film Where is Mama's Boy?" That's when I had to explain why I didn't like to watch Chinese movies at the cinema.

So what changed my mind? Every year, Hong Kong hosts an International Film Festival. As part of the festival, they focused on the career of one Cantonese film star, Andy Lau. I knew of his earlier work from the early 1990s. I decided to catch a screening of one of his later films, Running Out of Time. I was pleasantly surprised: great action scenes and solid character development? Heck, lots of Hollywood action films can't get those two items down!

After I told one of my classmates about seeing that movie, she decided she wanted to try and see a present-day HK film. So on Monday we headed to Mongkok to see House of Fury. Unlike Hollywood movies that are tightly focused on a target demographic, Hong Kong still produces "crowd-pleasing" movies. That means: movies to appeal to the whole crowd. Thus, there were veteran actors and younger teeny-bopper decoration. There were plenty of fight scenes for action fans. There was the perfunctory love scene. There was some witty dialogue for the comedy fans. There were sight gags for those of us who can't understand Chinese word play. The villian, although Chinese, mainly spoke American English. Perhaps a shout-out to us foreigners in the audience?