Homepage - Best and Worst of the 2001 HK entertainment industry - Top Of The Canto Pop
To
find a way to solve the crisis that has spoilt the Cantonese cinema industry for several
years, producers and directors have started to develop a solution that is over-tearjerking
dramas or at least over-sentimental flicks. That trend has started with the tearjerking Fly
Me To Polaris (1999) by Jingle Ma. Since then, the success of such lachrymal movies
never failed. There was some kind of evolution, however, to that type of feature. The
successful Sammi Cheng vehicles, i.e. Needing You and Summer Holiday,
were followed by tons of clones in 2001. Needing You (2000) mixed sickly drama to
strange sense of humour and Summer Holiday (2000, by Jingle Ma again) mixed
sickly drama to colourful Malaysian beach landscapes. There were also different versions
quite successful: Wu Yen (a period comedy, with Sammi Cheng), Love On A Diet
(a version with an over-weighted couple portrayed by Andy Lau and… Sammi Cheng), Fighting
for Love (a version with Best Actor Award winner Tony Leung Chiu-wai), la
Brassiere (a version dealing with revolutionising bra design!). Unfortunately, all of
these features were not much more than… rubbish. One of their rare advantages was to
know how successful an actor was. And the two Box Office favourite actors are
unsurprisingly Sammi Cheng (who beat Cecilia Cheung) and hard-working and restless actor
Andy Lau.
The pure HK genre cinema is then
more and more endangered. Nothing is left from the crazy-action-thrillers-Made-In-HK
period. Hit Team by Dante Lam (ex-assistant director of Gordon Chan) is the only
survivor from that heroic Bloodshed golden age filled with really effective and
unpretentious flicks chain-produced not so long ago.
As for the noir thrillers
produced by Johnnie To (e.g. The Longest Nite and The Mission), only one
was made in 2001: Full Time Killer. This is a kind of arrogant movie that
clumsily makes tons of references (to Hard Boiled, Fallen Angels, Terminator, Time and
Tide…). Full Time Killer deals with the duel of two professional and
sadistic killers, but in the end, it never managed to make a single point. Nothing
thrilling came from that thriller.
The 'psycho-horror' trend is
still, however, rather successful. The genre has started in Japan with The Ring
trilogy and tons of other rip off. It reached HK as a mini trend with films such as The
Horoscope and the Troublesome Night series or even Victim by Ringo
Lam. But these HK movies never managed to beat the original 'psycho-horror'. In 2001,
worldwide-acclaimed director Ann Hui tried to give her version with the pretty
disappointing Visible Secret. She bargained her artistic creativity for a boring
mainstream feature. However, a Visible Secret 2 is being produced at the
moment...
Big budget doesn't mean good
feature. HK producers have apparently a genuine will to increase production values (with
more clever use of CGI) to be able to compete with other international features. The
trouble is that this has tended to limit the HK cinema creativity and crazy visual that
was considered as its trademark. It seems that at the moment, HK directors make really
neat action sequences but rare within a feature. These action scenes are usually rip off
from international blockbusters (e.g. The Matrix!). The remaining time is then
filled with tons of boring dialogues! Accidental Spy with Jackie Chan, 2002
and The Avenging Fist are pretty good examples.
In Hollywood, Jackie Chan and
Jet Li are more and more successful. Good for them. Unfortunately, so far they have chosen
to play in flicks that took advantage of them. These features have failed to display their
great skills to only show mere street fights. The One by James Wong is therefore
simply an insult to Jet Li's wisdom. Clichés, racist jokes, poor violence made us come
back twenty years ago!
This overview may appear somehow
really pessimistic. But fortunately in 2001 some movies were able to keep defending our
idea of the HK Cinema i.e. as a unique and pleasurable feature producer.
2001
is the year for the come back of peculiar director Herman Yau. He was very famous for his
'category 3' flicks such as Ebola Syndrome (1996) and Bunman, The Untold
Story (1992). Herman Yau shot in 2001 two pictures really different from his previous
work. He directed Master Q 2001 and managed to refresh the children movie genre
(very rare genre in HK) and to highlight the great values of the local culture. Even if
the result isn't homogenous, it is still much more enjoyable and fresh than the pale
sentimental comedies, which have spoilt the Box Office. Obviously, it was a very ironical
move from producer Tsui Hark to choose Herman 'Filthy' Yau to shoot a movie for kids!
Herman Yau second feature of year 2001 was a bit more ambitious and personal. From The
Queen To The Chief Executive deals with a prisoner issue just before the handover of
HK to China. This movie, sometimes a bit clumsy, mixed a documentary type approach to some
effects from pure genre cinema. It was very brave and original to make such movie
regarding the current HK cinema landscape, even if the Box office isn't ready at the
moment to welcome such good attempt. What a pity!
The best movies of 2001 are
definitively Shaolin Soccer and Legend Of Zu. Both managed to use the
very modern special effects and CGI technology. Both have great production values that can
compete with any US production but both managed to keep the Cantonese cinema cultural
identity.
Stephen Chow Ching-Chi, number one clown in HK, is back with Shaolin
Soccer that broke the local Box Office record. It grossed more than HK$ 54 millions
in summer 2001. Shaolin Soccer re-used typical characteristics from Chow's
previous work, i.e. God Of Cookery and King Of Comedy. The result is a
very nice piece of work indeed. Not only Stephen Chow was able to give his feature a fun
and cool atmosphere that current HK films lack terribly, but he also showed with humour
that martial arts is not strictly equal to mere violent fights.
Tsui Hark has reacted to the
internationalisation of filmmaking with Legend
Of Zu. Such globalization has contributed to fade out the local genre cinema. Legend
Of Zu is nothing but a real treat and a trip without concession into Chinese culture.
This movie is therefore really amazing, astonishing and exciting but sometimes it can
really appear as a close book, and understandably it wasn't very successful in HK. Tsui
Hark's Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain received about the same response from
the audience 20 years ago. But hopefully, Legend Of Zu will rise to fame in the
future and will become a worldwide cult movie like Zu: Warriors From The Magic
Mountain. Director Tsui Hark is more creative than ever with Legend Of Zu
and Time and Tide. But these two features showed
that he wanted more and more to go as far away as possible from the popular and accessible
cinema and that he may not want to play a leading role in the local film industry any
more.
That is probably the most
important weakness of HK cinema. Skillful directors fed the cinema with great movies and
recycled the genre cinema for ages. Their ideas were then recycled to death. In the 90's
there was not a new generation of directors able to replace great filmmakers such as John
Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, Kirk Wong and Yuen Woo Ping. If a director doesn't prove on a
regular basis the interest of Cantonese cinema by launching a huge success, the local
audience will inevitably turn their back to HK features. They will only consider American
blockbusters. So where is the new blood?
A handful of good directors like Daniel Lee, Wilson Yip, Dante Lam, Teddy Chen and Patrick
Leung appeared as the new blood but they never really managed to stand out or to give the
HK cinema a new life. Meanwhile, the Cantonese film industry has got reorganised with new
production and distribution companies (e.g. China Star, Mei Ah, 100 Years of films, GH
pictures, Stareast BOB). In addition to that, HK producers have started to work in
partnership with foreign company branches such as Columbia-Tristar Asia.
Both
production time and budgets have increased. But if the genuine HK skill is lacking, the
Cantonese cinema industry will end up like an empty shell. It will only be able to produce
either a few boring blockbusters for worldwide video clubs or luxurious TV series on big
screen (i.e. romantic drama) for the local and Chinese market. Unfortunately that is the
news that the 2001 film harvest seems to break.
Written by Laurent Henry and
Thomas, December 2001.
