Right on Target

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If you like your movies rocking and rolling, you’ll be a lot happier if the movies you watch are made in Hong Kong. When key industry figures – Jet Li, Jackie Chan, John Woo, and Chow Yun-fat – went Hollywood and the city was swamped by the Asian economic crisis, many proclaimed the Hong Kong film scene dead. Instead, it dug deeper and got better.


Lincoln Center’s retrospective of post-2000 Hong Kong film, which begins on Monday, is just a sample of a vigorously healthy cinema.


King of the hill is director Johnnie To, deservedly represented by four films. His “PTU” (October 26 & 27) and “Breaking News” (October 17 & 23) are sophisticated action flicks with an unfortunate tendency to turn into smarmy “Dirty Harry” spectacles. But “Running on Karma” and “Throw Down” are masterpieces.


“Running on Karma” (October 19) was Hong Kong’s impossible-to-define sleeper hit of 2003. In it, Andy Lau plays a body-building, martial arts-empowered Buddhist monk who moonlights as a stripper. He gets sucked into a dark murder mystery, and the movie becomes an action/comedy/romance that explodes into a heartbreaking plea for an end to all violence.


“Throw Down” (October 24 & 28) is a stylish essay on dignity, lost and found. Dapper Louis Koo stars as a washed-up alcoholic judo master goaded into re-entering the ring in a judo-crazy Hong Kong where personal differences are settled by wrist locks and shoulder throws. It might be the most perfect (and possibly the only) movie about judo ever made.


Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most famous art house export, reveals a goofy side, unknown in the West. Watch Tony Leung play a cuckolded husband in Mr. Wong’s serious, delicate 1960s period piece, “In the Mood for Love” (October 23). But first watch Mr. Leung at his gravely ridiculous best in “A Chinese Odyssey” (October 20 & 21) a Wong Kar-wai-produced comedy that skewers Mr. Wong’s own art house pretensions.


A tornado of gender-swapping kicks off when the Emperor’s daughter disguises herself as a man and runs away from home, falling in love with a commoner (Mr. Leung). Meanwhile, Mr. Leung’s sister falls in love with the disguised Princess. Working itself up into a comic frenzy, this exuberant film keeps breaking into song, including one hilarious number featuring fornicating geese.


But the movie most representative of Hong Kong is “Golden Chicken” (October 22, 23 & 25) – “chicken” is Cantonese slang for “hooker” – which serves up a pornucopia of Hong Kong history. Sandra Ng plays a hooker trapped in a malfunctioning ATM booth with an inept mugger. To pass the time, she tells him the story of her life. Ms. Ng gives a riotously raunchy performance as an indefatigable piece of poultry facing two decades of Hong Kong’s rollercoaster history with high spirits.


It’s the perfect summary of everything that Hong Kong, and its movies, are all about: The past is gone forever, the present is hard to survive, and what keeps you going is an unshakable faith in a better tomorrow.


The New York Sun

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