Susie Au's Ming Ming Hits DVD June 15th!

Hate to disagree with you, Todd, but I thought this movie was awful.

This isn't a Hong Kong movie but a Mainland Chinese attempt to create hip, pop cinema but failing miserably. Hong Kong does it more successfully and effortlessly.

The story was contrived, trite and derivative of Wong Kar-Wai and steals plot and cinematic elements from Peter Chan's PERHAPS LOVE. Chow Xun was unconvincing as a street-fighting girl and has zero screen presence. The action scenes are badly staged, lacked conviction and were clumsy.

Susie Au shows signs of desperately wanting to be Wong Kar-Wai, but lacks his originality and soul, and comes off as instead overdosing on Tony Scott, and not in a good way.

Well, first of all, while there is some mainland money in it the primary production company was Au's own Fable Films, with Au herself serving as Executive Producer, with both Fable and Au being based in Hong Kong. It's not a mainland film any more than it is Taiwanese - where it also drew funds from - or any more than any of the host of Hong Kong productions partly financed by mainland money. Which is most of them, these days. The film's now represented internationally by Emperor Motion Pictures, also a Hong Kong outfit, one which Jackie Chan is heavily involved with. Motivation, writing, production and the behiond the camera talent all came from Hong Kong. On screen talent is a mix of Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland. All that came in from the mainland production-wise was a percentage of the financing.

Second, there's honestly not a single frame in this film that strikes me as having any bearing on Wong Kar Wai at all. And Perhaps Love? Err ... they're both romances with good cinematography but that's all you could compare them based on. There aren't any similarites at all in terms of plot. And personally I though Perhaps Love was awful.

From what I've seen Hong Kong has never attempted anything like this at all, and I'm hard pressed to come up with anybody from Hong Kong or mainland China that I'd say had any sort of significant influence on Au's style here. I think Japan is a far more prominent influence, particularly Japanese film from the 70s, as are the editing styles of people like Darren Aronofsky.

As I said in my review there will be people who write the film off as style over subtstance. That's fair enough, I just happen to disagree. Au is aiming to tell a story visually rather than through linear narrative or exposition, it's a different type of language. And I also thought the performances were quite good.

And yet you hated Duelist, Todd. :P

(Haven't seen Ming Ming yet, obviously, though being something of a Zhou Xun fanboy I do plan to. Just being facetious... though, well, not entirely.)

Todd,

Not meaning to pick a fight, but I found all of MING MING full of blatant technical, stylistic and narrative rips off the works of Wong Kar-Wai, Tony Scott and PERHAPS LOVE (a film I didn't like either).

The saturated colours and dreamy pacing are culled from WKW, since nobody really had that kind of tone dominate a movie until WKW's movies because popular. Same with the elliptical editing and the jump forwards and backwards in time. And the incessant use of voiceover, but in this case was a lot less insightful or revealing than one would hope. The frenetic and often pointless editing to different angles is totally taken from Tony Scott. The frequent cutting back to certain moments in time were done all over PERHAPS LOVE, and the sequence at the end in the snow is very similar to scenes and images in the last third of PERHAPS LOVE. I don't believe it was an accident that Zhou Xun, who was in PERHAPS LOVE, was cast in this either. The other thing this movie shares (probably unintentionaly) with PERHAPS LOVE is tht the characters are all shallow and dislikeable. Hong Kong directors rip off images, plotlines and actors off other hit movies all the time, and this one is just another one in that tradition.

And you might have missed certain things that make this feel more like a Mainland film than a Hong Kong film: all the characters spoke Mandarin instead of Cantonese, and all the locations were on the Mainland.

There's nothing original about this film that we haven't seen genre variations of in Hong Kong movies in the last 20-odd years. The attempt to create a kind of dreamy fantasy world of romantic action heroes was last seen, for instance, in SAVIOUR OF THE SOUL, which was more of a martial arts and comics movie, on whose script WKW actually worked.

Nah, I don't take it as picking a fight, Adam, and I fully expect a lot of people to disagree with me on this one. I just found it pretty compelling.

Believe me, I went into the movie hoping to like it. I was disappointed.