Karen Mok at Asian Film Awards

Karen Mok knocked it out of the park with an upbeat, playful attitude and a killer off-the-shoulder blue dress with a split skirt on the red carpet for the Sixth Annual Asian Film Awards. More pictures later--I was hoping for some larger images from the Chinese media but didn't want to keep these from the diva starved masses. Karen Mok is perfectly gorgeous here.

Gadzooks! Heart be still.

Meanwhile--the night before to be accurate--Karen Mok was at the FilmAID Power Of Film Gala that raised money for FilmAid Asia's programs, said by its sponsors to use the power of film to bring education to refugees and displaced persons globally. It honored Hong Kong-based documentary filmmaker Duncan Jepson and, to insure a big house, Keanu Reeves. She was wearing a ridiculous dress that looked like it was whipped up from a spare shower curtain, fit like a tent (a real big tent), in an unflattering color and almost made her disappear onstage. Outrageously bad choice but she gets to make a mistake occasionally.

With Cissy Wang, Donnie Yen, Keanu Reeves and Josie Ho.

Making the best of things.

Zimbio; Zimbio

Josie Ho Chiu-Yee in "Dream Home" (mild spoilers)

“Dream Home” is a terrific slasher flick. It is full of inventive and horrible ways to kill people and allows us to (or insists that we) watch them suffer as they die. It showcases Josie Ho Chiu-Yee a terrific actress; she creates an over the top but still credible character in Sheung whose taste for slaughter is undiminished by the pile of corpses at the end of the movie. On one level it works well as a commentary on how the Hong Kong property market turns people into monsters as more buyers compete for fewer prime flats and the competition strips away their already thin veneer of civilized behavior. Edmond Pang Ho-Cheung undermines any more profound message by showing us just how ordinary Sheung’s experiences have been. As a child she was one of many thousand uprooted from their homes by rapacious developers and the triad thugs they employed. While this was the beginning of her obsession with finding the perfect apartment and responding to that obsession by becoming a remorseless killing machine, most of those who went through the same situations continued to live lives of quiet desperation—or at least, if we are to accept the movies as a reflection of reality, they didn’t become crazed killers.

We meet Sheung for the first time at work. She is one of hundreds in cubicles pitching loans from the Jet Bank to people who either don't need them or can't afford them. She has to keep smiling and calling, dialing for dollars to finance her dream. Her co-workers are presented as typical Hong Kong office drones. Their idea of a fun weekend is cheap hotel rooms with cheaper liquor and staying hammered for the entire time. They are amoral, coming up with a plan to sell the names of those who want loans but can’t pass the credit check to a mob-connected loan shark.

Sheung spends time with them at work and on breaks but with two part-time jobs in addition to her work for the bank and a dying father at home she never is part of their social circle. She has a married lover, played to loutish perfection by Eason Chan Yik-Shun, who arrives late at the love hotel room she booked and paid for and leaves to go home to his wife and child while she is still asleep.

Most of “Dream Home” takes place late in the evening of October 30, 2007—digital time and date stamps keep us informed as the slaughter progresses—with flashbacks to Sheung’s childhood, her adolescence, her mother’s death and most recently, the soon to be fatal illness of her father. While the murders are justified or necessary only in the depths of Sheung’s derangement the first is particularly gratuitous: she kills a security guard who is fast asleep in front of the closed circuit monitors he should be monitoring. A quick glance after opening the door to the security office would have been enough to get her past him and into the elevator to the eighth floor where her “real” victims await. A Filipino maid, hard at work at 11:00 PM while her employer lounges in bed complaining on a phone call to a friend about her husband, is the next victim, another case of incidental murder.

The action gets absurd as Sheung heads for the door of the bedroom to kill the owner of the flat. Just as she reaches for the doorknob her phone buzzes and since the call is from her lover she answers it, pacing outside the door while he tells her to get a room, sneak in some bottles to avoid the corkage charge, bring a cake and get there by midnight. And it seems as if she plans to do all of that after up the errand she is on. Pang Ho-Cheung may be using this to heighten our realization of just how crazy Sheung is—as well as making a comment on wireless phone etiquette: let your calls go to voice mail when stalking someone you wish to kill.

This victim is played by Michelle Ye Xuan and we see her horrifying death in exquisite detail—she is heavily pregnant and fights for her life and the life of her unborn child—in real movie time and then again in a detailed flashback. Pang lingers over it in a shot from directly above that reveals the fear and pain of the victim. The rest of the killings are done in the approved Grand Guignol fashion with mortally wounded people coming back to life, some severed limbs and an unmistakable reference to “The Story of Ricky”.

Old Hollywood moguls Jack Warner and Samuel Goldwyn are both credited with originating “If you want to send a message call Western Union’, which means that it wasn’t original with either of them. But it is still good advice to filmmakers “Dream Home” doesn’t work as an indictment of the insane property market in Hong Kong and the gangster capitalists who control and profit from it (assuming that was at least part of Pang’s intention) because only one person in the movie turned into a cold-eyed killer because of it. More universally applicable would be an army of Romero type zombies made of those who committed suicide due to their losses in the housing market, a vengeful undead seeking the blood of those ultimately responsible for what happened to them. But that would be a different movie.

30th Hong Kong Film Awards

It rained on the 2011 Hong Kong Film Awards which didn't seem to bother Carina Lau in the least. She was one of the few bright spots in an evening full of dull outfits on beautiful actresses.

Tang Wei in the reddest red looked like she was having a great time.

Ella Koon in an shapeless orange dress that didn't look any worse having had its hem dragged through a few puddles.

Josie Ho in a dress that was typical of the evening: a poorly cut and draped pleat-fest that didn't hang right. She always looks like a billion (or so) dollars though.

Both "Dynasty" and "The Jetsons" would like their shoulder pads returned.

Kara Hui's dress is way beyond my ability to characterize but she could wear a burlap bag and look perfect as soon as she flicks on that smile.

Zhou Xun has had one hundred ways to look devastating. Now it is one hundred and one--big glasses as an accessory.

Chrissie Chau was there. This is what she looked like:

All images from ifeng.com

Josie Ho is not Paris Hilton

Even though each of then has certain shared characteristics--Josie Ho is the daughter and presumed heiress of a wealthy man; she is young, talented and attractive; and she has a career as a singer and actress that is based on her hard work and willingness to put in the requisite time and effort. Paris Hilton is the daughter and presumed heiress of a wealthy man.

While strange to think of these two together but I did for a moment while reading an interview with Josie Ho in HK-online in which she was quoted as saying:

"I have so much energy… maybe that’s why I have so much anger.
Now that I’m older, I get even angrier.
I feel there are more forces obstructing me."
(HK-online apparently doesn't bother printing the questions in interviews)

The idea of Josie Ho having to deal with forces obstructing her, while real enough to her, is hard to fathom given her material/social/class advantages over 99.9% of the population of Hong Kong--and maybe the rest of the world. However she presents herself in an interview, she is still a terrifically talented and committed actress who is often riveting onscreen.

A good example of this is Johnny To's crime drama Exiled in which she plays the perfect Triad wife trying to keep her husband alive during the last hours of Portuguese rule in Macau. This is not a review of Exiled--there are plenty of reviews--but a quick look at Josie Ho's role in it as the only person who is neither a killer nor someone who profits from killing.

Her husband, played by Nick Cheung, is returning from overseas in an attempt to pack up his family and get them somewhere safe. Anthony Wong and Lam Suet are waiting to kill him while Francis Ng and Roy Cheung are there to thwart the killers. None of them is as committed as Josie Ho.

She is waiting with their child in the sun-drenched tropical outpost for her husband to arrive:

She understands the difficulties of being the wife of a gangster, one of them being the chance that armed men may shoot up the apartment trying to kill each other while some of them also try to kill her husband. In an amazing sequence we see her through a doorway with the gun battle at its height. She goes to her child's crib, picks him up and allows him to nurse--something has to be normal during this day of the world turned upside down:

Even after the gunfight  she remains a proper hostess, bringing the men pillows and blankets so they can bed down in the living room while keeping watch on each other and her husband--and asking, almost casually, that she and her family be allowed to live:

There will have to be some serious blood spilled, of course, although the four gangsters have allied with each other and with her husband to rip off a huge shipment of gold being shipped out as the Portuguese leave their colony on the edge of Asia to return to the edge of Europe. Nick Cheung has to die and die he does. A chance to emigrate with more gold than she can carry doesn't balance her new widowhood as she shows the other side of being a Triad wife:

She not only shoots at the fleeing gunmen but decides that the only thing to do is strap her baby across her chest, put the huge revolver in her purse and hunt down the foursome she holds responsible, going from hotel to hotel with a photograph of the four of them plus her husband when they were much younger, good friends growing up in Macau:

Inevitably she arrives at the hotel that is the headquarters of the evil boss behind the evening's bloodshed. He is played by Simon Yam, so the roster of cool dude tough guy actors in "Exiled" is very deep. There isn't much for her to do at this point other than to listen while Francis Ng tells her where to go to find the gold and a boat waiting to sail on the morning tide:

HK-online through dleedlee.