Infernal Mission

No one ever sets out to make a bad movie although in hindsight one can see that the combination of creative people assembled for a project seems to doom if from the beginning. Sometimes, though, a movie turns out better than anyone might think it could. Infernal Mission is such a film.

Infernal Mission has many of the elements of a dull timewaster: an inexperienced writer and director; generic, barely dressed sets; by the numbers cinematography and a script that seems to be a cheap copy of a much better movie. It is visually uninteresting and dramatically dull. However the sum is greater than its generally ordinary parts or perhaps some of the parts shine are much brighter than one would expect. Even though the war room for the elite anti-drug squad looks like the word processing pool of a small accounting office, the gun fights are (with a couple of notable exceptions) perfunctory and the plot is pushed forward by people finding clues lying around on desks, it is still an effective police drama with decently developed characters, believable conflict and hidden agendas that are hinted at and only slowly revealed.

Teresa Mak plays Mak Ka Mei, the police cadet recruited to be a mole in the organization of a drug kingpin. She is beautiful as always, playing very tough when she needs to be, tender when necessary and makes it clear that she is always looking over her shoulder. The difficulties her character encounters, a female spy in the heart of a criminal organization are only hinted at—her main tool for getting information on drug deal is sex, since she had to hide her skills gunplay and strong arm tactics . Her status as both an insider, being present when huge deals are made, and as an outsider, never completely trusted are clear from the beginning and serve as one of the hinges for conflict. The audience likes her and wants her to succeed.

Infernal Mission is the only film credit for director Chan Man-Leun and screenwriter Chung Bond. However Cha Cheun Lee, its producer, has directed eighteen Hong Kong films, most of them romantic comedies or Category III not terribly hard-core pornography. He has been an actor, producer and writer--typical (or at least not untypical) for someone far below the top rank of Hong Kong film who wants to work in the business. I assume, based on nothing other than Cha Cheun-Lee's experience and the almost invisible status of the director and writer that he was more respoonsible than anyone for what showed up onscreen.

In addition to Teresa Mak the cast features Ruby Wong Cheuk-Ling, Lam Suet and Tony Ho Wah-Chiu. Ruby Wong, the mole in the police department, is a very attractive and talented actress who has done comedy for Ringo Lam and police dramas for Johnny To. She had a terrible hairdo/wig which actually distracted the audience from her performance, with them wondering why her hair was covering her face instead of the qualities she brought to her character. Tony Ho played the violent and erratic crime boss. His character was over the top for most of the movie and he brought it off with well. With 48 movies in 10 years--a lot for an actor in the post-handover world--he is a talented young pro. Lam Suet, as the police commander behind Teresa Mak's undercover operation, has always been perfect for any cop or hoodlum role.

The ensemble portrays the constant anxiety of both working undercover and being responsible for the operation. The script, which is based on, borrowed from or in homage to Infernal Affairs, keeps things hurtling along--no subplots, comic relief or stopping to think slow down the rush to the inevitable bloody showdown.

There weren't a lot of stunts--this is a buttoned up, low budget police drama--and the most dangerous thing that any of the actors did was smoke cigarettes. Teresa Mak had a quite a few scenes in which she smoked. She may not have had a nicotine habit when filming started but she must have before it finished.

Ruby Wong

Tony Ho and Lam Suet

Infernal Mission is available at a few online stores incuding HKFlix and YesAsia

The Hong Kong Movie Database page (registration may be required) is here HKMDB

Collectors and Film History

The history of Hong Kong film will never really be written although many have tried and others continue to try. duriandave, whose well researched and increasingly addictive blog is here is a great introduction to movies and popular culture generally in the Crown Colony and other parts of the Chinese diaspora. Another source is Silver Light:A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1920-1970 by Paul Fonoroff whose reviews from a couple of decades after this book are discussed in a post below.

Foronoff makes it heartbreakingly clear that when it comes of the history of film in Hong Kong, it just isn't there. There are prints of four of the over 500 feature films produced in the pre-World War II era. In some cases the same problems that plagued some Hollywood classics prevailed--the prints themselves and the movies on them weren't considered important enough to store properly, so heat and humidity did its damage. There simply wasn't enough room in Hong Kong to warehouse films--Hong Kong has long been one of the most croweded and hemmed in places on earth. Without enough room to house its people there wasn't much outcry to find space for old movies. It wasn't until 1993 that the Hong Kong Film Archive was established. A problem not faced in other movie capitals occurred during the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945 when any movies that could be found were melted for their silver content.

Fonoroff discovered that the only way to write a history of the movie industry he loved was to acquire the source materials himself. In searches through old theaters in Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, Singapore and Malaysia he found the posters, lobby cards, handbills and magazines that he used for illustrations in Silver Light.

We are spoiled now. Everything is digital, its all indestructible strings of zeroes and ones that don't get thrown out, burned up or simply left behind when a cinema closes like so much of the this history already has. The difficulty for the fan, of course, is that the more movies you watch the more you want to see; the more you learn the more you realize you don't know. It can be frustrating to look at advertising material for films that no longer exist--and who wouldn't want to see a martial arts western from the 1940s, "Double Pistol Heroine", for example--but among the serious collectors, I imagine, there will always be one more place to look to uncover one more bit of Hong Kong fim history.

Teresa Mak in "Love is a Many Stupid Thing"

There are a number of things you can count on in a Wong Jing comedy including plenty of attractive actresses, generally dressed (or undressed) to hightlight their beauty. A movie from the Wong Jing cinema factory in the 1980s and 1990s might look as if it were slapped together in a few weeks--because they often were. Confused plots and semi-improvised dialog were either part of the charm or real annoyances to his audiences. But Wong always knew how to get a movie cast, shot, edited and to the distributor on time and under budget.

A typical example of this is "Love is a Many Stupid Thing" which features Teresa Mok as a tough Hong Kong police sergeant leading a squad of lovely police constables. She falls in love with the wrong guy, a handsome cop who is actually a mole from one of the Triads sent to infiltrate and spy on the police. Her moods go from coy to friendly to bloodthristy--in one scene she storms into a conference room and stomps the suspect then flirts with the officer who was questioning him. This is a movie in which Teresa Mak is one of an ensemble--probably the lead co-star if such a thing exists. It is a guy's movie with Eric Tsang and Chapman To keeping the slapstick humor going. Here are some pictures from "Love is a Many Stupid Thing".

The first two show her in uniform. Many actresses look great in police uniforms--Cynthia Khan, for example, clocked a lot of time as a Hong Kong policewoman--and Teresa looks quite fetching here as Sergeant Cool Lady:



Cool Lady (I am not making this up although it probably made a lot more sense when said in either Mandarin or Cantonese) attempts to involve herself in the conversation Watson (Raymond Wong Ho-Yin) is having with another cop on how to approach the suspect played by Tony Ho Wah-Chiu and who is described in the credits as "insane sex offender". She is already getting a bit wild-eyed since she has a crush on Watson.



Things develop poorly during the questioning to the mounting concern of Cool Lady and her squad who are watching through the two way mirror.

Here she tries to act demure and girlish toward Watson who she just rescued from the suspect who was smashing Watson's genitals under the table in the interrogation room. After kicking the bad guy in the head she simpers at the object of her affection:

One of the trademarks of Wong's work is actresses in their underwear. Watson and Cool Lady are staking out the bad guys from a rooftop. They fall off but each are able to grab a string of lights to slow thier fall. Cool Lady's dress gets ripped off leaving her on the ground in the rain in her not very revealing lingerie.
It isn't necessary to have the actress wet and partially undressed, of course. A simple snap front blouse that just barely closes over Cool Lady's breasts with the snaps pulling but not quite gaping is a slightly more understated look although still very effective:
Looking shocked, amazed, horrified or just plain angry is the stock in trade of any professional actress. Here Cool Lady has discovered that not only is Watson an underworld informant and is planning to kill her but that he never planned on marrying her.

"Love is a Many Stupid Thing" is not a bad movie for fans of Teresa Mak Ga-Kei. While she doesn't have much screen time she does pop up throughout the film and is often featured in the scenes she is in. The movie itself is funny in parts, dreadful in parts and occasionally confusing--in other words what one expects from Wong Jing.

Reviews and Reviewers

Last month my friend Chick Young, proprietor of the blog Trash-Aesthetics a person who knows more about film, criticism and theory than I will if I live to be 100 and who really loves movies, posted a short and scathing discussion of movie reviewers based on the published reactions to “Watchman”. While six weeks ago is a century or so in blog time it is still well worth reading (as his entire blog) and can be found here.

There are many examples of sloppy thinking/writing/viewing among both the waning number of reviewers for newspapers and the explosive growth of online reviews there have been some excellent reviewers. Paul Fonoroff, when he wrote for the "South China Morning Post" was one of them. Like everyone else in daily or weekly film coverage he wrote under deadline pressure, wrote about whatever opened that week and had a specific amount of space allotted to him. His audience were the Anglophone residents of the then Crown Colony. His reviews were published in At the Hong Kong Movies: 600 Reviews from 1988 till the Handover.

While Fonoroff was very tough on screenwriters and directors it is the writers get the brunt of his scorn. Almost invariably when he doesn’t like a movie he faults the script. Fonoroff loves actors, none more than Chow Yun Fat and Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk, and he is generally at least supportive of the efforts of those in front of the camera. He knows good action scenes when he sees them and describes them well. A civil libertarian, he was very critical of movies in which the police show "a sneering attitude toward human rights" (from a review of Organized Crime and Triad Bureau) and wrote that "human rights in Hong Kong would be all but extinct if life ever imitated the 'art' of Twist in his article on that movie. It must have been a long decade for him since it seemed that there was a new "Danny Lee will beat you into submission" movie every month on the Jade screen.

His reviews were full of short and wonderfully descriptive allusions. In writing about True Love, Fonoroff mentions Sandra Ng and her "special brand of inelegance", as good description of her look and style as any I have seen. He wrote that "Robotrix looks like a Chinese Robocop invested with the spirit of Russ Meyer" and that in Point of No Return Jacky Chueng and Patrick Tam "are so unconvincing that one feels like putting out a contract on them. And I don't mean a movie contract".
With undergraduate studies in Chinese and a Master’s degree in cinema, knowledge of both Mandarin and Cantonese and long residence in Hong Kong, Fonoroff has the local lore, theoretical background and linguistic ability to cover Hong Kong movies in great depth. Most importantly he really loves the cinematic output of the former Crown Colony. This shines through in many reviews, not least in the Jade Leung vehicle Fox Hunter where he writes: "The finale set in a Guangdong department store s deftly choreographed. It’s unlike anything seen outside the Cantonese screen, as realistic as a Fred Astaire dance number and nearly as much fun."

From Fox Hunter, as is the image at the top of this post:

Another movie that Foronoff really liked (as did I) was Green Snake. He wrote that "The story outline is familiar to Chinese audiences from Singapore to Shanghai. Green Snake (Maggie Cheung) and White Snake (Joey Wong) are reptilian sisters who assume human form to seduce any hapless mortals who catch their fancy. Looking as they do like Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong, these human snakes are pretty hard to resist".

"What distinguishes Green Snake from its predecessors is both its imagination and humor. This is no museum piece rendering of a Chinese classic. The sight of the elegantly gowned Green Snake sticking out her tongue to nab a tasty fly, or her efforts to engage in the most unsnakely activity of shedding tears lightens up the proceedings considerably."

Three images from Green Snake

Natasha Richardson

Natasha Richardson has died after a head injury suffered in a skiing accident in Canada during a family holiday. This post doesn't fit with the stated purpose of this blog but she has been one of my favorite actresses since I first saw her over 20 years ago in "Gothic". Natasha Richardson has been in quite a few bad movies--I have seen many of them only because they included her, as has been the case with Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk and Cate Blanchette, two other enormously talented actresses.

There are potted biographies, family histories and obituaries all over the net so I won't bother linking any here.

May perpetual light shine upon her.

As Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire", May 19, 2005, New York Times

"The White Countess", 2005

And one more

Gillian Chung, Angelina Jolie, Rock Hudson and the uses of Thai sorcery

Hong Kong residents who visit Thailand and stray from typical tourist paths into brothels and bars are set upon and sometimes followed home by evil spirits. Or so it would seem from the movies—"The Eternal Evil of Asia" is one example of the genre. At her news conference the other day it would have been fitting if Ah Gil had summoned one of these demons to help her deal with the intrusive, vulgar and imbecilic questions from the press. The reporter who asked her whether she had to sell a condo unit in order to support her family could have gotten the same treatment as Bobby Au-Yeung Jan-Wa, ventilated with a few flourescent tubes while the one who wanted to know is she still loved Edison might look good as a a penis-head which is only one of the fates suffered by Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong when their characters crossed a powerful wizard in Thailand.

Bobby Au-Yeung Jan-Wa Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong

In the United States we have become used to the paparazzi and the celebrities they stalk and who owe at least part of their fame to the photographers they try (or seem to try) to avoid but Lindsay, Paris and other objects of the diva-starved masses have it quite easy compared to what Hong Kong celebrities must deal with, given the conservative audiences in the Special Administrative Region and their demands that popular entertainers have lives paralleling their screen images. The Hollywood studio PR systems that lasted until the 1950s are a good parallel. Rock Hudson was a manly man, Doris Day was the wholesome girl next door, Debbie Reynolds was a sweet as Tammy. No one expects that kind of organized hypocracy now (there are a different set of lies to retail to the credulous) but is seems from this western point of view that it is alive and well in Hong Kong.

Gillian Chung is returning from her year wandering in the wilderness, hoping to reignite her movie career and, to the extent possible, put the tawdry Edison Chan episode behind her. One wishes her all the success in the world, particularly given the insanity of the reaction of the Hong Kong press. A good summary of the gory details of her reception from AsianFanatics is here.
The great lengths to which celebrities go to insure their privacy was shown when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt decided that the birth their daughter Shiloh should take place in the southern African nation of Namibia. They are wealthy and not afraid to spend their wealth on privacy; have excellent international contacts and credibility due to Jolie's work with the United Nations refugee efforts (UNHCR) and complete cooperation from the Namibian government, who said foreign journalists wishing to cover the birth must have written permission from Pitt and Jolie to enter the country and obtain a work permit.

Few of the targets of celebrity-stalking journos have the money, logistic capabilty and connections that allow them to dictate immigration rules in a country of their choosing, so they wind up answering questions that shouldn't be asked. It seems as if Gillian Chung got through this ordeal relatively well, due in significant part to the unstinting support of the Tough Jeansmith clothing line. It must have been the first time in Hong Kong that an announcement for a new line of jeans by a local company drew over 100 press participants.
Here is a picture of her during the conference
And another the next morning, looking much happier at a Jeansmith store in Mongkok, surrounded by her fans
Gillian Chung is not a great actress but she had been a hard working and very professional performer, seemed to get as much from her talent as the script and director would allow and was willing to promote her projects tirelessly. She clearly had no sense of how to deal with the firestorm that the publication of her pictures with Edison Chen caused but may have done the right thing in simply disappearing for a year. It is interesting that her comeback is as a spokesperson for a clothing line. While Jeansmith got more ink and airtime in one day than they usually get in a year (or ten years) their executives still had to be as sure as they could that having Ah Gil as the face of their brand would work in their favor. I hope they are right and that she is able to begin working and once again make her fans happy.