PingMag somehow found themselves invited to the opening ceremony of the Hong Kong Film Festival in Tokyo yesterday. As a huge fan of HK Cinema, I was particularly excited about this event. The opening ceremony was at the glittering Roppongi Hills business and entertainment complex, whilst the festival itself will be taking place at locations in Ikebukuro and Kourakuen. The festival will be showing a selection of Hong Kong films over the coming weeks, from fast-paced movies about the HK mafia, to epic, period Kung Fu flicks, to love stories and beyond.
The opening ceremony of the event took the form of a celebrity ribbon-cutting ceremony, attended by some Hong Kong celebs and various diplomatic-types from both Hong Kong and Japan (including Japan’s former Prime Minister, Hata Tsutomu). Amongst the celebs in tow was the perma-smiling Cecilia Cheung (one of the young darlings of the HK media scene, whose face crops up in every movie and every make-up commercial ever to grace HK screens), Wong Jing (a very famous director who made his name with the cult classic “God of Gamblers”) and relative newcomer Ivan Wang, a curiously bilingual Cantonese/Japanese singer who is making his debut album in two parts, one in Japan and one in Hong Kong and is the singer for the Cantonese version of the theme song from the popular Korean movie “April Snow” (Japanese title: shigatsu no yuki).
After the formalities, the lights dimmed and we watched the first movie of the film festival.
The Hong Kong movie scene is unique in that it churns out about five hundred movies a day. Of course I’m exaggerating and the number is probably more in the 400s, but Hong Kong has this deserved reputation of having a completely hyper-active movie industry. In the rare case that Hong Kong creates a movie that isn’t just another rip off of a successful movie that preceded it, or isn’t just a thin platform to launch some new money-making media idol, Hong Kong can create brilliant movies. Unorthodox directors such as Wong Kar Wai (Chungking Express, In The Mood For Love) or the hilarious comic genius of Stephen Chow (God of Cooking, Shaolin Soccer) are truly gems in Hong Kong’s movie industry crown, as are versatile acting veterans such as Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau.
It’s a shame then, that for some reason the opening ceremony of the film festival was celebrated with a showing of a film from the opposite end of the scale…
We were treated to Wong Jing’s 2003 film “Colour of the Truth” (Japanese title: Black City). A run-of-the-mill gangster / police flick, of which the HK movie industry has so many of it doesn’t know what to do with them apart from replace character names and actors and hope nobody realises that the story is exactly the same as the last one. A solid crime thriller in it’s own right but when stacked up against something like the adrenalin-fueled roller-coaster ride of double-crossing that was 2002’s “Infernal Affairs” (of which “Colour of the Truth” seemed to borrow from liberally) it rated quite lowly.
Why we were subjected to that as our first taste of HK film for the festival, I have no idea - especially considering that the rest of the line-up for the month looks quite promising, with the aforementioned “Infernal Affairs” getting a showing, as well as Wong Kar Wai’s “2046” (featuring Japanese pop idol Kimura Takuya in a rare display of real acting) and the Bruce Lee classic “Way of the Dragon”.
The schedule for the film showings is online here. All movies will probably be shown in the English-unfriendly combination of original Cantonese (or Mandarin) soundtrack and Japanese subtitles. Whee! My Startled Tiger beats your Wandering Crab.
Written by Jon
Opening Ceremony
Cecilia Cheung speaks
Cutting the ribbon
Right: former Prime Minister, Hata Tsutomu
Ivan Wang and Leo Koo
Diplomat-type person and Cecilia Cheung
"It's done. Where's the pub"
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