Five Films: Donnie Yen

One of the most common responses I have seen to Disney's new film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, apart from the ones that would involve spoiling the movie to explain, is a general shock and joy at the performance of Donnie Yen as blind Force-sensitive warrior Chirrut Imwe. For many viewers in the English-speaking world Yen is a surprising new action star: talented, athletic, handsome and funny. For viewers in the Chinese-speaking world he has been a major action star for a quarter of a century, ranked up alongside male contemporaries like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat. It has taken Yen longer to make a successful break into Hollywood - a mid-90s attempt failed when he accepted a role in the fairly ropey sequel Highlander: Endgame - but now that he is here I would not be surprised to see American studios begin lining up to offer him some high-profile roles.

Thankfully for the new fans who have first seen Yen do his action thing in Rogue One, there is now a massive back catalogue of awesome often-times over-the-top action films to check out. I have picked five that I think will likely give the new viewer a solid showcase of what Yen can do. I have been a huge fan of his work for years, and it's great to see him make such a huge impact this year.

Full Strike (2015)

Ng Kau-Sau (Josie Ho) was a champion badminton player, but her poor attitude and aggressive style saw her career shattered. Now she's overweight, depressed and working in her brother's restaurant - until a chance encounter involving a meteorite and a homeless man leads her to a run-down badminton academy run by three ex-criminals looking to make a change in their lives.

Back in 2010 I was a huge fan of Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng's kung fu sports comedy Gallants - so much so that it wound up being one of my favourite Hong Kong films of the past decade. Last year Kwok returned to the sports comedy genre with Full Strike, co-directed with Henri Wong. While it does not hit the incredible heights managed by Gallants, it is a hugely entertaining film. The cast are great, the jokes are great, and despite being a fairly stereotypical 'misfits win the championship against the odds' story it still manages to find plenty of places for originality and unexpected angles on the material.

Office (2015)

The massive Hong Kong corporation Jones & Sunn is about go public. CEO Winnie Cheung (Sylvia Chang) is set to become a major shareholder after being a mistress to Chairman Ho Chung-Ping (Chow Yun-Fat) for twenty years. At the same time Winnie has been secretly romancing one of her executives, David Wong (Eason Chan) - and he has been secretly stealing company funds to play the stock market. New recruit Lee (Wang Ziyi) arrives eager to impress, and immediately falls for fellow new employee Kat (Lang Yueting), not knowing that she is actually the Chairman's daughter. This tale of corporate intrigue and romance plays out on a stylised set the size of an aircraft hangar, is shot in 3D, and is a musical. That certainly makes it one of the stranger Hong Kong film productions of recent years.

The film is directed by Johnnie To, my personal favourite filmmaker, and of course that means I arrived at the cinema with extremely high expectations. That may have been a mistake: it is a disappointing film compared to To's best, but it admittedly still a well-staged and often inventive musical - and how many musical films do you see coming out of Hong Kong anyway?

Three (2016)

Dr Tong Qian (Zhao Wei) is an overworked neurosurgeon struggling to compose herself after a surgery goes terribly wrong. Before she can leave the hospital, the police bring in the violent gangster Shun (Wallace Chung). He has been shot in the head, but miraculously remains alive and conscious. Tong wants to operate immediately to save Shun's life. Police Inspector Chan (Louis Koo) wants to interrogate Shun first. Shun bizarrely refuses medical treatment, and instead seems set on escape - but how?

Three is the latest crime thriller from Hong Kong's masterful director Johnnie To. It is set entirely inside a hospital ward, although we hear of plot developments occurring outside throughout the film. It primarily follows three key characters - a surgeon, a criminal, and a police officer - as their lives cross over and interrelate. Everything in the film builds to a noisy, chaotic climax - but is the build-up any good, and is that climax worth the wait?

2,000 minutes

Let's say you had 2,000 minutes that you wanted to spend watching movies. That breaks down to 33 hours and 20 minutes, so you could stock up on meals and snacks and run from 8.00am to 12.40am over a weekend. What would you watch with those 2,000 minutes? I am a pretty keen fan of Asian cinema, so let's say you wanted to see some great and entertaining Asian films. You could keep things simple, I suppose, and watch the first 21 Godzilla films in a row. On the other hand you could get an in-depth understanding of a particular director, like Akira Kurosawa: 2,000 minutes would get you from his debut feature Sanshiro Sugata all the way to The Lower Depths (his 17th).

I think a little variety would be better. Under the cut are my picks, pretty much made by browsing along my DVD collection until I hit 2,000 minutes of viewing time. These are not the best Asian films ever made, and they don't really follow any kind of pattern or logic beyond them being films that have really entertained me and that I would enthusiastically recommend to others. 20 movies in all: 12 from Japan, six from Hong Kong and China, and two from South Korea. Watch them over a weekend, or watch them occasionally over the course of a year. Either way, these are 20 Asian films I would wholeheartedly recommend.

The Astrocytes: Because I'm Really Not Sorry (2012)

The Astrocytes were an independent rock band based in Hong Kong. I bought their debut CD Because I'm Really Not Sorry while in the city in 2012, but to be honest have not heard anything from them since. I suspect like most independent groups they have long since separated and gone their separate ways. Their website does not even mention this album, and its only link is to an empty Myspace page. Lead singer Helena Angwin appears to be working as a professional model these days. Guitarist Joe Ashley Cheng is apparently a professional songwriter.

Because I'm Really Not Sorry is a weirdly retro album, stylistically speaking. More than once I am reminded of the sorts of mid-1990s grunge and independent British pop-rock that I listened to as an undergraduate student. It also boasts that near-trademark stark, simple sound that typifies an independent low-budget CD release. There is not really anything original or attention-grabbing about this album, but it does have a lot of straight-up energy and heart to it. I hope the four members of the band have moved on to better and more successful things.

Running Out of Time (1999)

A robber (Andy Lau) holds a Hong Kong finance company at gunpoint, but when police detective Ho Sheung-Sang (Lau Ching-wan) the thief seems more interested in playing a game of cat and mouse than in getting away with his money. Over the next 72 hours the game progresses, with Ho always one step behind the thief while slowly piecing together the truth behind his motives.

1999 was a great year for Hong Kong director/producer Johnnie To. His production company Milkyway Image, which he founded three years earlier, had suffered a string of commercial and critical failures. In 1999 To's one-two punch of The Mission (shot in 18 days) and Running Out of Time (shot intermittently over two years) revived Milkyway's fortunes and re-established his career as one of Hong Kong's finest and most idiosyncratic feature film directors. They cemented a specific house style for Milkyway's crime flicks and thrillers, one that highlights small moments of character and embraces the absurd in among all of the plot twists and shoot-outs. Running Out of Time specifically also re-directed the career of co-star Andy Lau, then a popular but critically unappreciated star of romantic comedies and dramas. Under To's direction Lau stretched himself considerably, and earned a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor as a result.

Kick Ass Girls (2013)

Boo (Chrissie Chau) runs a Hong Kong boxing club, Kick Ass Girls, that has fallen on hard times. To improve its chances - and to capitalise on a throng of sex-obsessed scrawny nerds - she hires the voluptuous Miu (Dada Lo) to be the club's new trainer. At the same time Boo is not speaking to former best friend TT (Hidy Yu) after TT stole her boyfriend. Then in Malaysia all three get kidnapped by a criminal organisation.

This is that rare case when a review steps well beyond a critical opinion, and instead becomes a warning: you do not want to see Kick Ass Girls.

There is a good chance you would not watch it anyway. This 2013 Hong Kong comedy - and I use the word in the broadest sense possible - sank without a trace upon release, and with very good reason. It is ultimately a bit of an insult to both taste and intelligence, garishly edited and astonishingly poor in terms of story and character. To an extent it wants to be a smutty, old-fashioned "Category III" exploitation flick; the kind that used to litter Hong Kong cinemas in the early 1990s. The problem is that it also wants to be a "girl power" action-comedy about some young women operating a boxing club, and that precludes its exploitation aspects from actually showing off any kind of sex or nudity. Now I am not a fan of Hong Kong's old Cat III films, but had Kick Ass Girls at least emulated them properly I could at least respect it for sticking to its guns.

Ten Years, and Hong Kong's future tensions

Last night the independent feature film Ten Years was awarded Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, continuing that film's remarkable and unexpected success. By winning it managed to beat several big-budget studio features including The Taking of Tiger Mountain, Ip Man 3 and Port of Call. Ten Years is a portmanteau film, comprising five separate short films depicting hypothetical lives in Hong Kong in the year 2025, and is directed by Ng Ka-leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, and Kwok Zune.

Ten Years presents a dystopian future for the Chinese city, in which Mandarin has become the sole official language, gangs of teenage agitators bully shop-owners who dare to sell banned goods, and a political activist sees no means of effectively protesting mainland Chinese control other than self-immolation. The film was produced on a shoestring budget of about HK$500,000 (approximately US$65,000) and has to date grossed more than HK$6 million in local cinemas.

As a science fiction enthusiast, it pleases me to see a science fiction film win Best Film at any country's national film awards. As a fan of Hong Kong - the city, its people, and its culture - the film's enormous success and acclaim points to a rapidly-building discontent with Beijing's steady growing interference in Hong Kong's affairs.

Portland Street Blues (1998)

During the tense period leading up to the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China, one of the stand-out film franchises was Andrew Lau's massively successful Young & Dangerous. Based on the popular Teddy Boy comic books by Cowman and Dickey Yau, they chronicled the careers of a group of young Hong Kong men as they progressed through the ranks of the city's triad organisations.

So popular was the series that the first three films were rushed into cinemas in the space of three months. A fourth followed one year later, and to satisfy audience demand a spin-off was released to expand on the background of one of Young & Dangerous 4's new characters - the Mongkok-based gang leader Sister Thirteen, played by Sandra Ng.

Portland Street Blues follows Tsui Sui Sui (Ng), the daughter of a low-level triad member whose youthful scams lead her into serious trouble. They eventually lead her into a leadership role within the Hung Hing triad, and a power struggle between rival gang members.

Magic Kitchen (2004)

For a while there in the early 2000s Sammi Cheng was one of the biggest stars in Hong Kong cinema. Every year brought about another high profile romantic comedy, more often than not pairing Cheng with superstar Andy Lau. While their biggest hits seemed to be with director Johnnie To in films such as Needing You and Love on a Diet, they also co-starred in a number of other comedies including Magic Kitchen. This 2004 release was directed by Lee Chi-ngai and based on the popular novel by Hong Kong author Lam Wing-sum.

Cheng plays Yau Mo-yung, a talented chef and owner of her own private kitchen. Private kitchens are a curious Hong Kong artefact, in which independent chefs set up very small restaurants inside their own living rooms. These restaurants, which often serve outstanding food, can only accommodate a few diners at a time. Mo-yung is unlucky in love, suffering from what her mother told her was a family curse that prevents the women in their family from finding happiness. When an ex-boyfriend (Andy Lau) comes back into her life, she angsts over pursuing him again - all the while overlooked the desperate affections coming from her kitchen assistant Ho (Taiwanese pop star Jerry Yan.)

Eight Asian films coming in 2016

2016 is upon us, and that means a whole new year's worth of feature films coming out. I figured I would have a look ahead and see what is coming and what I am most interested in seeing over the next 12 months. It seemed as good a place as any to begin with Asian cinema. I don't know the release dates for a lot of these films - unlike Hollywood, countries like Hong Kong, China and Japan tend not to set their release dates in stone. At present, however, all of the films mentioned below are supposed to be in cinemas by the end of the year.

Here are the eight films coming out of Hong Kong, China and Japan that have me most excited.

Election 3

Directed by Johnnie To. Starring Andy Lau, Louis Koo, Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Anthony Wong, Nick Cheung, Sammi Cheng, You Yong, Sun Honglei and Gordon Lam.

A veritable who's-who of Johnnie To performers reunite for the long-awaited third instalment of his Election trilogy. This is, in effect, the Godfather of Hong Kong movie franchises, boasting outstanding scripts and performances. While time will tell if this third film will match the quality of the first two (released back in 2005 and 2006), past experience of To's immense talents seems to make it pretty likely that it will.

The Storm Warriors (2009)

The Storm Riders was a 1998 wuxia film directed by Andrew Lau. It was based on the hugely popular Hong Kong comic book Fung Wan by Ma Wing-shing, starred popular movie stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng and made then-ground breaking use of computer graphics to recreate the comic's thrilling fantasy elements. It was a rare Hong Kong film that actually found an international audience, and audiences back home eagerly awaited the arrival of a sequel.

I'm not sure anybody was initially expecting a sequel to take 11 years, but in 2009 a second Fung Wan film did hit the cinemas. It was the work of a different production company, had new directors Danny and Oxide Pang, but did manage to reunite Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng as the overly dramatic super-warriors Cloud and Wind.

A synopsis of the film feels a bit superfluous: it's a story about the evil Japanese general Lord Godless invading China, and Wind and Cloud teaming up with other sword-wielding warriors Ghostly Tiger, Nameless and Second Dream to defeat him. Wind turns evil, forcing Cloud to fight against him for the future of the nation.

New Dragon Gate Inn (1992)

King Hu's 1966 wuxia film Dragon Inn was a ground-breaking and hugely popular film, so it's not surprising that eventually somebody had the idea of remaking it. The task fell to the hugely successful Hong Kong film producer Tsui Hark. While Tsui was an accomplished director in his own, he handed directorial duties to Raymond Lee (The Last Conflict). Lee and Tsui assembled an all-star cast for the remake, including Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen. The resulting production, New Dragon Gate Inn, was a massive commercial hit and remains a popular cult film today.

The storyline is essentially the same as the original film. Tsao Siu-yan (Donnie Yen) is a powerful eunuch in control of China's Eastern Depot security agency. He has a rival general killed, and uses the general's children as bait to lure in the general's allies. Those allies successfully rescue the children, but are forced to take shelter at the isolated Dragon Gate Inn before they can escape across the border, When the Eastern Depot forces arrive, a complicated game of deception begins between the two forces.

Visible Secret (2001)

Peter (Eason Chan) is a hairdresser living in Hong Kong. He meets a mysterious girl with an eyepatch, June (Shu Qi), and they have a one-night stand. He subsequently meets her again, and discovers the reason she wears the patch: June sees ghosts and apparitions with her left eye. Once drawn into her supernatural world, Peter finds himself helping her solve a series of possessions linked to a traffic accident some years earlier.

When viewed strictly as a horror film, Ann Hui's Visible Secret is a disappointment. The bottom line is that it is simply not particularly frightening or creepy. The scenes of foggy back alleys, harsh downlights and moaning sound effects have been done to death in so many other films, and Hui brings little fresh to the genre to make her film stand out or break from the pack. At the same time the film is curiously watchable. There's a really nice romance at its centre between a woman with too many secrets and a young man too well-intentioned to leave her.

Golden Swallow (1968)

Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei), a talented martial artist who wields a pair of daggers, is badly injured when defending a farm from bandits. She is nursed back to health by Golden Whip (Lo Leih), and a romance begins to blossom between them. That romance is disrupted when it becomes apparent that someone is murdering thieves and gangsters across the province and framing Golden Swallow for the killings. That person is Silver Roc (Jimmy Wang), a former boyfriend of Golden Swallow's from her time in martial arts training - and the murders purely exist to attract her attention so they can be reunited.

Let's start with the enormously weird bit of that synopsis: a brooding ex-boyfriend trying to get his one true love's attention by murdering literally dozens of people to make her notice him. That's a romantic gesture that goes well beyond creepy and into fully-blown criminal insanity. While Silver Roc's behaviour is not condoned by Golden Swallow, neither she nor the film in general really treat the man's actions with the slack-jawed nervous horror that they deserve.

So what the hell are we talking about here? This is Golden Swallow, a 1968 sequel to the legendary Hong Kong wuxia movie Come Drink With Me. Martial arts star Cheng Pei-Pei reprises her role of Golden Swallow, this time finding herself at the centre of a violent love triangle. It's a Shaw Brothers production: basically if you close your eyes and imagine the most iconic and archetypal old-fashioned Hong Kong action movie that you can, you're probably right on the money.

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

Most people seem to have encountered Journey to the West in one form or another. Most Australians my age will have first encountered Wu Cheng'en's legendary Chinese novel via its Japanese TV adaptation Monkey, which the ABC broadcast on a seemingly endless look during the early 1980s. More recent audiences might have seen it adapted by Hollywood in The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), or the admittedly very loose adaptation in the popular anime Dragon Ball. The story basically follows a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage from China to India, accompanied by three supernatural creatures: a water monster, a pig monster, and the boistrous Monkey King.

Stephew Chow's 2013 film Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons is another rather loose take on Wu's novel. It seems to make two major changes: firstly, it presents itself essentially as a prequel, set prior to Xuanzang (aka Tripitaka, for English viewers) embarking on his pilgrimage; secondly, it presents his three companions Sandy, Pigsy and Monkey not as fallen immortals from heaven but as terrifying and monstrous demons in need of hunting down and taming.

Punished (2011)

Wong Ho-Chiu (Anthony Wong) is a Hong Kong property tycoon. After his wife's death he remarried a younger woman - something that his rebellious daughter Daisy (Janice Man) will not accept. Daisy lives a life of drugs and scams, stealing from her father to pay for her wayward lifestyle. When Daisy goes missing, and Wong receives a ransom demand from her kidnappers, his life begins to collapse around him as he assigns his bodyguard - a former criminal named Chor (Richie Ren) - to help get her back and punish those responsible.

Punished is a 2011 thriller from Milkyway Image, Johnnie To's celebrated production company. The film is directed by Law Wing-Cheong, whose romantic melodrama 2 Become 1 I reviewed a few days ago. Punished is its polar opposite: not merely a thriller but almost mercilessly bleak. It suffers a pronounced lack of sympathetic characters, with a protagonist who's as much a criminal as a businessman, a kidnapping victim who abuses her new stepmother, and a bodyguard whose strategy to track down a team of kidnappers involves some fairly extreme violence.

2 Become 1 (2006)

Bingo Leung (Miriam Yeung) is a marketing executive who works hard by day and then hangs out with her bitchy friends in Hong Kong's bars and nightclubs at night. She meets a guy, the attractive Vincent "V" Cheung, takes him home, things get a little hot and heavy- and then he discovers a suspicious lump on her breast.

This is a weird film. It kicks off with all of the banter and innuendo of Sex and the City: three energised professional women out to find the man of their dreams, with comical misunderstandings, a token gay friend, and a dashing love interest with a high-paying job and a sports car. Even the title seems like a cliché: 2 Become 1, clearly referring to the two separate lives of Bingo and Vincent combining in one whirlwind, comedic romance.

Nope. It's a melodrama about breast cancer, and the title refers to Bingo's inevitable mastectomy. I have to hand it to director Law Wing-Cheong: this was not a plot twist I saw coming.

Rules of the Game (1999)

David (Louis Koo) runs a small garage with the help of his friends Becknam (Edmond So), Chun (Sam Lee) and Ha (Ronald Wong). Becknam's sister Ann (Kristy Yeung) is romanced by a local triad leader named Shing (Alex Fong). When David and his friends try to intervene Chun is badly beaten and left in a vegetative state. To make matters worse, to overcome a gambling debt David, Becknam and Ha are forced to join Shing's gang. Only once they are well-established in the organisation does David's true intentions become clear, sending him on a mission of revenge to kill Shing for what happened to Chun.

Rules of the Game is one of numerous triad-based melodramas that flooded the Hong Kong film market in the wake of Young & Dangerous. They all tended to run along a similar formula, peppered with cool fashions, montage sequences and wild street brawls with young Chinese man hacking each other up with machetes and meat cleavers. Rules of the Game is no different. It's clearly produced on a lower budget than its contemporaries, and indulges in more graphic depictions of violence, but really all in all it's another duplicate triad flick that may as well have rolled off a production line.