*warning: potential spoilers'
A number of intriguing disparate elements:
-the San Francisco location, beautifully shot and actually moving beyond the tired Golden Gate Bridge/Rice-a-Roni tourists' view of the city and utilizing some unique neighborhoods like the Castro and the Mission.
-Director Andrew Lau, better known for action movies like `The Storm Riders' branching into romantic comedy.
-Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai, promising that lightning might strike twice after `Comrades'.
Sadly, the result is far, far less than the sum of its (potential) parts. The film's concessions to its setting and pre-Millennial era consist of utilizing San Francisco's image as a dot-com haven and the unsettled lives of its protagonists in this society results in something laughably half-baked; the `Nirvana' site proposed by Leon Lai's dot-comer is ludicrous but a more problematic issue is Mike's character as presented in the script and acting. Mike's (Lai) character is woefully underdeveloped and seems a blank slate, a Rorschach man-boy with vague economic prospects and plastic, generic aspirations. It's worse than presenting him as an `everyman'; he has no personality as written and Lai, as usual, brings little to the table as far as making Mike a flesh-and-blood cinematic creation. He barely reacts to his surroundings or changes facial expression throughout the hour-and-forty minute running time and the film's brutally myopic focus on his male protagonist only goes to show the filmmakers projecting their own male narcissism of the dullest kind.
Would that the film stayed, or at least conceded, some more focus to Maggie Cheung. For the first thirty minutes, her side of the drama actually shows some promise; a restless, struggling (we can overlook the ridiculously plush 2-story house she rents on a single-mother cab-driver's salary.in San Francisco's current economic ruthlessness, a millionaire would be hard-pressed to afford such abodes in even newly gentrified neighborhoods in SF) and questioning woman flirting with promiscuity, wanting more (of what? She doesn't seem to know and we're intrigued to find out) than the boundaries of her life. It's all due to Maggie. She makes the drama worth watching; she IS the drama, as the thin script and herky-jerky plot/character development would leave lesser actors in the lurch and audiences asleep by the end of the first act. Fear, defiance, ambivalence, joy, panic, pain, tranquility, emotional overdrive dance across her face effortlessly---it's no accident she evoked the spirit of silent actors so evanescently in `Irma Vep'. Without words or belabored emoting, Cheung lets the audience into the emotional life of a cinematic being like a funhouse of hidden, wonderfully discovered dimensions. The script woefully, colossally lets her down by the middle as she winds up playing martyr and displaced maternal figure to Lai's tiresome Peter Pan stunted -development dweeb (yes, he's cute and will probably make lots of dough, but would someone like her give this loser more than two minutes after the conversation starts?).
More minuses: the film's homophobic slant, strange for a film set in San Francisco. Richard Ng's self-deprecating gay landlord character is an insult, even as a `mother' substitute for Mike who had essentially raised him from childhood, it's necessary for him to emphasize in a dialogue scene with Maggie his inadequacy in teaching Mike how to be a `real' man. It's one thing to make gay characters the butt of jokes (what else would you expect from producer Wong Jing's Neanderthalic sensibility) but it's far more horrid, embarrassing and insulting when a film purports to give you sympathetic gay characters and then railroads them into self-flagellation over their `deviancy' no matter how benignly presented. It's not the film's worse problem---I won't even go into the ludicrous climax, an unbelievable, corny and trite act of self-redemption by our dot-com hero---but it's symptomatic of the film's regressive attitude towards gender roles and a cheap, senselessly one-dimensional attitude towards characters who don't fall within the hetero man/boy paradigm.
Maggie, wonderful as she is, doesn't quite escape. Still worth seeing for her---keep your eyes on Maggie and your expectations very, very, very low.
A number of intriguing disparate elements:
-the San Francisco location, beautifully shot and actually moving beyond the tired Golden Gate Bridge/Rice-a-Roni tourists' view of the city and utilizing some unique neighborhoods like the Castro and the Mission.
-Director Andrew Lau, better known for action movies like `The Storm Riders' branching into romantic comedy.
-Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai, promising that lightning might strike twice after `Comrades'.
Sadly, the result is far, far less than the sum of its (potential) parts. The film's concessions to its setting and pre-Millennial era consist of utilizing San Francisco's image as a dot-com haven and the unsettled lives of its protagonists in this society results in something laughably half-baked; the `Nirvana' site proposed by Leon Lai's dot-comer is ludicrous but a more problematic issue is Mike's character as presented in the script and acting. Mike's (Lai) character is woefully underdeveloped and seems a blank slate, a Rorschach man-boy with vague economic prospects and plastic, generic aspirations. It's worse than presenting him as an `everyman'; he has no personality as written and Lai, as usual, brings little to the table as far as making Mike a flesh-and-blood cinematic creation. He barely reacts to his surroundings or changes facial expression throughout the hour-and-forty minute running time and the film's brutally myopic focus on his male protagonist only goes to show the filmmakers projecting their own male narcissism of the dullest kind.
Would that the film stayed, or at least conceded, some more focus to Maggie Cheung. For the first thirty minutes, her side of the drama actually shows some promise; a restless, struggling (we can overlook the ridiculously plush 2-story house she rents on a single-mother cab-driver's salary.in San Francisco's current economic ruthlessness, a millionaire would be hard-pressed to afford such abodes in even newly gentrified neighborhoods in SF) and questioning woman flirting with promiscuity, wanting more (of what? She doesn't seem to know and we're intrigued to find out) than the boundaries of her life. It's all due to Maggie. She makes the drama worth watching; she IS the drama, as the thin script and herky-jerky plot/character development would leave lesser actors in the lurch and audiences asleep by the end of the first act. Fear, defiance, ambivalence, joy, panic, pain, tranquility, emotional overdrive dance across her face effortlessly---it's no accident she evoked the spirit of silent actors so evanescently in `Irma Vep'. Without words or belabored emoting, Cheung lets the audience into the emotional life of a cinematic being like a funhouse of hidden, wonderfully discovered dimensions. The script woefully, colossally lets her down by the middle as she winds up playing martyr and displaced maternal figure to Lai's tiresome Peter Pan stunted -development dweeb (yes, he's cute and will probably make lots of dough, but would someone like her give this loser more than two minutes after the conversation starts?).
More minuses: the film's homophobic slant, strange for a film set in San Francisco. Richard Ng's self-deprecating gay landlord character is an insult, even as a `mother' substitute for Mike who had essentially raised him from childhood, it's necessary for him to emphasize in a dialogue scene with Maggie his inadequacy in teaching Mike how to be a `real' man. It's one thing to make gay characters the butt of jokes (what else would you expect from producer Wong Jing's Neanderthalic sensibility) but it's far more horrid, embarrassing and insulting when a film purports to give you sympathetic gay characters and then railroads them into self-flagellation over their `deviancy' no matter how benignly presented. It's not the film's worse problem---I won't even go into the ludicrous climax, an unbelievable, corny and trite act of self-redemption by our dot-com hero---but it's symptomatic of the film's regressive attitude towards gender roles and a cheap, senselessly one-dimensional attitude towards characters who don't fall within the hetero man/boy paradigm.
Maggie, wonderful as she is, doesn't quite escape. Still worth seeing for her---keep your eyes on Maggie and your expectations very, very, very low.