China Film Journal

Reading the Wikipedia article on Connected makes us laugh: it says that director Benny Chan tried to make the characters more “real and believable” than the Hollywood film Cellular, of which it is a remake.

Though we haven’t seen the original, if Connected is “real and believable” than Star Wars might also be loosely based on a real story. Barbie Hsu (widely known as Big S) plays Grace Wong, a single mother who gets kidnapped, along with her school-age daughter, on account of something her brother did. The baddie is played by Chinese actor Lou Ye, and the hero by Nicholas Koo. The movie unfolds when Grace is able to patch together an old phone in the place where she is being held and make a call to Koo, who must now decide if he ought to save a stranger in distress.

There are some half decent action scenes and good car chases, and the whole thing is not meant to be realistic, but even so, there is just something amateurish in the way the movie was crafted. Nick Cheung’s performance as the good cop that smells something fishy in all these proceedings hits the right notes, but in the end it is only Koo’s performance that manages to (barely) rise above mediocrity.

Technorati Tags: connected, benny chan, loius koo, barbie hsu

Well, Black Daddy probably won’t end up being the final English title, as it was based on the Chinese (黑爸爸), of which it is a literal translation. However, they’ve changed the Chinese title to (一个好爸爸), which means “a good father.” The movie is about a mobster/triad young man who has an affair with a young lawyer (Rene Liu/刘若英), the product of which is, as in most cases, a young human being. Koo’s character then attempts to hide his past and present dealings from his daughter, while attempting to go straight. However — there’s always a however — shit happens and he has to confront his triad past, etc., etc. The humanized and reformed triad man has become a popular character type in Hong Kong cinema of late. You can click on the image link below to find some pictures from the movie. The film was executive produced by Jackie Chan and will be released (in Hong Kong first?) on April 10.

We learned about this movie from the Crunchy Roll Blog, which we recommend as a place to find stuff on Asian cinema and entertainment, anime, stuff like that.

:: 一个好爸爸 :: via kwout