Film

Rating
(out of 4 stars)

Comments

Step into Liquid (2003)

Yo, dude, I got the stoke. Surfers as talking heads are not a good idea, but footage of them riding big waves is awesome. Laird Hamilton and buddies invented some crazy contraption called the foil board. It's sick!

A Hollywood movie went out into the world, traveled to Korea, got assimilated and regurgitated, and now it returns to our shores as this. The studios know it and advertise it as the Korean Speed. It also "borrows" a score straight from Hans Zimmer's work for The Rock, and the main actor looks like Chow Yun Fat light. It's discouraging to see Korean cinema paying homage to American action flicks--is this what we've spawned?

On the other hand, this movie composite of so many action movies we've seen before is fascinating in its skewed familiarity, like listening to E.T. after he learned to speak English from watching television. It's not terrible; the production values are high. I think of it as top notch karaoke, like American Idol. In the proper context, it's impressive.

This little ditty about Jack and Diane works as a broad comedy. Not particularly profound, but Nicholson and Keaton are a joy to watch on screen.

The commentary by Jack is a hoot.

The early third of this movie fails to set up the characters and situation with any adequate depth, dampening the impact of the payoff that comes later. Why does Stephen Glass make up all these stories (including those he wrote for his first editor Michael Kelly)? Why do the other editors despise Chuck Lane? Is there a director's cut of this movie that solves these gaping problems?

Fortunately, the payoff itself is such a spectacular automobile crash of human denial that the schadenfreude itself leaves the viewer with a pleasing buzz, like that from a cheap red wine. When Hayden Christensen (Glass) and Peter Sarsgaard (Lane) finally come to a boil, a movie that was to that point undercooked suddenly achieves a nice, golden crisp.

Two plotlines meet in an empty dance hall. One is about an assassin played by Robert Duvall who is sent to Argentina on one last hit. The other is about how, while in Buenos Aires, this assassin takes tango lessons from a beautiful young dancer named Manuela (played by Duvall's real-life girlfriend Luciana Pedraza). They try and dance together, but neither is sure who's supposed to lead, so they stagger around clumsily, stepping on each other's toes.

Duvall is clearly entranced by the tango and by Pedraza--he should have stepped in and kicked out the assassin plotline and simply asked for a dance with Pedraza. She's not a professional actor, and yet her uncomplicated dialogue and acting provide the most natural and beguiling material that this movie needs more of.

The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, and now this. The Coen brothers are on some sort of genre homage kick, but it's a waste of their talent. The thick layers of genre dressings are burying their unique genius.

Films like Raising Arizona and Fargo and The Big Lebowski accustomed us to expect off-beat comic rhythms. When we're presented with the conventional comic timing of The Ladykillers, it's shocking in its banality. I half expected to hear the old drum beat after each punchline (ba-doom-boom, <cymbal crash>).

Some kind of brilliant! 

Freddy laments at the start of the movie that he no longer holds sway over the youths on Elm Street because they've forgotten about him. Watching this silliness, I could see why. He's lost his claws and become a crowd-pleaser. Listening to him reading hammy lines is like watching a formerly fearsome grizzly sitting back and begging for treats like some circus animal.

Fans of both original series may enjoy exorcising their childhood demons by watching this movie and laughing at the thought of ever having been haunted by these two.

Perhaps it's only once politicians are out of the cauldron of Washington D.C. that they can speak honestly. An honest politician may be the most intriguing species of honest man if only because we're curious to see what's under that shell which calcified over dozens of years in office?

I wrote before that it would be either glorious or gloriously bad.

It was the latter. In the beginning was an idea: hey, wouldn't it be funny if Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson played Starsky and Hutch? Around that single wall an entire flimsy house of unfunny gags was erected.

The concept seems to fit these times: corporations are able to subvert the law by capitalizing on the services of jury-riggers like Gene Hackman who use surveillance and investigation to both predict and control each juror's vote. Gun manufacturers, sued by the widow of a lawyer gunned down by an office psycho, call on Hackman to assist their attorney. Little do they realize that Rachel Weisz and John Cusack are also working the jury from the other side. In the end, if the good guys triumph (yes, this is a liberal Hollywood movie so the gun mfrs are clearly the black hats), we're perhaps left with the message that even good guys have to play dirty to win. A depressing but cutting message.

Instead, the movie ends by telling us the jury arrived at their verdict purely of their own free will. Yet when the jury deliberation scene ends, one has no idea how John Cusack will turn one of the other jurors, a former military leader, to his side. None of the other jurors offer any interesting insights on the case except to shout phrases like "That's bulls***!" The entire scene both undermines one's faith in the legal system and fails to convince us that the jurors did any thinking of their own. And what of all the cases beyond this one? Hackman and his cohort show no signs of disappearing at movie's end, casting a pall over the supposed happy ending.

Another problem is that because the audience is privy to the behind-the-scenes machinations, the usually dramatic courtroom speeches and cross-examinations are stripped of all import. Dustin Hoffman rants and raves and we wonder why he's wasting his breath.

Grisham adaptations are surprisingly slick, though. For someone whose books are routinely dismissed as schlock, Grisham makes sure to deliver the type of material that's easily transformed into glitzy Hollywood schlock. Just defrost and microwave.

Director Jim Sheridan taps his personal experiences to extract the spirit of the American immigrant, the courage and perseverance it takes to bring your family to a foreign land with just the change in your pocket. That he pours this spirit into an oddly innocuous New York slum of an apartment (the immigrant family of the movie has as its support cocoon a network of panhandlers, drug dealers, AIDS patients, and waitresses) is forgivable. Nostalgia can reflect even tragedy as something glorious.

At such close quarters and in such heavy doses, immigrant spirit can leave one drunk with tears and laughter. I would have preferred some room for the the whole mix to breathe and to see more of NYC and America itself, mostly rendered here as a few long shots of the Manhattan skyline. Sheridan stays locked in tightly to his actors. It's truly an ensemble of five that, more than the setting or the script, that carry the entire movie. But when the acting is so natural and sublime, especially by child actors and real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger, the emotions all go down smooth, leaving a pleasant warmth inside.

Mountain climbing has always struck me as one of the craziest and purest manifestations of human courage, ambition, and arrogance. This quasi-documentary (in this past year, with movies like American Splendor and this one, we've developed the need for a new term for documentaries that mix fiction and non-fiction in equal doses) shows us just how pure the sport distills these human traits.

In 1985, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, two bold twenty-something climbers, attempted to become the first climbers to summit the West Face of the Siula Grande mountain in the Andes in Peru. They made it up fine, but on the way down, disaster struck, and the two would be forced to make decisions that perhaps neither was ready for.

The mixture of interview footage with Simpson and Yates, mixed with the dramatization of the events by actors and a film crew in the Andes, is partially successful. The real-life Simpson and Yates dominate the emotional drama as the actors speak little and focus on acting out the climbing itself. The effect is similar to the emotional displacement one experiences while watching re-enactments of crimes on Unsolved Mysteries, though the actors here are put through much greater peril. The movie also strays into some interpretive stylistic affectations at the end which seem amateurish; it's most effective when it hews to the unobtrusive documentary style.

The movie doesn't cover delve into the controversy around Yates fateful decision, nor does it offer an epilogue on the friendship. Such an incredible story begs for such exposition, some of which can be found in the bestselling book by Simpson.

Andrew Jarecki set out to make a documentary about birthday clowns, and he ended up making Capturing the Friedmans, which is like setting out to find the next island over and discovering America. During Thanksgiving 1987, police raid the home of the Long Island family the Friedmans and discover a stash of child pornography belonging to the father, Arnold. Soon both Arnold and his 18 year old middle son Jesse are arrested on charges of child molestation during computer classes given at the Friedman home by Arnold, a high school science teacher. But Jarecki discovers a remarkable hidden treasure of additional evidence: oldest son David, the birthday clown, videotaped almost all of the key events during this tumultuous period in their lives, even family arguments.

The documentary covers so much ground: the innocence of young love, the dissolution of a family and marriage, the fallibility of the legal system, a community's deep repulsion of child molestation, real or imagined, and more. Yet even with all this footage, we are left uncertain of the truth. The camera records the reverberations of the alleged events pulsing out in every direction, tearing apart this family, and we are left wondering how the courts could dole out justice with such certainty.

A fictional movie, yet it feels like a documentary: its plot is held so lightly in the hand it seems to slip through one's hands like sand, yet by movie's end we have a panoramic understanding of life in Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. On the other hand, the movie's dialogue and editing make less of an attempt at assembling into a linear plot or tracing a discernible dramatic path than even the roughest of documentaries. The movie feels like a multi-layered composition, dozens of stories overlapping, criss-crossing, starting and ending mid-stream.

Most of the dancing is beautiful, filmed in a gauzy haze, and the sounds of the fabric and human bodies as they slide and bounce against the stage are a feast for the ears. Malcom McDowell is humorous as the company director, and Neve Campbell is convincing as one of the star dancers. The most organic movie one will see in years; those who go to the theater to be manipulated may be disappointed.

Feels like an old-school Disney feel-good story. In other words, it's fairly conservative in characterizations and plotting, hinting at the dark sides of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team's success but retreating from all of them. The in-game shots are disappointing; the camera seems trapped between the players, without enough distance to discern overall patterns, and the effect is claustrophobic.

It's difficult, in the end, to completely mishandle such a ready-made fairy tale. The movie attempts at giving the event an integral place in history at the time, showing montages of clips from the Cold War, but the movie is most convincing when it

In this animated adventure, a young European boy, groomed to compete in the Tour de France by his grandmother(?), is kidnapped and brought across the ocean to a fictional town called Belleville, clearly a stand-in for New York City.

All the strengths and weaknesses of caricature. On the one hand, the exaggerated details amuse: the cleft that cyclists have in their calves, contrasted against their emaciated upper bodies; the gargantuan, overweight American; the broad shouldered mafia henchman. On the other hand, none of the characterizations go much beyond hyperbolic physical details or colorful mannerisms. The unique animation style and music will get your toes tapping, but this movie can't match up to your average episode of The Simpsons for cleverness and bite.

A great disappointment. A movie about a father (on his deathbed he's played by Albert Finney and in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) who tells nothing but tall tales, over and over again, and the son (Billy Crudup) who wants the truth. The real tall tale is the thought that a Tim Burton movie could nearly put me to sleep with it's bland fantasies. Burton usually tickles with his wacky but unmistakeably sensibility and style, that of the drama club recluse who also happens to enjoy dissecting animals in biology class. Here his vision seems wrapped in gauze. Even the Danny Elfman score is flat, listless.

It's an interesting exercise, to try and imagine what inspired Vermeer's famous painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Interesting, but not altogether successful. Scarlett Johansson plays Griet, the maid who inspires the painting, and Colin Firth plays Vermeer. Johansson proves up to the task of a mostly silent part, subtly conveying through her face and body language what most young actresses of her generation would pull muscles attempting. The scenes in which she and Firth work together in his studio are enjoyable unions of kindred artistic sensibilities. Johansson and Firth are well-suited to portraying such taciturn longing as both of them smolder below the surface. A shot of their two faces under a piece of cloth as they peer into a camera obscura is beautifully lit and framed.

But, just as our historical knowledge of the motivation for this painting is thin, so is the movie's plot. Around the idea of the relationship between Griet and Vermeer, the screenplay has added unconvincing period melodrama that in turn inspires some unpleasant overacting. Tom Wilkinson's character is especially guilty, stopping just short of donning a handlebar mustache. Oh wait, he does don a handlebar mustache.

Gorgeous score by Alexandre Desplat.

The most exhilarating experience I've had in a movie theater in ages. I've spent so many hours watching and rewatching the previous two chapters, so the emotional payoffs of the third were that much more rewarding. It's an awesome visual spectacle as well. With the books and the worldwide legions of fans of this tale, it's difficult to imagine another fantasy epic surpassing this one for many, many decades.

The phrase "working your heart out" applies here. Jackson and everyone involved worked their heart out, and it landed on the screen for all to see.

In this movie, Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is granted the powers of God, and all he can think of doing with them is to advance his own career at a local television news station. Step back through the movie screen and what you have is a director who had the idea to make a movie about a normal guy granted the powers of God, except the normal guy would be played by Jim Carrey, his girlfriend by Jennifer Anistron, and God by Morgan Freeman, and yet all the director could do was to make this silly Groundhog Day-style parable.

To capitalize on Jim Carrey, you have to set him free. Here, he's asked to simply rehash the same physical gags he can do in his sleep in the service of a childish morality tale.

Unfortunately for a movie that is supposed to be unflinching in its depiction of reality, the director, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, flinched. Instead of showing us a story in a straightforward, linear chronology, he throws bits and pieces of a story at us from all over the timeline. It's a stylistic mistake that subtracts more than it adds, robbing the story of narrative momentum. I felt like I was picking up shards of glass from an explosion, trying to piece them together. Unfortunately, long after enough pieces had been assembled to understand the storyline, I still had to sit and watch as the final pieces were put into place.

I often hear Iñarritu praised as a gritty realist, but while he clearly hasn't been polluted by Hollywood groupthink, he is hardly a realist. His bold stylistic choices, from his shaky handheld shots to the grainy film stock to the sickly color palettes to the extreme closeups, paired with his unbelievable storylines, mark him as anything but a realist. Some of the shards stand alone as absorbing vignettes, but Iñarritu's fever rubs off on Naomi Watts who's forced into intense but overwrought hysterics. Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn create complex, nuanced characters, but they drown in a tragedy that is audio amplified to the point of static and feedback.

Edward Zwick plots and directs in cinematic shorthand, and he knows it well. When he's directing stories of an almost mythological nature, like Legends of the Fall, his broad brushstrokes feel appropriately impressionistic. Zwick's The Last Samurai, however, feels blurry. The story's animating forces are Tom Cruise's gradual conversion to the samurai way of life and the clash between that way of life and the modernizing Western forces invading Japan, but neither is described in enough detail. It doesn't help that the enemies are cartoonishly cowardly, evil, and weak as compared to the noble samurai.

The counterbalance, though, are the wonderful performances of the Samurai villagers, from Ken Watanabe as the samurai Katsumoto to Hiroyuki Sanada as Ujio; both have wonderfully stern faces. Hans Zimmer delivers his usual driving martial themes to complement the immaculate cinematography of John Toll (ah! New Zealand!), both in the service of straightforward but easy-to-follow battle scenes. An early sneak attack on the samurai, with ninja-like assassins swarming the village, left the audience clapping with joy. I never once believed it was Japan--it looked like a movie set--but Zwick has never been a realist, and some of my favorite movies like The Untouchables resemble our collective dream of what a certain era must have been like.

Tom Cruise doesn't ever seem to inhabit a character; you can feel his effort and concentration and intensity in every scene, but it feels like the energy of professional movie star Tom Cruise and not that particular character. But he's worked with nearly all the great directors going today, and I suspect it's not just his professionalism. Directors can drape any action plot over Cruise, and his sheer intensity seems to lend it credibility and energy.

The trailer portended that this would be a romantic comedy to end all romantic comedies, from the reigning king of the genre, Richard Curtis. Instead, it is the romantic comedy that is all romantic comedies; all that is missing is Julia Roberts. Nearly every stock romantic comedy premise is here, crammed into one movie. It's as if Curtis couldn't decide which story to direct next, so he decided to do all of them in abbreviated form. There's unrequited love, unexpected love, cheating hearts, love triangles, puppy love, rebound romances for lonely divorcees, presidential romances, buddy sentiment, and so on.

I'm not a romantic comedy fan, not because I'm a curmudgeon, but because most instances of the genre offer such ridiculous fantasies that teach nothing. Love Actually is guilty of such occasional silliness (it opens with a comment from Hugh Grant's British Prime Minister about Sept. 11 that needed to be cut), but much of it won me over (I'm not just referring to the presence of the dreamy Keira Knightley). The cast is first-rate, and I enjoyed watching them work, from Hugh Grant's usual rakish charmer to Colin Firth's self-doubting romantic. And not all the stories end happily--too much sugar will ruin even the richest of desserts.

Unlike, say, Tom Cruise or Sean Penn, Russell Crowe's intensity seems to be channelled entirely towards the recreation of the character he's playing. His Captain Jack Aubrey is a convincingly salty commander. I have not read the O'Brian books, so I cannot review the movie from the perspective of its faithfulness to its source material. But on its own, Peter Weir's movie is an immensely satisfying sea adventure and character study. Paul Bettany and Max Pirkis join Crowe in giving a triangle of thrillingly nuanced performances.

Many I've spoken to have said the movie felt slow. I can't understand what they were hoping for! The shots of the ship on the ocean are gorgeous (the CGI shots are near seamless), the tension among the ship's crew palpable, and by movie's end, you'll both understand what hardships the men on board had to endure and wish you had been there to serve under Captain Jack. Crowe pronounces to his men "This ship is England" and by movie's end you understand him.

Just a short while into this movie, I felt that something wasn't right. And then it dawned on me. This comedy was playing its premise (Will Ferrell is a human raised as one of Santa's elves) straight, as sincere a Christmas movie as It's a Wonderful Life, or Miracle on 34th St. In this day and age of wink-wink satire, that feels strange, especially when starring Will Ferrell. Certainly, he's very good at committing to his roles, and as always he never breaks form in this movie: he's an elf from start to end. The cast around Ferrell also stays in character throughout, showing remarkable restraint.

But, unlike classic Christmas movies, this one didn't contain any authentic revelations of where the Christmas spirit is wanting. Sure, perhaps NYC could use some good cheer after the past two years, but the New Yorkers in the movie don't seem particularly cynical. And James Caan's conversion from cold-hearted businessman to devoted family man is too trite to be moving. Take those stop-action Rudolph Christmas specials as an example. Now those were Christmas magic. A few of the inhabitants from those TV specials, like Frosty the snowman, make an appearance in Elf, and I immediately wanted to rent those on DVD to get me in the mood for Xmas.

The Matrix Reloaded stretched the entire Matrix metaphor to its limits, and this concluding chapter, while it concludes all the action, leaves all sorts of metaphorical threads dangling. Those devoting their lives to the philosophical interpretation of the Matrix mythology will need to do most of the work on this one. The production values of the battle scenes are first-rate. After the concluding fight, can kung-fu fighting on screen really go any higher? Still, CGI has improved to the point where even the craziest fight scenes fail to inspire the awe they once did. And all the CGI in the world won't add 2nd and 3rd dimensions to the characters, all of whom display rigid personalities and speech patterns.

If the Wachowski brothers had simply stopped after The Matrix, it could have stood alone just fine. But they built two giant skyscrapers next to it, each costing more and utilizing the latest in technologies and materials, but both lack the charm and inspiration of the original, and the neighborhood now looks overcrowded. I look forward, though, to the next project from the Wachowskis. They are talented and ambitious, and with a blank page to work off of and no preconceived notions, they can let their imaginations roam free again.

Anyone who has read The Hot Zone or other accounts of real-life battles with lethal viruses like Ebola will realize that the truth in such cases is much more horrifying than the fictional scenario in this movie. And a movie which seems to start as an interesting exploration of how humans behave under such condensed Darwinian pressures ends up, disappointingly, as simply another instance of the good guys getting off the island. Even in Survivor the contestants lose even if they win.

But some fun is had with conceits like the 20 seconds one has to act before the virus turns infected victims into rabid zombies. The DVD's alternate endings, especially the one never filmed, turn out to be more interesting than the one that made it into theaters.

More entertaining than a recent show he gave is this documentary following Jerry Seinfeld in his return to stand-up after his long and successful TV run. Exposes the neurotic tension and courage and insecurities that lie behind the desire to get on stage and try to make others laugh. A whole fraternity of guest stars, from Bill Cosby to Chris Rock to Colin Quinn to Garry Shandling chat with Jerry and nod knowingly at both why he's returning to the stage (after all, he's got more money in the bank than he'll ever be able to spend) and why such a big name is sweating performances in front of tiny crowds in dark comedy clubs across the country.

Shot on a pair of camcorders, the editing is often distracting and the soundtrack of lounge songs often obscures the dialogue, but it's a faithful documentary of this very special art form. Helped explain to me why Seinfeld went with so much old or repeat material in his recent performance, and he comes off looking like a relative saint as compared to the unknown, insecure, arrogant, and neurotic comedian Orny Adams to whom he's contrasted throughout.

I can confirm what everyone has said--this film is shot in one uninterrupted 96 minute take, wandering through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, one that is inhabited by ghosts from Russia's history. Give that cameraman a bonus and an appointment with a chiropractor. Reminded me in ways of the magical control over the viewer's perspective exerted by the motorized seats in Disney's Haunted Mansion, but the lack of physical bodily motion enhances the dream-like feel. I was in a trance for most of it, aided by the somewhat mumbled conversation between the voice-over narrator (the voice of the director, Alexander Sokurov?) and the French Marquis the camera follows through the museum. At movie's end, after a stunning ball in the grand ballroom, I felt a great sadness, and I wasn't even entirely sure why; the movie had worked on me on subconscious levels.

Likely to be appreciated even more by greater Russophiles than myself--I had to read some articles and watch certain portions over to understand who certain historical characters were, undermining the impact of letting the movie wash over me in an uninterrupted flow. Perhaps this problem was confined to simply the DVD, but at times I could not tell who was speaking. The spacing and direction of the dialogue was murky. It adds to the dream-like feel but also confused some of the ideas being conveyed.

Stylistically dazzling, a faithful homage to the bloody martial arts revenge flicks I saw growing up. The anime sequence is a perfect stylistic choice, the set design is gorgeous, the soundtrack toe-tappingly good, and Go-Go Yubari a hilarious synthesization of all that's weird and insane about Japanese culture.

Still, Tarantino threatens with this picture to become a belletrist of a moviemaker. While he captures pitch-perfect the kinetic rage of martial arts revenge flicks, like those of the Shaw Brothers, those movies always worked best as cult showpieces, off on the fringes. Kill Bill Vol. 1 feels like Tarantino's entire self-referential movie universe, informed by his own influences from among his encyclopic catalog of movie plots and images and esoteria, exploded onto 35 millimeter film. It looks like so much insect debris on the windshield, but damn if it isn't colorful.

Sean Penn remains one of the most fascinating American actors going today, and his performance will burn a hole in your head. The entire cast dazzles, from a haunted Tim Robbins to a frightened Marcia Gay Harden to a steely Laura Linney (who gives a speech in the tradition of wives who stand by their men through all their sins, the last being Amanda Peet in Changing Lanes).

The movie has the dramatic intensity of a play, thanks in part to the still and unflinching gaze of Clint Eastwood's camera (he's at his best when he doesn't resort to the obviously lyrical moments, like the name half-inscripted into the cement, or the overhead shot of Sean Penn raging in grief at his daughter's murder, or the parade at movie's end). The gray hues evoke the somber mood of both the main characters and the Boston neighborhood they're trapped in. Mystic River finds, in this American working class milieu, a malaise that infects one generation after another. It doesn't just arise from the single incident at the beginning of the movie but seems to have infected the entire neighborhood.

I could stare at Charlize Theron for days and not get tired of the view. Just stunningly beautiful.

Caper flicks may be one of the last types of the action genre fun enough to watch because, despite knowing the outcome, you're curious to see how they pull it off. This is one of the better examples of that genre because it grins the whole way. Hot cars (Aston Martin's and BMW Mini Coopers; this is the most expensive of the BMWFilms), Venice, Charlize Theron, gold bricks, Armani suits, and sexy music. The only unpleasant image in this movie is Ed Norton's hideous mustache.

Side note: The last time Donald Sutherland was in Venice was in Don't Look Now, which, despite a naked tussle involving Julie Christie, gave me nightmares for a long time. This was a much more pleasant visit.

Strange goulash of moods, from farce to teen comedy to drama. Con and caper movies usually result in one of two resolutions. Everyone involved loses in the end, even if they pull off the con, because we realize that all of life is a con (House of Games). Or, in the conventional happy ending, the good con artists pull one over on the bad guys and slip away happily ever after (Ocean's Eleven, The Sting). Matchstick Men flirts with the former and then chickens out with a happy ending that it never earns and that the audience doesn't feel like participating in. Or is the point that Nicolas Cage's character doesn't care if it was all a game--he'd rather go back to his delusions because they cured him of his obsessive compulsive disorder?

Alison Lohman is quite good. Good year for teen actresses with Lohman, Evan Rachel Wood from Thirteen, and Scarlet Johansson from Lost in Translation killing it on the big screen. Nicolas Cage does his crazy man routine, which seems fun in measured doses and becomes tiresome when stretched out, like the friend who doesn't know when to cut off some impression at a cocktail party because he's cracking himself up so much. And then he spills wine all over the carpet and everyone is mortified.

Hey, turns out Hong Kong can still crank out fun action like nobody's business. It's not just that the choreography is top notch (director Cory Yuen is another in a long line of HK industry vets tapped by Hollywood for action choreography), but HK action movies are unabashedly unironic. An American audience might laugh derisively at the goofy slapstick and tragicomic sentimentality, but it's more likely they'll be dazzled by Shu Qi in her gorgeous designer white pantsuit and designer sunglasses, blowing away bodyguards while hanging upside down from the ceiling, suspended by a retractable spike emerging from one of her stiletto heels.

Leaving aside the bad subtitles (English subtitlers of Asian movies are like airport security screening personnel pre 9/11; underpaid and ineffective), you'll laugh through most of this movie from pleasure.