Another Worth Watching

Dr. X posts this from Run Run Shaw's place:

"Hong Kong film is not dead. As Lao Tzu noted, stuff happens, things change. Good things end, making us sad. Bad things end, making us feel better.

"In that sense, current HK film is only a disappointment for those who cling to the memory of the golden era...an era which arguably never existed. In 1997 people told me Hong Kong had been over for a decade. Today they tell me the same thing. But of the 103 best Chinese movies selected in 2005, 11 were made after 1997.

"There are still good Hong Kong films. Unlike Hollywood, where the signal/noise ratio is veering toward zero, you can still catch a recent HK film, enjoy it, and be challenged by it. Allow me to enter into evidence tonight's viewing, 2006's My Name is Fame (available on Netflix... LoveHKFilm review is here).

"It's nothing complicated. Lau Ching-Wan, a skilled but under-recognized actor in his 40s, plays a skilled but under-recognized actor in his 40s. In the twilight of his career, he plays Svengali to an ambitious but under-coached young actress (the smoking hot Huo Siyan). Of course she becomes successful, of course he falls in love with her, and of course she leaves him.

"That would be enough, but there is more, and it is good.

"The movie is an extended meditation on the trials of an artistic life and the simple twin virtues of sincerity and persistence. (This is not a cynical movie, so we don't have to visit the dark place occupied by Ed Wood, where sincerity and persistence are cast as handmaidens to willful incompetence.)

"At the end Lau delivers this succinct manifesto:

No matter what you think of me,
good or bad
I'd still give my all for my every effort.

To present that it's right when
it's not and turning a blind eye...
I can't do that.

Not then, not now,
and not in the future.

So, regardless of what you think,
I know I'm good.


"In 2006, the picture won Lau his first Hong Kong Film Award."