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Yisa Yu
China’s Yisa Yu ventured into singer-songwriter territory on a handful of songs in her last album, Warm Water (2014).
So it is disappointing to find that she has completely relinquished composing and lyric-writing duties to others on her fifth album.
The good news is that her crystalline voice is as lovely as ever and there are a couple of noteworthy tracks here – opening number Revert flows as gently as water in a lazy brook, while Solitude Again is a dramatic ballad which Yu navigates with aplomb.
Elevator is a slice-of-life track that touches on the ups and downs of urban romances. With a light touch, Yu sings the observant lyrics by singer-songwriter Jin Wenqi: “A newly married couple has moved in on the seventh floor/We met yesterday in the lift/He didn’t hear her sighing.”
Maybe she could take things to the next level with a return to songwriting on her next record.
(ST)
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Still Missing
Jia Jia
Taiwanese singer Jia Jia’s soulful voice is a thing of beauty.
She could have stuck to singing love ballads and everyone would be perfectly happy. Instead, she throws a curveball early on in this album with See Through, a number by singer-songwriter William Wei which juxtaposes a destructive relationship with a jaunty piano accompaniment. “If you want to hurt me, I won’t hide/A person who has given up can’t be hurt,” she sings.
Not to worry though, ballads are not completely missing from the album.
On the title track written by singer-songwriter Hush, Jia Jia conveys the tender pain of missing an old lover and the closeness they once shared: “More people have forgotten about you and worry about me instead/Forgetting that I am you.”
She also touches on familial love with an ode to her late mother on the album closer, She Was Beautiful.
(ST)
Jia Jia
Taiwanese singer Jia Jia’s soulful voice is a thing of beauty.
She could have stuck to singing love ballads and everyone would be perfectly happy. Instead, she throws a curveball early on in this album with See Through, a number by singer-songwriter William Wei which juxtaposes a destructive relationship with a jaunty piano accompaniment. “If you want to hurt me, I won’t hide/A person who has given up can’t be hurt,” she sings.
Not to worry though, ballads are not completely missing from the album.
On the title track written by singer-songwriter Hush, Jia Jia conveys the tender pain of missing an old lover and the closeness they once shared: “More people have forgotten about you and worry about me instead/Forgetting that I am you.”
She also touches on familial love with an ode to her late mother on the album closer, She Was Beautiful.
(ST)
The Mysterious Family
Park Yu Hwan
The story: Miaomiao (Ariel Lin) is psychologically scarred after surviving a brutal attack by a stranger (Blue Lan). She refuses to speak to her family and shuts out the world by concentrating on training for a marathon. On Christmas Eve, her mother (Kara Hui) urges her to return home early for dinner with her father (Jiang Wu) and brother (Chen Xiao). Miaomiao later learns that a serial killer is on the loose that very day.
An unreliable protagonist. A looping narrative. A villain who keeps turning up like one’s worst nightmare. In more assured hands, these elements could have made for a compelling thriller.
But Korean writer-director Park Yu Hwan delivers only an overworked and overwrought movie that is more confusing than mysterious. (Do not mistake Park, who helmed the Chinese-language thriller Memento Mori (2016), for the idol actor Park Yoo Hwan, who starred in She Was Pretty (2015).)
Is there something diabolical going on? Are we being fed a steady stream of red herrings? And how trustworthy is Miaomiao anyway?
Unfortunately, the question becomes “Do we care?” at some point as the assembled cast, including China’s Jiang (To Live, 1994) and Hong Kong’s Hui (Rigor Mortis, 2013), is both underused and misused.
There is a point here about how one should not box oneself in after a traumatic episode, but it is buried late in the movie. And to get there, one has to sit through scenes of Lin howling in frustration – you might be tempted to do the same.
(ST)
Park Yu Hwan
The story: Miaomiao (Ariel Lin) is psychologically scarred after surviving a brutal attack by a stranger (Blue Lan). She refuses to speak to her family and shuts out the world by concentrating on training for a marathon. On Christmas Eve, her mother (Kara Hui) urges her to return home early for dinner with her father (Jiang Wu) and brother (Chen Xiao). Miaomiao later learns that a serial killer is on the loose that very day.
An unreliable protagonist. A looping narrative. A villain who keeps turning up like one’s worst nightmare. In more assured hands, these elements could have made for a compelling thriller.
But Korean writer-director Park Yu Hwan delivers only an overworked and overwrought movie that is more confusing than mysterious. (Do not mistake Park, who helmed the Chinese-language thriller Memento Mori (2016), for the idol actor Park Yoo Hwan, who starred in She Was Pretty (2015).)
Is there something diabolical going on? Are we being fed a steady stream of red herrings? And how trustworthy is Miaomiao anyway?
Unfortunately, the question becomes “Do we care?” at some point as the assembled cast, including China’s Jiang (To Live, 1994) and Hong Kong’s Hui (Rigor Mortis, 2013), is both underused and misused.
There is a point here about how one should not box oneself in after a traumatic episode, but it is buried late in the movie. And to get there, one has to sit through scenes of Lin howling in frustration – you might be tempted to do the same.
(ST)
Shock Wave
Herman Yau
The story: In an undercover mission, special agent Cheung (Andy Lau) takes down criminal Biao, but Biao’s mastermind elder brother Blast (Jiang Wu) escapes. Seven years later, Cheung has risen up the ranks in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Bureau. Blast exacts his revenge by holding several hundred people hostage as he threatens to blow up Hong Kong’s vital traffic artery, the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
The villain who likes to blow things up is called Blast.
That is an indication of how subtle things get in this, well, bombastic crime thriller from writer-director Herman Yau, whose varied body of work includes Cat III exploitation flick Ebola Syndrome (1996) and award-winning drama True Women For Sale (2008). The hero here is self-sacrificing and saintly, played with a certain smugness by Lau – which means that Cheung is not particularly interesting as the protagonist.
He gets a girlfriend early on, not so much to humanise him, but to have the damsel placed in distress.
Cheung is so macho that he does not even put on a protective suit while attempting to defuse a particular bomb because he reasons that the blast force would be too powerful anyway (by that logic, he might as well wear a T-shirt and shorts for his assignments).
The main event of the tunnel hostage situation is played out over an hour.
Yau draws out the tension as the clock ticks, Jiang chews up the scenery as Blast and the prospect of the tunnel getting destroyed looms.
On the whole, though, this is a workman-like and heavy-handed effort that is unlikely to knock anyone’s socks off.
(ST)
Herman Yau
The story: In an undercover mission, special agent Cheung (Andy Lau) takes down criminal Biao, but Biao’s mastermind elder brother Blast (Jiang Wu) escapes. Seven years later, Cheung has risen up the ranks in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Bureau. Blast exacts his revenge by holding several hundred people hostage as he threatens to blow up Hong Kong’s vital traffic artery, the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.
The villain who likes to blow things up is called Blast.
That is an indication of how subtle things get in this, well, bombastic crime thriller from writer-director Herman Yau, whose varied body of work includes Cat III exploitation flick Ebola Syndrome (1996) and award-winning drama True Women For Sale (2008). The hero here is self-sacrificing and saintly, played with a certain smugness by Lau – which means that Cheung is not particularly interesting as the protagonist.
He gets a girlfriend early on, not so much to humanise him, but to have the damsel placed in distress.
Cheung is so macho that he does not even put on a protective suit while attempting to defuse a particular bomb because he reasons that the blast force would be too powerful anyway (by that logic, he might as well wear a T-shirt and shorts for his assignments).
The main event of the tunnel hostage situation is played out over an hour.
Yau draws out the tension as the clock ticks, Jiang chews up the scenery as Blast and the prospect of the tunnel getting destroyed looms.
On the whole, though, this is a workman-like and heavy-handed effort that is unlikely to knock anyone’s socks off.
(ST)
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
My Name
Jocie Guo
Jocie Guo Meimei is back to claim her name.
The Singaporean singer’s career had stalled in China, where she was mistaken for the notorious charged-with-illegal-gambling blogger Guo Meimei, to the extent that people thought that her big hit No More Panic (2005) had been performed by the Internet celebrity.
Perhaps because of that sobering experience, the singer seems more grown-up now. She still sounds sweet, but she has ditched the cutesy hits such as Mouse Loves Rice (2005) in favour of forlorn love ballads with titles including One Hundred Reasons To Be Alone and Loneliness.
She sings on Blue Sky Tears: “Don’t say, black and white, rumours are vicious/Who says, right and wrong, hearts will shatter.”
While Keep Going might be a love ballad, it contains an epiphany that she could well have gleaned from the sorry episode: “Time waits for no one/I’ll just keep going alone.”
(ST)
Jocie Guo
Jocie Guo Meimei is back to claim her name.
The Singaporean singer’s career had stalled in China, where she was mistaken for the notorious charged-with-illegal-gambling blogger Guo Meimei, to the extent that people thought that her big hit No More Panic (2005) had been performed by the Internet celebrity.
Perhaps because of that sobering experience, the singer seems more grown-up now. She still sounds sweet, but she has ditched the cutesy hits such as Mouse Loves Rice (2005) in favour of forlorn love ballads with titles including One Hundred Reasons To Be Alone and Loneliness.
She sings on Blue Sky Tears: “Don’t say, black and white, rumours are vicious/Who says, right and wrong, hearts will shatter.”
While Keep Going might be a love ballad, it contains an epiphany that she could well have gleaned from the sorry episode: “Time waits for no one/I’ll just keep going alone.”
(ST)
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
Extraordinary Mission
Alan Mak, Anthony Pun
The story: Lin Kai (Huang Xuan) is an undercover cop trying to get to the heart of the heroin-smuggling business. He finds his way to the ruthless Eagle (Duan Yihong), whom Lin’s handler Li Jianguo (Zu Feng) suspects is the same drug lord he had tried to bring down 10 years ago in an operation which went sour.
Tapping out messages on a mobile phone in Morse code was used to great effect in the Hong Kong crime thriller trilogy Infernal Affairs (2002-2003).
Alan Mak (co-director and co- writer) and Felix Chong (co-writer) liked the idea so much that they cribbed it for Extraordinary Mission, which Chong scripted and Mak co-directed with Anthony Pun.
But it is executed here lazily and in a throwaway manner that does not do the idea justice. At least they did not call this Infernal Affairs 4, the way director Jeffrey Lau slapped on A Chinese Odyssey Part Three (2016) to be an unworthy follow-up to a beloved series.
While it is not Infernal Affairs good, Extraordinary Mission is mostly quite engaging.
Huang (The Legend Of Mi Yue, 2015) makes for a compelling supercop who can pull off riding a motorcycle inside a building and on rooftops with panache.
The film-makers carefully weave a web of intense relationships around his character – Lin, Eagle, Li and Li’s partner Zhang Haitao, who was assumed to have perished in that botched operation.
Will Li’s sense of loyalty to Zhang lead him to put his subordinate in danger? Are Lin’s sacrifices, including getting shot up with drugs, worth it? What exactly does Eagle want?
Having set all this up, the movie then works itself into a corner and has no choice but to shoot its way out. The climactic gun battle is the kind where the vastly outnumbered good guys always find their targets while the bad guys seem to be shooting in a fog while blindfolded.
(ST)
Alan Mak, Anthony Pun
The story: Lin Kai (Huang Xuan) is an undercover cop trying to get to the heart of the heroin-smuggling business. He finds his way to the ruthless Eagle (Duan Yihong), whom Lin’s handler Li Jianguo (Zu Feng) suspects is the same drug lord he had tried to bring down 10 years ago in an operation which went sour.
Tapping out messages on a mobile phone in Morse code was used to great effect in the Hong Kong crime thriller trilogy Infernal Affairs (2002-2003).
Alan Mak (co-director and co- writer) and Felix Chong (co-writer) liked the idea so much that they cribbed it for Extraordinary Mission, which Chong scripted and Mak co-directed with Anthony Pun.
But it is executed here lazily and in a throwaway manner that does not do the idea justice. At least they did not call this Infernal Affairs 4, the way director Jeffrey Lau slapped on A Chinese Odyssey Part Three (2016) to be an unworthy follow-up to a beloved series.
While it is not Infernal Affairs good, Extraordinary Mission is mostly quite engaging.
Huang (The Legend Of Mi Yue, 2015) makes for a compelling supercop who can pull off riding a motorcycle inside a building and on rooftops with panache.
The film-makers carefully weave a web of intense relationships around his character – Lin, Eagle, Li and Li’s partner Zhang Haitao, who was assumed to have perished in that botched operation.
Will Li’s sense of loyalty to Zhang lead him to put his subordinate in danger? Are Lin’s sacrifices, including getting shot up with drugs, worth it? What exactly does Eagle want?
Having set all this up, the movie then works itself into a corner and has no choice but to shoot its way out. The climactic gun battle is the kind where the vastly outnumbered good guys always find their targets while the bad guys seem to be shooting in a fog while blindfolded.
(ST)
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