Police Story 2013
Ding Sheng
The story: China cop Zhong Wen (Jackie Chan) makes his way to a bar, where he is meeting his estranged daughter Miao Miao (Jing Tian). Things get hairy when bar owner Wu Jiang (Liu Ye) prevents the patrons from leaving and holds them captive. It turns out that Zhong had crossed paths with a few of the hostages before. And Wu is determined to get to the bottom of an old case.

Adventure thriller CZ12 (2012) was supposed to be Jackie Chan’s last major action film. But without his trademark daredevil stunts, is a Jackie Chan film still worth watching?
In this case, not quite.
To be clear, Police Story 2013 still has action sequences, just fewer and nothing that is likely to result in a loss of life or limb for the famously – some would say recklessly – gungho star.
In his best films, such as Project A (1983) and Armour Of God (1986), the NG (no-good) blooper reels at the end were highlights packed with action. Among Police Story 2013’s bloopers, Chan seems to have more difficulty with the dialogue than any particular manoeuvre.
To execute a scene in which he tries to free himself from being bound to a chair with metal wires, it takes him several takes and only bloodied wrists.
The focus is very much on the plot, so too bad it comes up a little short.
There is some suspense built up at the beginning, when you wonder who Wu Jiang is and why has he taken the trouble to mount such an elaborate set-up.
Besides holding people hostage in the bar and making sure that Zhong is on the premises, he also demands to meet a specific hostage.
Once the pieces fall into place, there is an attempt at a Rashomon-type recreation of an old case.
One by one, those who are present that night add to the story of what went down and gradually fill in the puzzle.
When the mystery is finally unveiled, though, it feels like writer-director Ding Sheng is making a mountain out of a molehill.
And the question of why such an elaborate set-up is necessary in the first place is never really answered.
For the ending to be nicely sewn up, a new character has to be conveniently introduced at the last minute.
In films such as A Beautiful Life (2011), Liu Ye has shown that he can act; here, he is hampered by ham-fisted characterisation.
Although Chan’s role is better sketched out (the absent father element seems to have been drawn from his own life), Ding’s previous collaboration with him in action comedy Little Big Soldier (2010) was less laboured and more fun.
And by the way, why call this Police Story 2013 when it has nothing to do with the four comedy-action Police Story films made between 1985 and 1996, or even New Police Story, 2004’s darker reboot?
Doing so merely feels like a cop-out, not to mention draws attention to the fact that Chan’s best films are behind him.
(ST)

Thanks For Sharing
Stuart Blumberg
The story: Former sex addict Adam (Mark Ruffalo) has been sober for five years and is now helping others with the 12-step process of recovery. He is even ready to start dating when Phoebe (Gwyneth Paltrow) comes along. His sponsor Mike (Tim Robbins) is supportive of Adam but wary of his own addict son, Danny (Patrick Fugit). Meanwhile, the incorrigible Neil (Josh Gad) unexpectedly finds friendship with the free-spirited Dede (Alecia Moore, better known as pop star Pink).

Perhaps the fact that writer-director Stuart Blumberg had co-written Oscar-nominated gay family drama The Kids Are All Right (2010) attracted this ensemble cast of big names to the film.
But lightning fails to strike twice for Blumberg.
Maybe the problem lies with the fact that addiction is not an inherently hilarious topic. And the light comic tone that Blumberg is going for in his debut directorial feature does not work.
Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing and harrowing Requiem For A Dream (2000) is a far more honest and compelling look at the subject instead.
Here, the stories never quite resonate.
The Neil-Dede plotline is too pat and feels mainly like an acting exercise for pop star Pink. She does an okay job but you never forget that she is Pink. And the chubby Neil borders on being a caricature whose main purpose is to milk some cheap laughs.
In the case of the Adam-Phoebe story, there is also some serious miscasting going on. Mark Ruffalo (You Can Count On Me, 2000) can play wounded and vulnerable in his sleep, but he has zero chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow’s health fanatic. Watching them play at being a flirty couple trading cutesy banter will have you cringing so much that it feels like a workout.
The Mike-Danny father-son strand is potentially the most interesting as it touches upon issues of trust and forgiveness. But it feels slight, given all the characters and material the film is juggling.
What I did learn from the film is that the terminology used in sex addiction is the same as that used in alcohol addiction. Hence, characters talk about being sober and also commemorate their length of sobriety. The idea is that sex addiction is as serious as any other kind of addiction and not just a flimsy excuse that Hollywood stars trot out for their bad behaviour.
In the end, Thanks For Sharing plays like a well-meaning public service announcement. But good intentions alone do not make a good movie, so thanks, but no thanks.
(ST)

Insignificance
Hebe Tien
Wait a minute, when did Taiwan’s Barbie Hsu go back to making music? It turns out, instead, to be S.H.E member Hebe Tien on the cover, looking unlike herself in close-up.
The album warrants greater scrutiny as well. Expectations were high after her well-received solo outings To Hebe (2010) and My Love (2011). And, at first, this new offering seems to fall far short in comparison.
There is a clear theme – insignificance – and there are some gorgeous photos in the CD booklet, thanks to a trip Tien took for the album to Icelandic glacier Vatnajokull.
But there is a languidness to the music that threatens to slip into a torpor now and then.
More attentive listening reveals some interesting imagery in the lyrics and some points of interest in the music and her singing.
The record was inspired by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s Under One Small Star and the title track draws on it: “In the ugliest world, I occasionally catch a glimpse of the most beautiful poem/ Turns out the darkest sky has the brightest stars”.
Her singing is appropriately light-as- air for Impermanence, while Won’t If Not Drunk has an appealing loosey-goosey vibe.
Not quite so insignificant after all.
(ST)

The Best Memoryz
Z-Chen Chang
This is not the way to follow up a good album. Malaysian singer Z-Chen Chang’s In Love With... (2011) featured Valuable Advice and Met Too Soon, moving ballads that showcased his smooth emotive pipes.
But instead of building on that momentum, The Best Memoryz is a collection of eight covers and only two new tracks.
The choice of songs to reinterpret is also not compelling, what with ho-hum radio hits such as Jacky Wu’s Do You Only Think About Me On Nights Like This and Kelly Chen’s Love What You Love.
There is a touch of melancholia to Chang’s voice and it is on A-Sun’s affecting Leaves that he really gets to shine.
As for the new tracks, ballad The Best Memory feels like a so-so attempt to recapture past glories while the more uptempo Love Is My Own Strength is merely passable.
Not exactly the stuff fond memories are made of.
(ST)

Control
Kenneth Bi
The story: Insurance salesman Mark (Daniel Wu) is blackmailed by a mysterious figure and is forced to do his bidding, including crossing some dangerous crooks. When he is captured by Devil (Leon Dai) and his men, he insists on telling his story to the big boss, Tiger (Simon Yam).

Control could well have been inspired by something like The Usual Suspects (1995), in which the protagonist weaves a mesmerising tale with a stunning twist at the end.
Unfortunately, scriptwriter-director Kenneth Bi (Hainan Chicken Rice, 2005) is clearly not in control of the material here which veers off course during the crucial denouement.
The film actually begins promisingly. Set in an unnamed futuristic city in slick shades of black and grey, it seems to be an Asian take on the cyber-punk sci-fi noir genre.
It is unusual enough to be intriguing, but apart from an excuse to use some computer graphics, the setting ultimately does not matter.
So what we are left with is the tale of a man forced against his will to follow the instructions of an auto-tuned voice.
Since the identity of the puppet master is shrouded and what he actually wants (money? vengeance? an advanced degree in puppetry?) is under wraps, it falls to the poor victim to keep us hooked on the story.
Unfortunately, Daniel Wu (New Police Story, 2004) is not charismatic enough to reel you in from the get-go and make you care about what happens to him.
There is some curiosity over what Mark will be forced to do next but the stakes are never very high for the viewer.
The supporting cast of normally reliable actors do not fare well either.
Simon Yam (Eye In The Sky, 2007) appears to be slumming it in a hammy turn as crime boss Tiger while Kara Hui is once again an emotionally distraught mother, too soon after horror flick Rigor Mortis (2013).
As the machinations get more laboured and more characters get pulled in – including Mark’s old girlfriend Jessica (Yao Chen) – you begin to wonder how it will all be resolved.
There is more story-telling involved, and it might leave your jaw hanging – not from admiration, but from incredulity.
(ST)

Chinese Puzzle
Cedric Klapisch
The story: The follow-up to The Spanish Apartment (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005) continues with the story of Frenchman Xavier (Romain Duris) and his friends. He and Wendy (Kelly Reilly) have split up and she moves to New York from Paris with their two children. Xavier then heads for the Big Apple as well where his lesbian friend Isabelle (Cecile de France) is raising a child with her partner. He later reconnects with his ex, Martine (Audrey Tautou), who has two children of her own. Along the way, for the sake of a visa, Xavier gets hitched to a Chinese-American woman.

Meeting an old friend after a long time apart can be a fraught affair. Can you pick up where you left off? Will the conversation still flow easily? Have they changed? Have you?
In Before Midnight (2013), it was a pleasure meeting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) again and seeing where they were nine years after Before Sunset (2004) and 18 after Before Sunrise (1995).
Add to that list of happy reunions writer-director Cedric Klapisch’s Chinese Puzzle. We first met Xavier in The Spanish Apartment (2002), a young Frenchman in Barcelona on the brink of adult and working life and figuring his way forward with the help of a group of friends from all over Europe.
In Russian Dolls (2005), the setting moved to St Petersburg where Xavier and his friends fall in and out of love.
And now, pushing 40, he is at yet another crossroads as life takes him to bustling Chinatown in New York and he has to take stock of his relationships with his ex-partner, children, friends and old lover, while keeping his publisher in Paris happy.
Romain Duris has shown his versatility as an actor, including his turn as a thug in the compelling The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), but he will always be remembered for playing Xavier.
He brings an easy charm to the highly self-aware and articulate character, someone who can be indecisive and passive at times, but ultimately has his heart in the right place.
The other actors slip easily into their roles as well, from Audrey Tautou (Amelie, 2001) as the older and wiser Martine to Cecile de France (Hereafter, 2010) as the butch Isabelle, settling down with a partner and baby and yet still behaving irresponsibly like a child.
Whatever their flaws and foibles, it is clear that Klapisch has great affection for this group of friends.
Apart from depicting their relationships with one another with honesty, warmth and gentle humour, he also tackles bigger themes of globalisation and culture through the trajectory of the three films.
There is a playful visual flair in Chinese Puzzle that elegantly conveys the frenetic vibe of New York City and lends the film an engaging energy of its own. It all culminates in a welcome bit of farce as the various plot situations all come colliding together.
Life can be complicated and never linear, as Xavier grouses, but he and his friends have also shown us that it can be a glorious mess filled with laughter, light and love.
(ST)

Love Lesson
Diana Wang
While Taiwan’s Diana Wang made it only to the final 42 on the first season of talent show Chinese Idol earlier this year, she impressed label Warner Music Taiwan enough to be offered a contract.
And the newcomer has since made quite a splash with her debut album as Love Lesson hit the No. 1 spot on the authoritative G-Music album chart.
But I am not quite feeling the love, even though a fair bit of the material here revolves around the topic, from ballad Too Young To Love to the emo title track.
Her voice is pleasant enough, but not particularly distinctive. The same goes for the material.
What leaves more of an impression are the upbeat Armoured Wizard and the sole English track, her cover of feted indie act Bon Iver’s Skinny Love.
Her take is a glossier pop version of the haunting and angry original. But the power of the song is such that it is easily the most memorable number here.
(ST)

The White Storm
Benny Chan
The story: Tin (Sean Lau Ching Wan), Wai (Nick Cheung) and Chow (Louis Koo) are three friends who grew up together and then signed up to be cops. Tin rises through the ranks and is senior to Wai, while Chow has to tough it out as an undercover mole for a drug lord. As they seek to bring down kingpin Eight-faced Buddha (Lo Hoi Pang) who operates in Thailand, friendships and loyalties are tested.

Oh no, not another drug movie, was my first thought.
Louis Koo played a weaselly drug peddler earlier this year in Drug War while Sean Lau Ching Wan and Nick Cheung have been on both sides of the cop-crook divide in other films such as Overheard (2009) and Nightfall (2012).
They have even teamed up in various combinations, though this marks the first time all three actors are in a film together.
But despite my initial reservations, The White Storm turned out to be a crackerjack of a movie which managed to be surprising in a well-worn genre.
It could have been another generic drug bust movie, but director and co-writer Benny Chan (New Police Story, 2004) ups the stakes by grounding the film with strong characters and extreme moral dilemmas.
The three seasoned actors inhabit their characters easily and also play off one another well.
Koo is the frustrated undercover mole, Chow, who is tired of living a double life. He lives in fear of picking up the wrong mobile phone and saying the wrong thing and just wants to be with his pregnant wife.
Lau is his superior, Tin, who is caught between wanting to protect his friend and pressure from his higher-ups to go after bigger fish – which means that Chow would have to remain as a mole.
And Cheung is the peace-maker, Wai, sandwiched between the other two and trying his best to keep their friendship from fraying as well as the mission from going under.
The film throws up some interesting questions.
What does it really take to motivate an undercover cop to stick it out?
Is a sense of duty enough or does there need to be something more personal given the sacrifices one is asked to make?
Later on, one of the three friends is put in an impossible situation of choosing who to save and, hence, who to sacrifice. Better yet, the movie examines the consequences of that fateful decision and how things sour after that.
Chan also packs in bursts of adrenaline rush in the action sequences ranging from a showdown in an abandoned building to an attack by helicopters in Thailand.
A pity then that the packed-with-gunplay finale is stretched out too long.
Right up till then though, the film has you in a firm grip.
(ST)

Midsummer's Equation
Hiroshi Nishitani
The story: The brilliant physicist Manabu Yukawa (Masaharu Fukuyama) goes to the seaside town of Harigaura to attend a seabed mining plan debate. He stays at an inn and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a little boy Kyohei (Hikaru Yamazaki), who later helps him with the suspicious death of another lodger, retired cop Tsukahara (Sansei Shiomi). A vocal opponent to the mining plan is Narumi (Anne), Kyohei’s cousin and daughter of the inn’s owners, Setsuko (Jun Fubuki) and Shigeharu Kawahata (Gin Maeda). By the end of summer, everybody’s lives would have changed irrevocably. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by author Keigo Higashino.

The character of Manabu Yukawa, also known as detective Galileo, is a one-man pop culture cottage industry in Japan. The books by mystery writer Keigo Higashino are bestsellers and they are the basis of a hit TV series in 2007, and a second season this year. On the big screen, there was the excellent Suspect X (2008). So Midsummer’s Equation is a long-awaited follow-up film outing.
As with Suspect X, there is a central murder mystery set up. But what distinguishes the films are the fact that they are not just interested in the “how”, but the “why”.
Director Hiroshi Nishitani has once again delivered a puzzler that engages the mind and moves the heart.
Central to the stories is the coolly brilliant Yukawa (Fukuyama), whose unflappable nature and rational thinking make him great at deductive reasoning. “Truth is a map that teaches us about the world,” he says.
It also makes him something of a cold fish.
What is fun in Midsummer’s Equation is that we get to see a different side to him. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kyohei (a naturalistic Hakaru Yamazaki) – a boy who does not give him hives on contact – and even teaches him about the value of science through a very cool rocket project.
Incidentally, actor-singer Fukuyama was also very good acting alongside another young co-star in Hirokazu Koreeda’s family drama Like Father, Like Son (2013).
Meanwhile, the other pieces of the puzzle are put into place. What is the secret shared between mother Setsuko and daughter Narumi? What is their connection to a murder which took place in 1998? Who was the man arrested for that murder and why is there a retired cop sniffing about the place now?
Compared to Suspect X, the case here is a little less satisfying because it is not as surprising or clever.
But Midsummer’s Equation still delivers when it comes to delving into people’s motivation and the consequences of their actions. Just when the case seems all wrapped up, more revelations follow as the film teases apart the secrets and lies and anguish that have been buried within a family over the years.
And Yukawa’s friendship with young Kyohei pays off too, in a beautifully low-key scene at the end.
If you are looking for a humane murder mystery to mull over, Midsummer’s Equation could well be your answer.
(ST)