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Tsui Hark’s classic tale of love and mistaken identity, with plentiful helpings of farce and wackiness, has been restored for its 40th anniversary

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy from 1984, directed by Hong Kong genre veteran Tsui Hark and restored last year for its 40th anniversary. It’s a tale of love and mistaken identity, with plenty of farcical hiding in cupboards to avoid the scandal of being caught in a compromising position, and we even get the time-honoured business of having sex with the wrong person in pitch darkness – a plot point stretching back to Jacobean drama.

It’s a wacky love triangle. In 1937 Shanghai, with the Japanese about to invade, a young would-be songwriter nicknamed Do-Re-Mi (Kenny Bee) is humiliatingly employed as a clown in a nightclub and figures he might as well join the army.

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.As part of our Cannes 2024 coverage, we invited critics and programmers to share their thoughts on one moment from a film they've seen at the festival so far.Sign up for the Weekly Edit to receive exclusive reports from the Croisette straight to your inbox.Miriam BaleElizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes by Nanette Burstein (co-director of The Kid Stays in the Picture) is in some ways a straightforward chronological documentary of the movie star's fascinating, tabloid-centric life. What makes the film formally interesting, though, is the separation of voice and image. Burstein’s reliance on audio recordings of Taylor made in 1964 and 1985 foregrounds her remarkable voice over her blinding beauty, seen in stills and film clips. Taylor's voice, even at ages 32 and 53, can range from girlish and flirtatious to bawdy and shrill, sometimes within the same statement. When she describes how the AIDS crisis led...

Distribution Workshop has struck a key sale on the restored version of Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues, which received its 40th anniversary screening in Cannes Classics with star Sylvia Chang in attendance.

Spectrum Films has acquired the 1984 bittersweet love story set against the backdrop of wartime Shanghai in the 1940s for France and French-speaking territories.

Distribution Workshop handles international sales and has received offers for Japan, South Korea, the US and the UK.

Shanghai Blues was the first film produced by Hong Kong-based Film Workshop, which Tsui and producer Nansun Shi established in 1984. The cast includes Kenny Bee and Sally Yeh,...

A 4K restoration of Shanghai Blues by Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark will screen in the Cannes Classics section to mark the film’s 40th anniversary since its 1984 premiere.

Leading actress Sylvia Chang will be present at the screening in Cannes, where the Classics program is also celebrating its 20th year at the festival.

Tsui Hark and Nansun Shi supervised the 4K restoration of the original negative, in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata. The Shanghai Blues soundtrack was remixed by One Cool Sound.

Set in Shanghai in the year 1937, a soldier (Kenny Bee) crosses path with a young woman (Sylvia Chang) under a bridge during a Japanese air raid and they vow to meet after the war ends. Many years later, they meet again although they do not recognize each other.

During its initial run, Shanghai Blues received eight nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards and also screened at...

A restored 4K version of Tsui Hark's “Shanghai Blues 2024” will be screened in the prestigious Cannes Classics programme at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.

Set against the backdrop of wartime Shanghai in the 1940's, the film weaves a poignant love story between a soldier, Tung Kwok-Man (Kenny Bee) and a young woman Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang), who vow to meet after the war ends. Unfortunately, they walk away not able to recognize each other's faces or remember their names. Through a series of misplaced opportunities, the two lovebirds keep missing their reunion, even though fate has a funny way of bringing them ever so closer to each other.

Infused with a delightful blend of innocent romanticism, satirical wit, and whimsical sophistication, “Shanghai Blues” showcased director Tsui Hark as a burgeoning master who could seamlessly fuse different genre's for the screen.

To bring the film back 40 years later, the “Shanghai Blues...

Beginning Friday, March 22, a new 2K restoration of My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, Patrick Tam's underseen and visually daring late-80s action-romance, opens for a one-week NY exclusive theatrical run at Metrograph In Theater.

Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave's most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with Dp Christopher Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong's cinema of longing and John Woo's cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking. A Kani Releasing release.

The digitization and restoration of My Heart is...

Tony Leung Chiu Wai is one of the most recognizable Asian actors in the world, chiefly through his collaborations with a number of master filmmakers, including Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao Hsien, John Woo and Wong Kar Wai. Leung, who also has a career as a pop singer, has been praised by audiences and critics for his ability to wonderfully portray a plethora of different roles, a skill stressed by the fact that he can fluently speak Cantonese, English and Spanish.

His career reached its apogee from the end of the 80s, and Leung never actually deteriorated, with the astonishing parts coming one of the other. It is by no surprise then, that this year, he was presented with the Venice Film Festival lifetime achievement award

1. A City of Sadness

The script depicts the experiences of the Lin family during the upheaval that occurred after 1945, when Japanese forces withdrew from Taiwan after 51 years,...

After “Cute Girl” and “Cheerful Wind”, Hou Hsiao-hsien would again team up with former pop singer Kenny Bee for yet another romantic comedy, “The Green, Green Grass of Home”. Much like its predecessors, the feature serves not only as a means for the director to further make a name for himself within the film industry of his home country, but also as a way to find his voice and technique as a filmmaker, as some of the themes and visuals seem to foreshadow his later features such as “Dust in the Wind”, “Daughter of the Nile” and, perhaps most notably, “The Boys from Fengkuei”, which many critics and fans of the director regard as his first “true work”. “The Green, Green Grass of Home” would also become a success with audiences and critics, resulting in three nominations at the 1982 Golden Horse Film Festival, and Chou Pin-chun, who play one of the students in the feature,...

Racing films were all the rage in the early 2000s thanks to the successful launch of the Hollywood “The Fast and the Furious” franchise. A year before that franchise relocated briefly to Tokyo for its third drive, which introduced and focused on the technique of drifting, Hong Kong cinema also turned to Japan for “Initial D”, a feature based on a manga and anime of the same name, which also looked at the world of street racing and drifting in Japan.

“Initial D” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

By day, Takumi Fujiwara works at the gas station of his best friend Itsuki’s father. Come nightfall, he goes down the nearby Mt. Akina and delivers tofu for his father Bunta “Tofuman” Fujiwara’s business in his father’s AE86 car. The Mt. Akina mountain pass is a favourite track amongst underground street racers as well as professionals,...

As with many Taiwanese directors, the path to the first feature starts with years of learning, at film school as well as on set, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s career is certainly no exception. Having spent years training with cinematographer and director Lai Chengying, Hou established a reputation for himself, qualifying him to helm “Cute Girl”, a feature which would star the heavily popular singer Kenny Bee in one of his first roles as an actor, in a year that saw him act in many other productions. “Cute Girl” also marked the beginning of a fruitful work relationship with Hou as they would also collaborate on “Cheeful “ind” and “The Green Green Grass of Home”, which was released only two years after.

on Amazon

Although she has made a successful career and is quite well-educated, Wenwen (Feng Feifei) is still single, which is no problem for her, but...

Racing films were all the rage in the early 2000s thanks to the successful launch of the Hollywood “The Fast and the Furious” franchise. A year before that franchise relocated briefly to Tokyo for its third drive, which introduced and focused on the technique of drifting, Hong Kong cinema also turned to Japan for “Initial D”, a feature based on a manga and anime of the same name, which also looked at the world of street racing and drifting in Japan.

on Amazon

By day, Takumi Fujiwara works at the gas station of his best friend Itsuki’s father. Come nightfall, he goes down the nearby Mt. Akina and delivers tofu for his father Bunta “Tofuman” Fujiwara’s business in his father’s AE86 car. The Mt. Akina mountain pass is a favourite track amongst underground street racers as well as professionals, who test their and each...

Do you remember sitting down in the holidays and watching on television one of those all start cast epics such as “Around the World in 80 Days” that frequented Hollywood in the 1960’s. Well now imagine that with a cast of Hong Kong’s finest from the 1980’s and throw in a lot of martial arts amidst the comedy. Now imagine it in the style of a western-only set in the Orient. Sammo Hung certainly liked variety in his directorial career and at his creative peak in the late 1980’s, came up with this polar opposite to the more vicious war epic “Eastern Condors”. A more family friendly, action filled entertainer that throws everything into the mix and finds most of it sticking.

Ching Fong Tin (Sammo Hung) returns to his hometown after attempting to steal goods from Russian soldiers and nearly being captured by bounty hunter...

Hong Kong New Wave directress Ann Hui’s sophomore work – after a foray into “Giallo” territory with “The Secret” – is an unusual mix of comedy, horror and Cantonese Opera. “Unusual” at the time of the release but not for longer, as her film, together with Sammo Hung’s “Encounters of the Spooky Kind” of the same year, started off and contributed to define a genre that proved extremely successful and dominated the box office for many years, peaking with “Mr. Vampire” and the huge legacy that spawned from it. “The Spooky Bunch” was screened in 1981 at the Berlin International Film Festival

A rickety, travelling Cantonese Opera group is employed by the wealthy patriarch Ma to perform for him on the island of Cheung Chau. He has a special request though; the support actress Ah Chi (Josephine Siao) must perform in the leading role this time. All this is organised for a precise reason.

Evidently, not the most famous category of films coming out of Asia, since the genre has been associated with Italy and Hollywood almost completely. However, in the vast plethora of movies coming out of the continent, there were bound to be some productions in the genre, which, as we are about to see, come from a number of different countries. Manchuria has always been a place to shoot these films for the Japanese and the Koreans, but lately the Indonesia landscape has been also used, for a couple of films. India and Thailand also have their share of films in the genre.

Evidently, the category stretches the term a bit, and goes beyond the basic elements of guns and desert settings. Here are 15 of the finest samples, in chronological order

*by clicking on some of the titles, you can find the full reviews. For the rest, we just included the...

The Taiwan Film Institute has restored Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Cheerful Wind”. The movie was released in 1982 for lunar new year, and is part of Hou Hsiao Hsen’s more commercial movies, earlier in his career. It reunites three popstars that were already in his first feature.

“Cheerful Wind” screened at Udine Far East Film Festival 2020

Hsiao Hsing-hui (Feng Fei-fei) is a photographer working on a commercial with her boyfriend, Lo Zai (played by Anthony Chan). As they are shooting on the Pescadores Islands, they run into a blind man who plays the harmonica and the flute: Ku Chin-tai (Kenny Bee). The young woman and her boyfriend go back to Taipei, only to run into the flute player. From there, an (ambiguous) friendship grows between Hsing-hui and Chin-tai.

This may not be the feature that will make you fall in love with the Taiwanese director’s indie vibe, unique aestheticism, particular pace,...

“My Heart is that Eternal Rose” is a movie that proved to be an adventure to track down. In the mid-1990’s I got my first glimpse of it when the final reel was shown as the opening to the “Cinema of Vengeance” documentary that formed part of my initial education into Hong Kong cinema as an impressionable teenager. At the time, it was not easy to get hold of these movies in the UK and near enough impossible to track down a copy of this one, even imported. It was only years later that I finally got my hands on a re-released DVD copy and able to tick it off my wish list. Now out on Blu-ray, I am revisiting to see if it was still able to meet those expectations I had build up over the years.

Uncle Cheung (Kwan Hoi-san) is a retired gangster...

“Spicy food can be a form of pain to numb another pain”

Director, producer, writer and wonder woman Heiward Mak who Amp had the pleasure to meet and interview at a previous edition of Five Flavours Film Festival, is back in excellent form with her family drama “Fagara”, named after the delicious and very hot Sichuan peppercorns, renowned for being so strong to numb your mouth (all true and tested!) Based on the popular 2011 novel “Spicy Love” by Hong Kong writer Amy Cheung Siu-han, “Fagara” is co-produced by Ann Hui.

“Fagara” is screening at Five Flavours Asian Film Festival

The sudden dead of a father is a painful and intense shock even if, like Hong Kong travel agent Acacia (Sammi Cheng), the family bond has been neglected for quite some time. Even more shocking for Acacia is learning that she has two half-sisters the father Ha Leung had with two women in other countries.

Contemporary Chinese Cinema is a column devoted to exploring contemporary Chinese-language cinema primarily as it is revealed to us at North American multiplexes.This past weekend, inspired by the RZA, I watched a dingy, cropped, and badly dubbed copy of the 1983 Taiwanese kung fu film Shaolin vs. Lama. It’s not a great film: generic plot, mediocre acting, lame comedy; but the stunt work is extremely good. I’ve watched hundreds of Hong Kong and other Chinese language movies over the past few years, and in every case I’ve taken care to avoid this kind of shoddy presentation, going out of my way to find the best possible images with the original language soundtracks. Because of that, sometimes I forget that for most of my life cheap and dubbed was the only way to see many of the best action films in the world, while almost all of the...

As pro-democracy, anti-police-brutality protests in Hong Kong enter their 10th week, the political unrest has begun to make itself felt in the entertainment world, with actors and other performers caught up in an increasingly vituperative battle between those who support the demonstrators and those who back the local government and mainland China’s tough stance.

One popular singer-actress blacklisted by Beijing has live-streamed and live-tweeted herself attending protests and being tear-gassed. Another veteran actor took part in a pro-police rally – and promptly landed a release date in mainland China for his directorial debut film. Worldwide star Jackie Chan has thrown his lot in with the Beijing regime, putting out a video interview in which he expressed his patriotism in terms that echo mainland propaganda.

The protests – the biggest in Hong Kong’s history – have raged since early June, at their peak drawing nearly 2 million out of the territory’s 7.4 million people to the streets,...

Sammo Hung, for all his immense contributions to action cinema has never been considered one of the visual stylists of his generation. Yet in 1993 he made two classic swordplay movies that could be considered to challenge this notion. The first and sadly largely forgotten “Blade of Fury”. The second recently re-released on Blu ray “Moon Warriors”.

The 13th Prince (Kenny Bee) along with a few loyal retainers narrowly escapes an assassination attempt by his brother, and finds himself in the company of Fei (Andy Lau) a fisherman with exceptional martial arts abilities. Dispatching Fei along with Mo-Sin (Maggie Cheung) to bring Princess Yuet Nga (Anita Mui) leads to a complicated situation with Mo-Sin, who is secretly in love with the 13th Prince and a growing attraction between Fei an Yuet Nga begins. As the brother closes in and secrets are revealed, the fates of all converge in an epic final confrontation.

A tragic love story at heart, this triad action drama turns into a blood bath in the final reel with plenty of bullets flying, slo-mo action and freeze frames thrown in.

The story kicks off in a bar by the seaside run by Uncle Cheung; his daughter Lap works there as a waitress and she has a boyfriend Rick Ma who also works at the same bar. Uncle Cheung is actually a retired triad man; soon he is talked into doing another human trafficking job for a very rich man. Accordingly, he asks Rick to be his driver and as predicted, everything goes wrong and Rick is forced to flee to the Philippines. In the meantime, Uncle Cheung himself is captured; Lap decides to sacrifice herself to triad boss Shen in order to free her father.

Fast forward to six years later, Rick, who has now become a hitman,...

Some movies are as interesting due to their theme and aesthetics as due to the context that surrounds them. “House of the Rising Sons”, a biopic about The Wynners, an extremely popular during the 70’s, Hong Kong teen idol group definitely falls under this category for a number of reasons. The group itself is the first, since their success was responsible for kick-starting the career of Alan Tam and Kenny Bee, both musician and actors. The second one is the director, Anthony Chan, who was actually the drummer of the original band, who returns to the seat of the director after ten years and “My Americanized Wife”. The last is the cast, which includes Hk legends Kara Hui and Simon Yam. Let us take a closer look at the film itself though.

House of the Rising Sons is screening at the 17th New York Asian Film Festival

The story begins...

The Green, Green Grass of Home

Written and Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Taiwan, 1983

Having started with Goodbye South, Goodbye, we go backwards in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s career to one of his earliest films, The Green, Green Grass of Home. This particular film is the last in a trilogy of commercial-minded vehicles for pop star Kenny Bee that also included Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind. Bee got his start in Hong Kong as a part of a pop group called The Wynners and when that group split Bee made his way to Taiwan to make a go at acting. This won’t be the last time Hou works with a musician as an actor. Lim Giong was in multiple films including Goodbye South, Goodbye (for which he also did music for the soundtrack), and popstar Lin Yang made her debut in Daughter of the Nile, which I’ll be discussing in the future.

Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou returns with “The Rooftop”, his second outing as director following his successful and surprisingly accomplished 2007 debut “Secret”. A long while in development, the film is an ambitious affair, a musical filled with songs, dancing, romance, martial arts and more, with the actor-singer not only starring and directing, but having written the script and composed the soundtrack. Although Chou takes the lead, the film is an ensemble piece of sorts, and also stars newcomer Li Xin Ai as his love interest, along with Alan Kuo, Darren Chiu, and veterans Eric Tsang, Wang Xueqi and Kenny Bee. The film revolves around Jay Chou as Wax, who along with his gang of goodhearted roustabouts hangs around the titular rooftop overlooking the city of Galilee, doing odd jobs for Chinese medicine shop owner Bo (Eric Tsang). Catching the eye of local gang leader Rango (Wang Xueqi), they get involved in collecting rent and debts,...

Shanghai International Film Festival

SHANGHAI -- The evocative title might mislead one to imagine Shanghai Red as one of those pre-Liberation epics like A Time to Remember (1998) or a propaganda film about the fiery days of the Cultural Revolution. In fact, the film is an attempt at an Eastern La femme Nikita with an interracial romantic twist set in contemporary Shanghai.

As a U.S.-Chinese co-production with Shanghai Film Group Corp., the film could gain theatrical release in China and draw in crowds curious about how their own city appears in a Hollywood film. Beyond that, some Asian-American festivals also might consider it for their selection.

Vivian Wu (The Pillow Book, Eve and the Fire Horse) plays Meili, an interpreter who becomes an angel of vengeance when her husband is shot dead on his way to sign a joint-venture contract. The appearance of an enigmatic American who claims to be a kind of troubleshooter for companies draws her into a web of deceit, love and guilt.

Still ravishing after all these years, Wu is the biggest interest-sustaining factor in the film. She gives subtle gradations in performance for the three phases and identities in her life but still maintains continuity of personality in spite of the film's more contrived moments, like when Meili slips into a scarlet red cheongsam and dons wide-brimmed Ray-Bans -- that really helps her blend in with the crowd when being tailed by the police on her way to assassinate her adversaries!

Director Oscar Luis Costo (Wu's husband) is a recognized Hollywood producer, so production quality is what one would expect of Hollywood. Costume and production design are thoughtfully consistent, with the film's color schemes of green, red and gray conceived to reflect the three stages and states of mind of the female protagonist.

However, the script is compromised by an attempt to make the film accessible to both American and Asian audiences by throwing together a mixed cast from U.S., Hong Kong and China. Ge You (To Live, The Banquet), a superstar in China, gets only a cameo role as the inscrutable boss, with little to do except look shady. Kenny Bee, once a Hong Kong heartthrob and now a veteran actor, spends most of his time playing a corpse or a ghostly apparition.

Richard Burgi (Hostel: Part II), on the other hand, gets the most screen time as the international love interest. Although he looks the part as the handsome "man of mystery," he and Wu have as much chemistry as a fish and a bicycle. She hits off much better with Sun Honglei (The Road Home, "Zhou Yu's Train"), another well-known Chinese actor who plays her defense lawyer in the film's overlapping narrative.

Although their interaction takes place exclusively in the confined space of a prison, it generates more dramatic tension as the two alternate roles as confessor and confidant, judge and therapist. Yet any attempt at psychological penetration is distracted by all the action, suspense, romance and Shanghai city tours that fill up the film's running time.

Moviegoers who choose this film for a bit of Oriental mystique will get their money's worth, from panoramic views of the Bund to lessons on how to eat xiaolongbao (soup-filled dumpling), with some modern images of snazzy, skyscraper-filled Shanghai thrown in. Those looking for the essence of Shanghai had better stick to Lou Ye's Suzhou River.

SHANGHAI RED

MARdeORO Films Inc. USA/Shanghai Film Group Corp.

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Oscar Luis Costo

Director of photography: Adam Kane

Producer: Ren Zhonglun

Production designer: Jeff Knipp

Music: Randy Miller

Editor: Josh Muscatine

Cast:

Zhu Meili: Vivian Wu

Michael Johnson: Richard Burgi

The Lawyer: Sun Honglei

The Boss: Ge You

Running time -- 115 minutes

No MPAA rating...