Made in Hong Kong

Every once in a while you'll see a film that just makes you say "wow". After the final scene goes by, you just sit there watching as the credits go by, then the black space after the credits, then the "snow" after that, then finally the tape rewinding itself. You just continue sitting there watching the screen... dumbfounded.... you just sit there and say "wow". Made In Hong kong is one of those movies. To say that this movie blew me away would be an understatement. This movie got inside of me and changed the way I look at HK cinema, or cinema as a whole for that matter, hell... it even changed the way I look at life.

Autumn Moon is a low life thug, he and some friends discover the body of a dead girl who committed suicide, and a note she left. This dead girl that he never knew ends up teaching him more about his own life than he could by himself, and also guides him to his own fate. See this movie and experience cinema at it's best.

absolutely blown away by this film. It got to me like no other film. I couldn't stop the tears rolling down my cheeks. I started mourning for them, sitting there in front of the tv, watching the light went out and the sun started to set. It hurts.

Sluggish gangster genre revitalised by infusion of teen melodrama. One of the films of the year. The violence is, for once, sickening, immediate and real, rather than crude comedy, but interlaced with expressionistic sensibility of dead protagonist. Deeply moving on a personal level, and highly comic in spite of ultimate despair. The director's visual vocabulary is immense, with imagery of such dreamlike, poetic, evocative beauty, your heart stops.

Fruit Chan's debut film was seen by many in Hong Kong as a metaphor for the foreboding that gripped the colony in the years before 1997, and Chan himself has said that it is the first part of a trilogy on the handover--the second part is "The Longest Night." Metaphorical resonances aside, though, under the energetic, sometimes violent surface of "Made in China" is a film of haunting sadness and compassion. The central character, the young, jobless Autumn Moon, is proud of his ability to live by his wits; but he ends up in a world that his wits can't handle. Chan's ingenuity in making this film on a tiny budget with amateur actors is obvious, but one leaves the film overwhelmed with sadness for the lives of the characters--most of all Autumn Moon's, and his despairing inability to help the people he cares about.

At least two famous film critics retired at a time when they felt they were no longer in step with new cinema. One was a much revered Sunday newspaper journalist in the UK who saw the writing on the wall when she could only register her loathing for "Psycho". Although I am not a professional critic and simply like to impart enthusiasm rather than condemnations through this website, I sometimes wonder if I am out of step with what a much younger generation of audiences admire. I have all but ceased going to the commercial cinema where nine out of ten offerings seem to be mindless kids' fodder delivered at a painfully high decibel level. Far too often those that my peergroup recommend, "0negin" or "The House of Mirth" for example, I find to be dreary and portentous. And so I sit through endless art house movies, many of them enervating in the extreme, just for that wonderful sense of discovery when something like "La Promesse" from Belgium or "After Life" from Japan occurs. However, I had a sobering experience the other day which has warned me not to be too dismissive of "youth appeal" films when I saw "Made in Hong Kong". First impressions were dreadful, slapdash hand-held camera stuff, washed out colours, tempo continuously at feverpitch and a plot I could barely follow - the last factor is something I recognise as a personal shortcoming if my interest is not initially aroused. I could not quite pinpoint at the time why I did not abandon there and then a film I was barely comprehending or why something afterwards tempted me to give it a second go. I was extremely glad I did as I think I achieved an insight into why such a film can work for young people. The three main characters are all so likeable. There is Moon the school dropout turned toughie, his sidekick a retard whom he protects called Sylvester and Ping the girl with a serious kidney disease whom they are both soft on. For all its violent rough cut trappings, "Made in Hong Kong" is an incredibly sentimental film about camaraderie of the "Kings Row" sort that my generation wallowed in and "Dead Poets Society" revered by the generation in between. It is that old "youth - death" thing all over again. My recognition and appreciation of this in a film initially as alien as "Made in Hong Kong" gives me hope that I can still keep in step.