PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2004 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
There's good news and better news when it comes to Infernal Affairs (opens
in limited release next month). The good news is that it's a gritty,
noirish Hong Kong police drama. The better news is that it's being remade
by Martin Scorsese for release next year, and I think he'll take care of
most of my issues with the film (most notably, the hella-irritating
score/soundtrack).
Affairs, which has already spawned two sequels, is a delicious mélange of
Michael Mann's Heat and John Woo's Hard Boiled. It begins at a police
training academy, where we first see star pupil Ming (Andy Lau - no relation
to co-director Andrew Lau) scoring brownie points, while the reckless Yan
(In the Mood for Love's Tony Leung) is given the boot before graduation.
But things are not always as they seem. Ming is really a mole planted in
the academy by drug kingpin Sam (Eric Tsang), and Yan's banishment was
orchestrated by SP Wong (Anthony Wong) in order for him to infiltrate Sam's
gang in what becomes a decade-long undercover assignment.
Things come to a head 10 years later, on the eve of a huge drug deal. Both
Sam and SP Wong know there's a spy in their camp, but neither one has a clue
who it might be. That's a whole lot of fun, as are the performances from
Lau and Leung (the latter of whom can be seen this week in Hero). Affairs,
which was edited by Danny Pang (of The Eye's Pang brothers) and "visually
consulted" by Wong kar-wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle, won oodles of
Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film awards. It made me long for the day when we
had strong police dramas on television (a la Homicide: Life on the Streets)
before CSI and Law & Order took over. We gotta take the power back.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38544 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1313456 X-RT-TitleID: 1121503 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 7/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews