tell me about it

Watched 男儿本色with Kaixin yesterday at sleazy ol’ Beach Road Prince theatre.

Wasn’t expecting much beyond the excited “Want to watch free movie? Got cute Hong Kong boys!” SMS that she sent me so I went in without much expectations.

But WAH…I really, really, really loved the movie. Hong Kong movies are actually damn good when you come to think about it. Their fight scenes are so much better choreographed, for one thing; the men are much more attractive (Leo DiCaprio compared to Andy Lau? Please), they aren’t afraid to kill off major characters, and bad sometimes triumphs over good.

What I really like is that HK movies often explore the duality of good and evil more convincingly than any Hollywood movie ever could. There’s so much ambiguity. In the movie, you have cops brawling bloodily in restaurants, pursuing ‘justice’ for their own selfish reasons (revenge and reputation), while the bad guys are bad because they grew up in poverty, without parental influence, and grew up believing in a dog-eat-dog world. Who’s to say who’s good or bad? Nothing’s black or white.

The fight scenes are amazing. They jump all over rooftops, smash into buses, roll around on a floor covered in burning gasoline. The explosions are graphic and you get heavily invested in the emotions and feelings of each character, whether good or bad. And of course it helps a lot that all of them are total hunks. Giggle.

Shawn Yue (yummy), Nicholas Tse (yummier), and Jaycee Chan (surprisingly cute in a good-boy clean-cut way; KX you’re right, he looks much better now with that decent haircut) are the good guys; Wu Jing as the bad guy (and some of his seven brothers are cute too). It’s a major drool fest for the girls and packed with bloody fantastic action for the guys.

There’s also a gratituous scene where all three men strip their shirts off and massage liniment into each other’s bruises. Teeheesqueegiggle.

It opens officially on MY BIRTHDAY which is TOMORROW wooo! So this is definitely twenty thumbs-up (if I had twenty thumbs); go watch go watch go buy tickets is NICE.

Even better than Infernal Affairs.