First Love

[moshi moshi]

> Am I here to come to WKW's defense?  Perhaps.  For me the problem with
> Fallen Angels has more to do with bad acting (main killer guy, forget his
> name) than bad shooting.  

Leon Lai. I agree he wasn't at his best but it's rumoured to be Takeshi
Kaneshiro's best performance (and he isn't usually a bad actor)
and Charlie Young, Michelle Reis and Karen Mok weren't half bad either...

> Which is not to say that the next WKW film will not fall into imitations of
> other WKW films, or that I look forward to seeing an outpouring of films
> shot in this style because its cool.  This would be horrific.

Considering he went from triad movie to kung fu to romance, he doesn't
seem to stagnate yet. 
>From what I've seen of Hong Kong's new new wave, the few directors that
have adapted (and not adopted) Wong's style seem to have done it pretty
well, especially when you think of movies like "Too many ways to be Number
1", "Odd obsession", etc.
We also have to keep in mind that if WKW's films are perceived as very
artsy in the west, they still use all the big stars of HongKong and are
thus big events over there like a DiCaprio/Pitt/Truman movie could be in
America (I'm sorry about my comparison, I'm really out of touch with
American cinema...).

On another topic, would anybody on this list be interested in establishing
a "serious" (KineJapan-style) list for Chinese/HongKongese/Taiwanese
movies? It seems to be lacking with only alt.asian-movies as an
alternative option...

Take care,
Olivier Petitpas