Archive for February, 2015
Together Again: Triumph In The Skies and the Rebranding of Francis Ng
Francis checks in, Triumph In The Skies, 2015
The day-and-date release in the U.S. of the movie version Triumph In The Skies (more popularly known as TITS) represents a renaissance of sorts for my boy Francis Ng, who’s enjoying a resurgence of popularity after a bunch of down years. Although probably best known for his straight-up thuggin’ in classic HK gangster movies like Young & Dangerous, The Mission, Exiled, and many many more, Francis has in the past year or so managed to reinvent himself and his public persona as a romantic lead, a family man, and an overall good guy. Ironically, although Francis is mostly a movie king, his rebranding has been based mostly on the popularity of a couple recent television series.
The sequel to the Hong Kong drama on which TITS is based started Francis on his road to recovery back in 2013 as TITS 2 racked up the ratings and online views in both HK and China. Francis reprised his role as Sam Gor, the serious and intense pilot for the fictional HK airline Skylette who moons over his dead wife and hooks up with the young hottie Holiday Ho. As with the original TITS back in 2004, HK audiences (as well as a sizable number of watchers in China) lapped it up and Francis’ popularity, which had mightily declined for a number of reasons (crappy film selection, aging, orneriness, and overall poor career choices) started to rise again.
Twee couple, Dad, Where Are We Going 2?, 2014
But what really got things going again for Francis was another television series, the Hunan TV reality show Dad, Where Are We Going 2? which aired in 2014 and in which Francis starred with his darling boy Feynman, then five years old. The show features six celebrity dads and their ultra-cute offspring wandering the hinterlands of China and interacting with their country cousins. Due in large part to the otherwordly twee charm of his kid and his strict but loving interactions with said child, Francis made a big impression as a warm-hearted patriarch and counteracted his past rep as both a movie villain and a pain-in-the-ass diva actor. Francis released a film while the show was airing, The House That Never Dies, which was a huge box-office success in China due in no small part to his popularity on DWAWG.
Because of the popularity of TITS2, TVB, in association with Shaw Brothers, MediaAsia and its China-based subgroup China Film Media Asia, and a couple other China-based entities, have thus teamed up to produce a film version of the iconic drama series about Hong Kong flight crews and their various romantic entanglements. But despite bringing back Francis as Sam Gor, as well as Julian Cheung Chilam as Jayden “Captain Cool” Ku, the film doesn’t manage to recreate the melodramatic success of the original 2004 series or its 2013 sequel.
Sammi rocks, Triumph In The Skies, 2015
To start with, the movie drops the viewer in medias res, which is fine if you know the backstories of the various characters, but is utterly frustrating for those unschooled in the minutiae of the characters or their past television lives. Weirdly enough, while relying on the audience’s assumed knowledge of the show, the movie also eliminates a lot of key narrative elements from the series, including the crucial love triangle between Sam, Jayden, and Holiday (who is gone completely missing in the movie), and in the film Sam and Jayden don’t even appear together. The film’s story consists of three vignettes featuring Sam, Jayden, and newcomer Branson (played by the inexpressive Louis Koo) which don’t interlock in any meaningful way. Aside from one scene, none of the male leads interact with each other, and Jayden seems to be on another continent for the entire film. Each of the vignettes lack any kind of dramatic tension, with almost nothing at stake for the characters, and they resolve in the most predictable ways possible. The film as a whole is missing self-awereness, irony, wit, or anything that might add a bit of an edge to the film, and the three narratives play out like long-form wristwatch adverts, with gratuitous product placements of bottled water, designer chocolates, and jd.com, the Chinese shopping site that miraculously ships within hours from Asia to London.
Amber & Chilam get wet, Triumph In The Skies, 2015
The lead actors don’t look too bad for their age (with Francis in his fifties and Chilam and Louis both mid-forties), and Charmaine Sheh and Sammi Cheng as the love interests are feasible and not too mismatched. Amber Kuo as Jayden’s girl-toy appears to be way too young for him, though, and their vignette in particular is pretty cringeful, relying on a remarkably tired plot twist and saddling poor Chilam with horribly clichéd romcom dialog about hearts living in other people’s bodies and the like. Sammi Cheng as a pop star (what?) is cool with her tattooed knuckles and hard-part eyebrow and she and Francis make a pretty pair, but the impetus for their hook-up is completely contrived. As a fangirl I did enjoy the sight of Sam Gor practicing his dance moves, but the question still remains: WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS FORMER GIRLFRIEND? There is also a gratuitous subplot involving a pair of mainland Chinese characters that concludes in the cheesiest way possible and which seems tacked on just so the PRC audience can hear a bit of Putonghua (inexplicably, the actor playing Louis Koo’s father also speaks Mandarin, though Louis Koo’s dialog is strictly in Hong Kong Cantonese).
As usual Francis does his thing, acting with his mouth full of food and with his eyebrows quirked, but honestly he doesn’t have a whole lot to do. There’s also a tiny bit of TITS fan service with Kenneth Ma and Elena Kong reprising their characters from the television drama and Kenneth Ma is anonymously humorous in the twenty seconds that he’s onscreen, but their appearances only underscore the calculated genesis of the film, in which the producers are trying to suck in as many customers as possible.
Pretty vacant, Triumph In The Skies, 2015
The entire viewing experience is like injesting an extra-large serving of Kraft Cheese Food Sticks, with lens flare, rainbows, designer clothes, and saturated color correction making for a pleasant but ultimately vacuous optical experience. Coming from a straight-up fanperson like myself who really wanted to like this movie, I think that, for all of its interminable schmaltziness, the TVB drama is actually a better product, since at least it had some interesting character conflicts and gave its performers space to emote a bit. The movie version is all hat and no cattle, with beautiful sunsets and ferris wheels and not much else. But the movie was number one at the box office in Hong Kong during the Lunar New Year holiday and made more than 100RMB during the same time period in China, which bodes well for Francis Ng and his rebooted career. He’s currently working on a film with Zhou Xun, he recently wrapped another Chinese romcom, Love Without Distance (directed by Hong Konger Aubrey Lam), and there’s already talk of another film sequel to TITS (noooooo!) Meanwhile, the Chinese film commerce machine rolls on, as TVB is planning to cash in with a movie version of another one of its recent dramas, Line Walker, with Nick Cheung and Lau Ching Wan rumored to star.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a mainstream movie like TITS is so overtly commercial, but being an optimist I always hope that these undertakings might squeeze in a bit of craft and care and maybe even some genuine artistry. No such luck here, but kudos to Francis Ng for riding the wave and coming out on top once again.
Back In Black: 2015 Noir City film festival
Stanwyck and Lund caught in the web, No Man Of Her Own, 1950
The 13th Annual Noir City film fest has come and gone, and as usual it was a celebration of audience-participation in fedoras and fox furs, with free booze samples in the Castro Theater mezzanine between the double-bills.
The glorious week and a half of movies, co-curated by Noir City founder Eddie Mueller and local rep movie queen Anita Monga (she also programs the Silent Film Festival), featured bleakness, backstabbing, angst, and deceit, with some programming surprises to leaven the usual shadowy mid-century filmic fare. I made it out to a fair percentage of the shows, and although I didn’t dig out my peplum jackets or pumps, I did catch several great movies along the way.
The festival’s theme was the subject of marriage and the films all dealt with (un) holy matrimony in one way or another. First up on the docket were a pair of movies set in Edwardian England that were all about killing your spouse. Ivy is a fun black widow film featuring Joan Fontaine as the conniving title character. Although set a bit earlier in history than the classic mid-twentieth-century noir, the film’s gorgeous camerawork by Touch of Evil cinematographer Russell Metty oozed with classic noir imagery including shadowed faces, silhouettes, forced perspective, and similarly expressionistic lighting and camera techniques. The movie’s fancy art direction included gorgeous peplums, ribbons, and frills defining the Edwardian look, with lead actress Fontaine in particular tricked out in period wear, but the storyline, about a married women who wants to bump off both her husband and her lover, is classic noir.
Joan Fontaine back in black, Ivy, 1947
The second film in the double bill, The Suspect, is a much more nuanced look at spousacide, giving its protagonist a layered representation that adds a complexity to his possibly murderous motivations. Whereas in Ivy the doomed spouse is a cheerful and likeable chap, the wife in The Suspect is nothing but misery and her demise is a blessing, not a crime, which makes her suspected killer a sympathetic character rather than a heel. This perception is hugely aided by Charles Laughton’s subtle performance as the cuckolded husband wanting desperately to escape his unhappy marriage. Laughton acts with his entire body and his facial expressions and body language tell the tale beautifully. Ella Raines as the love interest is also pretty good, though her English accent slips in and out. Director Robert Siodmak creates an excellent and suspenseful narrative structure worthy of Hitchcock that never fully reveals the guilt or innocence of the main character–did he or didn’t he?
The festival also included a trifecta of Barbara Stanwyck films. Stanwyck was always good at playing intelligent women chafing again societal restrictions and her roles in the three films at Noir City this year were no exception. Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night, an adaptation of Clifford Odets’ Broadway play, is a bit stagey but it includes great performances by Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan (who I’ve always found a bit creepy due to his wrinkly forehead and intense eyebrows) as the three points of a love triangle set amidst the Monterey fishing canneries. A young Marilyn Monroe is also good as a spunky cannery worker involved with an abusive boyfriend, demonstrating the acting chops that were sometimes obscured in her later, glitzier films.
Ryan, Stanwyck, and fridge, Clash By Night, 1952
Even more pointedly critiquing the strictures of the oppressed housewife ground to dust by society’s expectations is Crime of Passion. Though possessing a less stellar pedigree than Clash By Night, the movie nonetheless makes an airtight argument for the case that restricting women to confining gender roles leads to murder and madness. Stanwyck plays a hotshot newswoman who falls for a manly cop (Sterling Hayden) who then gives up her career to become the little woman. Seeing Hayden as a romantic lead is a bit weird for me, since I’m mostly familiar with his later career as a dissolute character actor. But Hayden began his career as a male model and was considered a babe when he was younger, though by the time this movie was filmed he’d already started to get a bit jowly around the edges. At any rate, his extra-large build is a worthy lure for Stanwyck’s feisty female news reporter and it feels plausible that an independent gal might abandon her career for the likes of such a hypermasculine specimen.
The Stanwyck eyebrow, Crime of Passion, 1957
Rounding off the mini-set of Stanwyck was the classic noir weepy, No Man of Her Own. Stanwyck plays a pregnant woman abandoned by her no-good boyfriend who, through a set of implausible circumstances, poses as the wife of a man killed in a train accident. She and her newborn son are taken in by her “husband’s” family and the film mostly centers on the psychological strain of deceiving her new in-laws and fending off their warm and fuzzy affections. Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, the film focuses on Stanwyck’s reformed outsider attempting to maintain her newfound place among a family of white Christian pillars of society. Stanwyck is as usual magnificent in all three films, using her face, her posture, and the subtle inflection of her dialog to convey the psychic crises of her characters as each struggles with devastating interior conflicts.
Daphne, the real star of the show, Sleep, My Love, 1948
Noir City also included a couple films from the famous Thin Man series, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, which focus on rich people who got the sweet end of the lollipop, and the A-list MGM production provided an interesting contrast to the grittier fare in the rest of the festival. After watching one-percenters Nick and Nora Charles sashay through the two films in top hats, satin smoking jackets, and feathery dressing gowns it was easy to discern the much different thematic and stylistic concerns found in film noir, which usually focuses on the losers in life. Similarly, the Claudette Colbert-Robert Cummings vehicle, Sleep, My Love (dir. Douglas Sirk) strictly speaking wasn’t noir either, as the wealthy heiress and her playboy suitor were entirely too optimistic and guileless to be true noir protagonists. If it had been a textbook noir film the lead character would’ve been the slinky photographer’s model Daphne, who snarls the classic lines, “I want her house, I want her life, and I want her man.”
An interesting side aspect that caught my eye: Chinese people and/or culture made appearances or were referenced in three of the films that I saw in the series. Yet as per usual for Hollywood at the time, only one of those representations, in Sirk’s Sleep, My Love, was thoughtful and not insulting. In that movie Keye Luke has a supporting role as Robert Cumming’s pal-friday, first appearing in an extended scene at his own wedding. Said Chinese wedding is only mildly orientalized, at first as a punchline to the Cummings comment that he’s invited to wedding of his “brother” (who turns out to be with his Chinese business partner, played by Luke). Later, the Chinese male gets to have a healthy and normal sex drive as he avidly makes out with his new wife in anticipation of their wedding night, and a running joke centers on the couple’s eager impatience to get to the honeymoon suite. Luke speaks unaccented English and is Cumming’s partner and friend, not subordinate or servant, which for the 1940s is pretty progressive. Props to Sirk for a balanced and sympathetic portrayal of Chinese culture in general and a Chinese man in particular.
Sleek and sexy, Keye Luke and Marya Marco, Sleep, My Love, 1948
The other appearances of Chinese culture in Noir City films this year consisted of standard stereotypes and reflect the casual racism that’s always been business as usual in Hollywood’s representation of Asians. In the otherwise respectable Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Clash By Night Robert Ryan’s cynical loner character Earl inexplicably does his “Chinese impersonation,”a ching-chong imitation of Chinese speech complete with the corners of his eyes pulled up. In After The Thin Man, the film depicts San Francisco’s local color in part by setting several scenes in a Chinese nightclub. Lum Kee, the nightclub owner and one of the many murder suspects in the film, speaks mostly unaccented English for the bulk of the film but his closing line of dialog is for some reason delivered in a broken ching-chong accent. Side note: before breaking out as a big-time star in the Thin Man series Myrna Loy was known for playing a series of yellowface roles.
Coming up in March will be the International Film Noir series at the Roxie Theater, organized by Don Malcolm, who put together the French Noir festival there last November, and Elliot Lavine, the programmer of I Wake Up Dreaming, the Roxie’s annual noir festival. More noir is always better, so I’m looking forward to ingesting more dark visions of crime, duplicitousness, and paranoia.
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