Back on 21 August 2003, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl blew into Hong Kong cinemas. A certified blockbuster of a movie, it had already made over US$230 million at the American box office alone by then. And, to put it mildly, it proved to be a hit too with local Hong Kong audiences who flocked into theatres to get their first taste, and more, of the black-eye-shadowed ‘Captain’ Jack Sparrow, young but resourceful Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann and co.

Now, as Hong Kong braces for the third swashbuckling instalment of the wildly popular franchise, we at bc figure it would be good to get those isolated souls who’ve not yet hitched a ride on this extravagant cinematic vehicle up to speed by providing them with a few short sketches of the prime personalities who figure in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End:

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp):
British colonial India-born Jack Sparrow was literally branded a pirate after he refused to transport slaves and, instead, freed them in Africa. Later, he struck a bargain with the villainous Davy Jones, captain of the ghostly Flying Dutchman, to raise his ship from the ocean floor and grant him captaincy for 13 years of the rechristened Black Pearl in return for Jones getting to own his soul for 100 years afterwards. And this deal is what comes back to haunt Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. (One word: Kraken!)

Will Turner (Orlando Bloom):
A lowly blacksmith’s apprentice – but also a craftsman of fine swords – in Port Royal, the Jamaican centre of shipping commerce reputed to be “the richest and wickedest city in the world” during its heyday. Young Will Turner seals his fate by falling for Elizabeth Swann, the governor’s daughter, and then teaming up with the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow to rescue her after she is kidnapped by the evil Captain Barbossa and his crew. As time goes on, and after undergoing several baptisms of fire, the once naïve boy develops into a worldly-wise man entirely befitting the affections of his lady love.

Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley):
For a woman of noble rank, Elizabeth Swann sure gets into more than her fair share of trouble and adventures! Also, for all her having fallen at one point into the clutches of the nefarious Captain Hector Barbossa, she turns out to be quite the dab swordswoman and battle strategist; which is good because those skills are often much needed in the company of Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and their ilk.

Davy Jones (Bill Nighy):
The strangest looking individual among a group of colourful characters, the fearsome captain of the Flying Dutchman was the primary heavy in the second Pirates, and he figures once more in the latest film. (On a technical note: as with the rest of his crew bar ‘Bootstrap Bill’, the diabolical Davy Jones is actually a CGI creation. So it’s perhaps more accurate to describe actor Bill Nighy as voicing rather than actually portraying the character.)

Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush):
Jack Sparrow’s erstwhile first mate who betrayed and led a mutiny against his captain, Captain Barbossa became a member of the undead upon unknowingly unleashing an ancient Aztec curse. The main villain of the first Pirates piece, he appeared only in the tail-end of the second section of the saga but looks to once more have prominent screen time in the latest Pirates episode.

Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat):
How appropriate that the character based on Hong Kong’s very own Cheung Po Tsai will be played by Chow Yun-Fat! Still, rather than hailing from Hong Kong, the captain of The Empress is identified as a pirate lord based out of Singapore – to where Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann and others have sailed to steal an important navigational chart. We wish it were otherwise but at press time, it remains unclear whether Captain Sao Feng is a good or bad guy. Although he previously crossed paths with Jack Sparrow, it’s hard to figure out whether that’s a clue to his affiliations or just a red herring.

Starring: Leon Lai, Fan Bingbing, Rene Liu
Director: Teng Hua-Tao
Scheduled release: May 17
The Matrimony, like the name implies, focuses on relationships and love, with the supernatural angle adding that extra dimension to complicate matters. It is not a horror movie per se, but a tragic love story that has its characters perpetually stuck with their various issues. Leon Lai stars as cinematographer Shen Junchu, a man living in a state of denial and guilt who can’t forget his true love. Fan Bingbing plays Xu Manli, the woman he can’t forget, who now belongs to the netherworld, but who is still trying her best to make contact. And rounding up the main cast is Rene Liu as Sansan, Jinchu’s present wife, stuck in a loveless unconsummated marriage, but looking, too, for ways to reach out to him.
While initially the usual attempts at scaring the audience (creaky doors, quick edits, camera pans...) are put through the motions, they are soon abandoned when the story focuses on the contrasting affections these two women have for their man. Then the film becomes more an exploration of the methods to attain the unattainable. To Manli, it is obvious that her appearance and touch will harm Junchu, and for Sansan, it becomes clear that nursing a crush without a two-way emotional connection is futile. So a pact between the two women is made, at first seemingly to benefit Junchu, but later revealed to be much more than meets the eye.
The story is fairly straightforward, but to its credit it stays coherent, recalling storytelling days of old. It doesn’t have a twist save for what I deem cop-out wrapper scenes which, if you ignore their use as bookends, actually make for a refreshing experience given that horror movie finales these days are always so clichéd. The narrative rarely goes over the top or gets too full of itself, and so preserves the beauty of its simplicity.
But there is nothing simple here in terms of production values. The film sets are lush and gorgeous, and every effort is made to try and match the authenticity of the time, making it a beautiful film to look at. The only smudge that mars the visual spectacle is a crucial scene in which visual effects are badly done and cheesy. Later scenes are made to perfection, but I guess for this particular one, some quality control was allowed to slip. The movie starts off rather slowly but thankfully the pace picks up as the film progresses, and, anyway, it is difficult to get bored while admiring almost everything in the mise en scène.
Rene Liu has the most to do as, surprisingly, much of the story revolves around her character Sansan who has the richest history of the three, which, of course, is a great challenge to Liu’s acting range. Leon Lai is stoned for the most part, while Fan Bingbing is largely scheming which accords with the age-old superstition that any spirit clad in red will be the most vicious.
I could probably stick my neck out to say that this makes a decent date movie, despite the secondary subject of spirits and ghostly possession. Just remember not to play with a dealmaker who isn’t from this part of existence. Stefan S

Starring: Fann Wong, Gurmit Singh, Moses Lim, Samuel Chong
Director: Jack Neo
Scheduled release: Now showing
Jack Neo is undoubtedly Singapore’s most commercially successful director, having made 10 films (including this one), which topped the charts and broke Singaporean box office records. His films touch a common heartlander chord with their fusion of satire and subtle jabs at topical issues.
Almost everyone can identify with the frustrations of civil service bureaucracy and its unpleasant staff with their less than helpful stick-to-the-rule-book answers and attempts to shift responsibility and cover their rears. Nor are company employees free from such antics. For the first 20 minutes, Neo’s film is all that – office politics 101 with spot-on accuracy, jazzed up by special effects.
The story is set in a fictitious government body tasked to create jobs and encourage skills upgrading. But the fact is that almost everyone in the department needs a serious skills upgrade themselves. You can laugh at the inept CEO, the conniving colleagues, the unskilled workers and the bootlickers as they all have a go at each other. But then as familiar incidents are played out by familiar characters, it dawns that you could well be laughing at yourself…
Yet the film plays out quite childishly, like school skits not very well cobbled together. The variety of ideas cannot be faulted, but they don’t gel into an engaging narrative and at times it is like watching a tele-movie plagued by too many minor characters, each a one-dimensional mouthpiece for the issue it represents. The skits try to be stand-alone jokes as they lead one into another through lazy fade-outs, so that, although there is the semblance of a main plot, we get a series of meek attempts at comedy or awkward scenes where social issues are more or less shovelled down our throats.
However, casting Fann Wong was a coup, and it is immensely appealing to watch her trash her glamorous goody-two-shoes image in a comedic role requiring her to act like a siao char bor (mad woman). And she pulls it off with aplomb: she burps, farts, grabs her boobs and walks, talks and swears like an ‘ah beng’. According to reports, her minders were in fits as her character swapped the body of a high-ranking scholar manager with that of Gurmit Singh’s lowly Lim Teng Zui. Image-wise, she threw caution to the wind but it turned out well, the same couldn’t be said for Gurmit playing a woman – this is no Mrs Doubtfire or Tootsie. He plays it relatively muted and, when he and Wong are on screen together, there is no doubt who is the movie star, Fann giving the veteran comedian a run for his money. Still, the chemistry between them is obvious, even though the plot and dialogue were sometimes too thin to keep the swapped-gender pretense convincing.
Being a Jack Neo movie, product placement is never far away and the director has created plenty of opportunities for advertising, all milked to the max. Jack also couldn’t resist putting himself in a cameo hammering referential jabs at the government.
The film’s budget was more than S$1 million; sometimes the movie’s look and feel seem like it, at others they are a lot cheaper. The effects though are surreal – a substitute, probably, for obvious stunts or backdrops that would have proved relatively costly to make. And did I detect a recycling of a song from an earlier film?
Just Follow Law will do well, given Fann’s against-the-grain role. A pity that it could have been much better. Stefan S

Starring: Kim A-jung, Joo Jin-mo, Kim Hyun-sook, Lee Han-wi, Seo Yoon, Seong Dong-il
Director: Kim Yong-hwa
Scheduled release: May 17
Hanna is a good-natured, hard-working woman blessed with a knockout voice. Thanks to this, she is hired to perform as a ‘ghost singer’ for a sexy, hot-tempered young pop star named Ammy. As Ammy struts about the stage, lip-synching amidst her crowd of backup singers and dancers, Hanna is backstage in front of the microphone. No one takes seriously the prospect of Hanna becoming a pop star on her own, because at 169cm and 95kg, she’s about as far from the thin, pretty prototype as you can get. But she seems happy enough pouring her heart into song each night, and staying as close as she can to Ammy’s good-looking young music producer Sang-joong, who seems to genuinely enjoy her company.
Alas, this happy equilibrium cannot last, and one day Hanna finds herself utterly humiliated and robbed of any will to go on. Rather than kill herself, she drops out of society and embarks on a course of radical plastic surgery and weight loss. Her surgeon is talented, the pounds come flying off, and a few months later Hanna is not only unrecognizable, she is a stunning beauty. And with a voice to match (but a secret to hide), she is a prospective diva with no need to lip-synch.
For me this is not the sort of synopsis that inspires great confidence, and the first 20 minutes of the film seemed only to confirm my worst fears. The fetching young actress Kim A-jung (When Romance Meets Destiny) who portrays Hanna is decked out in a latex fat suit which is more or less convincing, except for the fact that her face muscles don’t move when she speaks. The narrative initially bumps along powered by fat jokes that are offensive and not particularly funny. (Nobody else in the theatre was laughing, either).
Gradually, however, the film starts to produce some well-deserved laughs, and by the time Kim A-jung is allowed to shed her latex, we end up with a fairly entertaining comedy. The film has various little strengths I can point to, such as a surprisingly good performance by Joo Jin-mo (Happy End, Musa), a bouncy soundtrack, a few good supporting characters, and an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the Korean music industry.
But Kim A-jung is the reason to watch this film. I have to say it, Kim A-jung is the bomb. Not only does she look great, but does all of the singing on her own and displays a nice instinct for comedy. When Hanna transforms herself, she becomes beautiful but doesn’t really ‘act’ beautiful, having grown up as someone almost universally looked down on. Kim manages to capture this element of the role nicely, even when it gets rather heavy-handed towards the film’s end. 200 Pound Beauty was based on a Japanese manga by Suzuki Yumiko, although – like Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy – the final screenplay has ended up differing quite a bit from the source material. It’s tempting to try to tease some sort of social insight out of the film, given the rage for plastic surgery among young Koreans (men as much as women). I’m not sure the film really supports this, however – ultimately it’s just an entertaining comedy with nothing particularly new to say.
Nonetheless, Korean audiences were certainly charmed, as they bought a stunning six and a half million tickets, for a box office take of about US$45 million. It may be ‘hard to be a beauty’ (the original Korean title of this film), but it certainly doesn’t hurt ticket sales. Darcy Paquet

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau Jr, Robert Carlyle,
Rose Byrne, Catherine McCormack, Imogen Poots
Scheduled release: Now showing
The grisly 28 Weeks Later jettisons the director, cast, and recurring characters from the original film – Danny Boyle’s 2003 nightmare vision 28 Days Later – and keeps only the franchise’s dynamic plot device: a rage virus that, in seconds, turns unsuspecting citizens into violent zombies. It’s an effective way to wipe the slate clean before more blood is splattered across it.

Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo structures his picture less like a conventional sequel and more like a ‘next chapter’ in the horror saga, which might explain why this fresh, energized, and clever installment works better than it should.

If you can’t recall the details of Days, don’t fear. Title cards re-educate us about the first film’s happenings, which shadowed a coma patient waking up to an apocalyptic London decimated
by the aforementioned disease. Seven months after that, portions of the evacuated city have been decontaminated and prepared for reconstruction. People who ran for the hills are returning, slowly.

Among the survivors is Don (Robert Carlyle), the submissive father of Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), who reunites with his children in the safe zone after narrowly escaping an attack. The kids ask what happened to Mom, and Don says she was claimed by the Infected – a catchy moniker for the stalking creatures. The family settles into the green zone, a virus-free area shared by fretful scientist Scarlet (Rose Byrne), soldier-with-a-conscience Doyle (Jeremy Renner), and a platoon of US- and NATO-sponsored snipers ready to respond if the zombies were to worm their way back to London.

Fresnadillo improves on the grave new world of Days, building on the already impossible shots of a deserted, dilapidated London that Boyle first conjured. Weeks would provide audiences with a vibrant tour of the city’s monumental landmarks – Big Ben, Parliament, Wembley Stadium – if not for the omnipresent corpses littering the cobblestone streets. Fresnadillo’s production team creates a triumph of apocalyptic neglect that logically extends the death and destruction from the initial film.

Stability can’t last for long, though, and screenwriter Rowan Joffe (assisted by Fresnadillo) comes up with a sharp method for reintroducing the virus, allowing all hell to break loose. The Infected storm the safe zone, creating some genuinely creepy scenes and ample amounts of gore. Buried deep in the chaos, though, Weeks finds a storyline worth exploring. Scarlet’s research suggests a cure might be found in Tammy and Andy’s genes, so she commits to shuttling them out of London – a task made harder by the presence of the marauding zombies and the military, now on ‘Code Red’, ordered to kill anything that moves.

Carnage lures crowds to zombie pictures such as these, but Weeks excels when it explores deeper human reactions to the constricting situations created by the deadly infections. Fresnadillo slips twisted ideas into his script – Don’s conundrum regarding his wife establishes a great hook for what could have been a mindless monster movie, and obstacles preventing Scarlet’s exit from London’s safe zone are credible (at least, as credible as a zombie flick can be). Unfortunately, Fresnadillo loses his grip when he has to stage extreme chaos, and too many attack scenes are directed as if the cameras were mounted on the backs of running dogs. Why stage such action if you won’t allow your audience to enjoy it?

Weeks recoups from these minor mistakes by making bold choices in the middle and third acts. The movie improves as the survival prognosis of the main characters worsens. And the way it’s currently structured, the 28 franchise could last forever: the ending of this segment teases a potential location shift for the inevitable 28 Months installment. Sean O’Connell

Starring: Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel, Robert Patrick, Bailee Madison
Director: Gabor Csupo
Scheduled release: May 31
One wonders if the makers of Bridge to Terabithia actually have something against all the people who loved reading Katherine Paterson’s award-winning book as children. The original story, which deals with loneliness, isolation, and the importance of friendship, is now – thanks to a cloying screenplay by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson (son of the book’s author) – little more than an anodyne valentine to the power of the imagination or some such cliché popular among vulgarizers of young adult literature. You could ask why they can’t just leave well enough alone. The answer, unfortunately, is they never do.

A great many problems with Bridge to Terabithia could have been solved by casting, which director Gabor Csupo gets wrong from the start. The protagonist, Jesse Aarons, a lonely fifth grader in a small town, is played with sullen inattention by Josh Hutcherson. His better half is Leslie Burke, the new girl in town, performed by AnnaSophia Robb with a bright and shallow perkiness that suggests a callow Keira Knightley 10 years ago. With not much going in the way of chemistry between the two, it’s difficult for the film’s rather (on the surface) uneventful and deeply interior story to gain much traction.

The gist of the matter is that both Jesse and Leslie are pretty miserable, as is the lot of many isolated fifth graders. Both are picked on by bullies and their respective home lives are less than great – Jesse’s parents are working when not yelling at him, and Leslie’s mom and dad are self-involved writers who barely notice when she’s not there. As a means of escape, the two spend their days after school in a deep patch of woods near their houses, reachable only by a rope swing over a turbulent creek. Back there, in a falling-down tree house, they create the imaginary world of Terabithia, filled with magical creatures, a Dark Lord, and the occasional battle with the forces of evil. Beats geometry homework.

A major concern among fans of the book was that the backers of the film (Disney and Christian media group Walden, which are behind the Narnia films) would turn the story into a special-effects extravaganza: that at least didn’t happen. The CGI scenes Csupo creates to graphically illustrate the fantasy life of Jesse and Leslie are kept thankfully brief. The heart of the film is indeed supposed to be Jesse and Leslie’s friendship – as well as the surprising (at least for those not familiar with the book) tragedy that turns the movie on its head near the end – and it’s not the fault of the special effects that this heart is simply not beating.

The brightly generic camerawork, cliché-clogged screenplay, flat acting styles (though character actors like Robert Patrick and Zooey Deschanel do decent work in small roles), and a couple of preachy nods to the wonders of religion reduce this potentially heartbreaking tale to something cheap and ordinary. This isn’t art, it’s product. Chris Barsanti