Starring: Tony Leung Ka Fai, Simon Yam, Kate Tsui, Lam Suet, Maggie Siu
Director: Yau Nai Hoi
Scheduled release: 21 June

“There are cameras everywhere. The police can nail you with a hair,” an outwardly unassuming – in more ways than one – criminal mastermind (a masterful Tony Leung Ka Fai) tells his subordinates early on in Eye in the Sky. Even if an Octopus card rather than biological evidence proves to be the crucial clue, they are prescient words in a film that gets its name from how the French word for surveillance is translated into English, and whose main ‘good guys’ are from the Criminal Intelligence Bureau (CIB), the secretive surveillance branch of the Hong Kong Police.

The devil is in the details. Carefully observe and remember everything. Keep watch, stay alert, track and tail rather than determine or even intervene to give relief to a dying colleague. This is what fresh-faced Bo (former Miss Hong Kong Kate Tsui, making her film debut) – both codenamed and nicknamed ‘Piggy’ – is told is her job, nay duty and responsibility, by her team leader, a bespectacled man with stubble and a paunch codenamed Dog Head (a dressed down but still charming Simon Yam).

For even while closed-circuit television cameras and other technological gadgets assist police in their work these days, policing still needs to be done by dedicated but otherwise regular human beings; men and women prepared to lose a colleague, if not their own lives, to ensure law and order prevail. This is but one of the messages rookie director Yau Nai Hoi conveys via this solid debut work with its shades of previous Milkyway Image movies, like Expect the Unexpected (1998) and P.T.U. (2003), the preponderance of Milkyway Image regulars in front of the camera and thematic importance on team players.

Yet, ironically, viewers are meant to mostly identify with one particular character in this film. The kind of newbie cop who comes across as over-idealistic yet raw, the youthful Bo is still trying to find her feet in the shadowy and at times danger-fraught world she has chosen to enter. Respectful of not only the veteran Dog Head but also his four-letter-word-prone commanding officer (Maggie Siu plays this role with obvious relish), she nonetheless also shows before too long that she has a mind of her own.

Which at times leads Bo to run afoul of her seniors but at others marks her with the initiative of a promising unit member. And both initiative and conscientiousness are needed in spades when the CIB and associated police teams go up against an organized team of robbers whose heists are very well planned and precisely timed. This criminal gang is not without faults, though, and a careless action by a slovenly fellow the CIB nickname ‘Fat Man’ (the ever-watchable Lam Suet) gives the CIB the opening they need to hunt down the gang and bring them to justice...

Eschewing the vast expanses of the widescreen favoured by Johnnie To (who co-produced this work with Siuming Tsui), Eye in the Sky is more modest than the offerings I have come to expect from Milkyway Images. For better or worse, the result feels more realistic and less showy even if less stylish. And it shows that Yau Nai Hoi, respectful of his acknowledged sifu (see the interview in this same issue) is, nonetheless, his own man at the helm of a movie. Yvonne Teh

Starring: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Al Pacino, Elliott Gould, Michael Mantell
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Scheduled release: Now Showing

I’ve always firmly believed that Las Vegas and Hollywood are, in many ways, the same town. Except for one looming fact – Las Vegas is the more honest of the two. Surprising sounding, yes. But at the end of the day, both are built on a solid foundation of lies and thievery; overtly celebrate sex, flesh and all variance of surgical enhancements; and enjoy nothing better than lavish displays of luxury and elitism.
Yet Los Angeles works hard to be taken seriously as a cultural, academic and artistic hub, while Vegas struts out, sequined thong and pasties a’glittering for the world to admire and envy. Vegas knows who it is, where it came from (mobsters and stolen money) and exactly why people come to visit. Hence the trademarked city slogan, “What happens here, stays here.”
In this summer’s much-anticipated Ocean’s Thirteen, though, the two camps have reached an amicable union in presentation, portrayal and, most importantly, willingness to poke some fun at each other in the name of a rollicking good time. Because this movie is all about spectacle, trickery and breezy laughs that go down as smoothly as a pricey glass of cognac, it stands as one of this summer’s easiest-to-swallow treats.
Many fans of 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven instantly latched onto director Steven Soderbergh’s hip use of lighting, multi-framed shots within shots, creative angles and big-screen eye candy. The swoon-worthy marquee names of Brad Pitt (Rusty Ryan), George Clooney (Danny Ocean), Julia Roberts (Tess Ocean) and Matt Damon (Linus Caldwell), coupled with the twinkling Vegas setting, helped Ocean’s bring moviegoers in droves to the theatres.
In Ocean’s Twelve, though, the dice didn’t roll so much in the favour of Danny Ocean and company. The group wandered through a spider’s web of plots and subplots and critics and fans alike got lost in a loopy storyline and were rubbed the wrong way by too much tongue-in-cheekiness.
Soderbergh manages to reign in his handsome bevy for a good, old-fashioned heist frolic in Ocean’s Thirteen, which means leaving out stars like Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones and concentrating on – of all things – friendship. Specifically, the Ocean gang’s ties with elder-statesman Reuben (Elliott Gould) who has been shafted out of a lucrative casino partnership with disreputable tycoon Willie Bank (Al Pacino). After Bank sours on the deal, effectively slicing Gould and his life savings out of the soon-to-be completed hotel/casino, the Bank, Reuben lapses into cardiac arrest and teeters on the brink of death. For Ocean and his gang, it’s time to get even and avenge their dear friend through whatever means possible.
Rather than stealing any glittering diamonds or cracking open an impenetrable safe, this go-around has the gang planning to rig each slot, table and roulette wheel in the casino on opening night so that every visitor wins – effectively ‘breaking the Bank.’ From there the usual whirlwind pace of elaborate plans is narrated over rapid-fire shots of domino-effect action. Of course, it would be unfair to divulge all the cinematic fun but, rest assured, the plot twists and turns as much as a limber Vegas showgirl on stage. Ocean’s Thirteen packs in the action including a lovely side plot involving, of all people, Oprah Winfrey that simply must be seen to be believed.
Overall, the film has a certain fluidity, much like Ocean’s Eleven, due in part to the fantastic scoring by David Holmes that blends seamlessly with smartly shot scenes inside the lush Bank hotel designed by Philip Mesina. Critics like to argue the Ocean’s series is nothing but a frenzy of smooth-talking, crisply dressed eye candy and, though I heartily agree, this third instalment has honed in on what makes the films so much fun: the camaraderie between Danny’s motley crew, the neon-lit visual spectacle and the respect paid to Vegas’s golden age. Jessica Jardine

Starring: Karena Lam, Rene Liu (Lau Yeuk Ying),
Julian Cheung, Eddie Cheung
Director: Lo Chi-leung
Scheduled release: 14 June
Kidnap throws its audience immediately into the thick of the action. By the time the opening credits roll, viewers have already witnessed a botched attempt by the police to rescue the victim of a swift abduction that ends up with three dead, one of whom is the young brother of a woman who slaps her grief out on the face of a veteran cop.

Soon afterwards, the psychological horror and personal trauma-laced crime drama fast forwards three years. (A quick fashion quibble: I find it hard to believe that one of the main characters, Lam Hiu Yeung (the multi-faceted Karena Lam), could be so unfashionable as to keep the same hairstyle – and one that doesn’t particular suit her, to boot – over some
three years.)

Early on, Yeung looks like she has become thoroughly embittered since the death of her close relative three years before. With the flashing of a smile and the enacting of a dance with her wheelchair-bound husband (Zhao Huinan), however, she quickly demonstrates there’s more to her than immediately meets the eye.

All things considered, much hinges on the willingness of the audience to realize the several layers of emotional complexity of the two main females in director Lo Chi Leung’s latest offering. Consequently, the director also lays it on pretty thick with the woman who had led the police operations resulting in the death of Yeung’s brother: he ensures we are well aware that Inspector Ho Yuen Chun (the luminous Rene Liu) is not only a much-respected cop, whose second-in-command, Sergeant Ho (the also impressive Eddie Cheung), will do pretty much anything for her, but also a loving mother and the kind of individual whose wussy husband (Julian Cheung) decided to divorce her, not because he didn’t love her anymore, but rather because he found that she didn’t need him.

All of these elements come into play when Inspector Ho is placed in command of another kidnap case and, in a plot twist that hits solidly home for her, it turns out that her son Ho Yin was mistakenly abducted in place of the boy’s classmate and friend from a wealthy family. And the tension is ratcheted up even further when the kidnappers decline to free the child and, instead, demand a $10-million ransom for him.

A distraught Inspector Ho – who has already undergone the ordeal of stripping in public and being knocked unconscious on the orders of the chief kidnapper – becomes increasingly desperate and contemplates breaking the law to save her son. At the same time, nagging away at both her and Sergeant Ho is the feeling that the person thoroughly relishing playing a cat-and-mouse game with the police knows them, or at least their ways, too well…

Full of twists and turns, Kidnap lets up neither emotionally nor in pace. One reason for this may be that if it gives its viewers time to think, the plot will start to unravel as they poke holes in certain all-too-convenient machinations and question how otherwise intelligent cops can fail to notice and act on certain glaringly obvious clues.

Then there is a CGI moment that came pretty close to destroying the film for me and had me looking back fondly to a time of thoroughly skilled stunt people in Hong Kong cinema. Fortunately, Kidnap boasts the sterling presence of Rene Liu; for without the actress from Taiwan whose strong performance stays long in the memory, this Hong Kong-Mainland China co-production’s centre would have soon collapsed. Yvonne Teh

Starring: Masami Nagasawa, Mokomichi Hayami, Tsuyoshi Abe, Takuya Ishida
Director: Kentaro Otani
Scheduled release: Now showing
Director Kentaro Otani once again delves into young love and friendship with a mix of light comedy and earnest drama and though the results are certainly amiable and enjoyable, they are never magical and heartwarmingly fuzzy like his previous film, NANA. As most Japanese films seem to be these days, Rough is based on a manga from Mitsuru Adachi and, though this manga influence can be sensed at times, the romantically troubled narrative would be even more at home in that Japanese version of TV soap opera known as dorama – the snug 11-episode series the Japanese have mastered to perfection. The main problem with this film is that it doesn’t have the time of either a dorama or the manga and feels uncomfortably squeezed into its two-hour format. Many side characters are introduced in the story’s three-year time span – but those years rush by so quickly you barely register most of the characters and rarely get a true sense of time passing.
Ami (Masami Nagasawa – Touch) and Keisuke (Mokomichi Hayami – a television idol) first meet at a swimming competition where Keisuke is racing freestyle against Ami’s mentor and ‘big brother’ Hiroki. Hiroki easily bests the much younger Keisuke, but after the race Keisuke bumps into Ami who calls him a murderer. This leaves him speechless, confused and, in typical Japanese adolescent-male fashion, unable to ask her what she means. Later he gets the chance when it turns out both have enrolled in Eisen High School and will be living in dormitories for students with sports scholarships. The title Rough comes from the dormitory monitor’s description of them as rough sketches to be filled in as they
get older.
Initially, the film looks to be heading down a comic road with the introduction of many quirky students and some amusing potential off-beat romances but that soon gives way to the serious off-and-on relationship between Ami and Keisuke. In a lottery ‘One Day Dating’ contest Keisuke ends up on a date with Ami and discovers that her animosity stems from an old business rivalry in the candy business between their families. But even with that discordance, the two grudgingly become friends and finally develop strong feelings for each other. Yet they are reluctant to speak about what they feel as the years pass. Lots of other characters, complications and swimming pop into the story, but primarily the tension is created by the question whether the two youngsters will declare their love. There are no hard edges to this film and the actors are charmingly innocent as is the material – don’t expect any sex, gang fights or drugs in this high-school tale – or even classes – it is all adolescent love and sports and goes down as easily and unthreateningly as a vanilla milkshake. Brian Naas

Starring: Anthony Wong Chau San, Ronald Cheng, Karen Mok, Teresa Mo, John Shum, Bau Hei Jing, Andrew Lin
Director: Samson Chiu
Scheduled release: 14 June
Mr. Cinema is a movie made to celebrate, not just commemorate, the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China. Produced by the historically left-wing Sil-Metropole Organisation and featuring a good-hearted protagonist Zhou (Anthony Wong Chau San) who’s proudly left wing as well as happy to be a projectionist at a Sil-Metropole cinema, it also revels in lines like “The Chinese are rising” and slogans extolling the “selflessness of social spirit”, one might associate more with a propaganda film than your regular Hong
Kong cinematic offering. And I must admit that the first few minutes of the work not only felt cramped and rushed but also disturbingly dogmatic.
Besides being taken through several decades – from the early 1960s to July 1, 2007 – as the story unfolds, the audience is introduced to characters whose views serve to temper those of the left-wing projectionist whose surname (pronounced Jor in Cantonese but written as Zhou in the English subtitles) actually means ‘left’ as well. One of these, Yan (John Shum), is a Chinese Nationalist sympathizer who nonetheless is a good friend of the movie’s main man. Then there’s Zhou’s loving and largely apolitical wife, Ying (Teresa Mo), who is not so much a willing martyr to the cause as to her marriage.
By far the strongest counterpoint to him, though, is the couple’s only child. Chong (played by Ronald Cheng for the better part of the movie) was sent to a left-wing school and dressed by his parents in Chinese store-bought clothes but is much more attracted to Western name brands and other consumer products, and evinces the entrepreneurial spirit of a Hong Kong yan. The contrast is neatly captured by Chong’s reaction to the elder Zhou’s constant dream of going to Beijing and stepping onto Tiananmen Square. “Can we go to Disneyland first?” the son asks.
As might be expected, the differing ambitions and views of the father and son lead to arguments that become increasingly angry the older both of them become. More than once, the mother steps in to try to balance their opinions and cool things down. After Chong – whose family lives in a more impoverished state than they need to, largely because Zhou’s policy of ‘one for all and all for one’ leads him to donate chunks of his salary, savings and other material possessions to others he considers more deserving – states “I will feel inferior if I don’t have money,” it’s his mother rather than his father who gently tells him “I know it is not great to be poor but it is not a crime.”
In recent years, director Samson Chiu (Golden Chicken 1 and 2; McDull: The Alumni) has carved a niche of sorts for himself making movies with a bittersweet taste. Although its posters might not make it look this way, Mr. Camera turns out to be another such heart-tugging work. Thus, while the likes of Ronald Cheng and Teresa Mo remain best known for their comedic abilities, be duly warned that they and their fellow cast members will have you reaching for the tissues as well as leave you in a more celebratory mood. Yvonne Teh

Starring: Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei
Director: Walt Becker
Scheduled release: 21 June

Prior to the screening of Wild Hogs, the theatre played an advertisement in which two identical cars ‘sumo fight’ on an elevated circular stage. One charges forth, its engines roaring healthily, its nose forcing the other back. That other, its engine squealing pathetically, submits to the force of its opponent until eventually it plummets from the edge of the stage. The difference between the two cars? The first was running on superior fuel.
That car reminds me of Wild Hogs. Ostensibly, Wild Hogs is the same model as every other middle-of-the-road road movie; a hybrid vehicle that mishmashes middle-age crisis comedy with fish-out-of-water, city-slicker slapstick. However, its charismatic and effortless cast, and the occasional bit of wit, see that it performs better than the usual Hollywood dross regularly served up as comedy. Hence its box-office success.
Doug (Tim Allen) is a dentist who wanted to be a doctor, and lives a dissatisfying suburban life (according to Hollywood, is there any other suburban life?) with loving wife Kelly (Jill Hennessy). Woody (John Travolta) has been recently divorced by his supermodel wife and no longer has a penny to his name. He can’t even pay $10 to have his yard raked. Bobby (Martin Lawrence) is trying to write a do-it-yourself book, but his wife (Tichina Arnold) henpecks him mercilessly, demanding that he return to “real work”. Finally, timid and stammering Dudley (William H. Macy) is a computer technician looking for a bit of adventure in his life.
Together, Doug, Woody, Bobby and Dudley are the Wild Hogs. The four regularly get together to ride their motorbikes around the suburbs, recapturing their college days, until the desperate Woody suggests a cross-country road trip, all the way from Cincinnati to California. The Hogs leave their troubles behind, only to discover that the open road has a few more troubles in store.
Wild Hogs is City Slickers meets Road House via Easy Rider told with a tone halfway between Mrs Doubtfire and Old School. Nothing is fresh in the mechanics of this vehicle. The plot is tired and the characters are rote. Eventually, and predictably, the four land in the small town of Madrid where Dudley meets local diner owner Maggie (Marisa Tomei) and the Hogs have to protect the town from a biker gang led by Jack (Ray Liotta). Director Walt Becker’s efforts stringing this all together is serviceable: the film is not as stunted and choppy as his previous effort, Van Wilder, but as a director he still has no real identity.
What makes the film work is the performances. I have never been a fan of Martin Lawrence, but he shines here, settling into his middle age and seeming less desperate to fill the happily unfilled void left when Eddie Murphy passed his use-by date. His eyes, whether rolling or bulging, work really well when unconstrained by the distraction of a fat suit. Allen brings his usual Tool Time charm, and Macy adds a level of professionalism to his inspiringly goofy treatment of even the most faecally-charged material: the efforts of the actors are somewhat undone by such boyish obsessions in the script. Sitcom writer Brad Copeland seems fascinated with everything that bores in frat-boy comedies, and thus we are treated to Dudley’s bag of poo and the literal slapping of a bull on the butt. To be fair, the script has some very bright spots; I liked it when the firm Bobby’s wife gets him a job at is actually a plumbing company named The Firm.
In this otherwise predictable film, it comes as a surprise that the usually brilliant Travolta seems an unwanted distraction. His performance is awkward, almost as if he never takes a moment seriously. Still, quibbles aside, Wild Hogs is an enjoyable enough ride for the undemanding viewer. It runs on good fuel, but the vehicle itself just isn’t great. Joel Meares

Director: Julie Delpy
Starring: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Marie Pillet, Albert Delpy, Alexia Landeau, Adan Jodorowsky, Alex Nahon, Daniel Bruhl
Scheduled release: 28 June­

In this part of the world, many global entertainment figures are multi-talented. Yet even so, the varied accomplishments of Julie Delpy – who scripted, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, composed the music and supplied still photographs for 2 Days in Paris – would stand out as much as she dominates this dialogue-rich bi-lingual (English and French) offering about cultural and personality clashes in France’s capital city. It might all cause some people to become a
tad envious.
That is not to say, though, that Delpy’s character, Paris-born photographer Marion, back in her home city for a two-day visit, is the envy of many other women. She has had her share of good-looking lovers, a number of whom, including the one she lost her virginity to at the age of 19, she remains on warm and friendly terms with. However, the American Jack (Adam Goldberg) with whom the 35-year-old Frenchwoman has been in a relationship for the past two years (but who is making his first visit to Paris), doesn’t seem like quite ‘the catch’.
Prone to paranoia (he has to be coaxed to use public transport for fear of terrorist attacks), hypochondria (though, to be fair, he really had been sick in Venice just before the pair arrived in Paris), self-pity and jealousy (it doesn’t help that he and Marion keep on meeting up with her former lovers), the apt-to-be-whiny individual is more akin to a player in a French farce than a romantic comedy or even drama. Yet for this movie to really work, the viewer would have to find both partners at least likeable, even if not downright attractive.
Marion herself is undeniably pretty and often quite witty but can also be somewhat neurotic and overtaken by public displays of anger. Which could be interpreted as just a charming French trait since many other denizens of this movie’s Paris, including Marion’s parents (played by Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, Julie Delpy’s real-life progenitors) and at least one xenophobic taxi driver are given to hot-tempered histrionics as well. However, after she and a perplexed Jack get thrown out of a restaurant because she picks a fight with someone she accuses of being a paedophile, one does get to thinking that perhaps, as Jack suggests, she could do with some anger management classes.
It is to Delpy’s credit that she doesn’t shy away from showing the less savoury side of Paris – though I imagine people here won’t be shocked at the sight of a suckling pig carcass at a market or a rabbit’s head on a plate as people may be in, say, the USA. At the same time, though, I can’t help thinking that the film would have been better served if more of its idiosyncratic characters had been cast in a better light. Yvonne Teh