I don't know what donkeys ever did to Americans, but they seem obsessed with kicking them. The eponymous film was no donkey though. Great fun and even better for a kids show, it was Category 3 here in Hong Kong, but only an R rating in the US. In order to watch it I had to show my ID. Now, as I am getting perilously close to claiming senior citizen concessions, when I was asked to show my card I wondered if I was having a Benjamin Button moment and living life in reverse. That would make perfect sense: an adults only kids show where to gain admission, the oldest person in the audience has to show their ID to prove they are under eighteen.
I have often thought that Hong Kong was in some kind of parallel universe where time moved slow whilst one experienced it quickly; where as the rest of the world had democratic revolutions, the communists took over and were more capitalist than the capitalists in enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor; and worse still, had a flourishing film industry that flew away to Hollywood as I flew in and Hollywood decamped to Toronto. Which is where a lot of Kick Ass was shot.
Comparing Kick Ass with "Assassins and Bodyguards", winner of the Asia Film Awards Best Film category, is like comparing, well, an adult movie that is too dumb even for kids, with a kids show that is smart and deemed only fit for adults. In this bizarro universe silly and pretentious is good and exhilarating and fun is corrupting. I wonder which will make the most money? The one with a script or the one that cobbled together some old bits of TVB Soap Operas and threw in some patriotic stuff about history's dullest revolutionary?
So much for the revival of the Hong Kong Film Industry. The mainland's penchant for propaganda movies has mingled with Hong Kong's penchant for chop socky to the detriment of both. I believe I say somewhere in my notes about the nature of the film industry, that it is not the films that should be made that are made, but those that can be made? Talent, economics and politics fight it out and the audience, it is hoped, will do as they are told.
So what was I saying about Zombies the other day? In the case of the cinema, we are all manipulated into getting into paying our ticket before we can get the word out. Now and then the real sentiments of the audience twitter forth and confound the worst intentions.
Kick Ass duked it out with "How To Train Your Dragon" in the US and did well. It did not break out of its core audience, the web-savvy comic book aficionado teenager, into the adult audience, but word of mouth is probably turning the tide on that. And certainly the inability of under-eighteens to see it in Hong Kong will guarantee a massive purchase of its DVD as the twenty somethings talk about it. In fact I can hear them downloading pirate versions from Chinese web sites as I type. Mention Salmonella Yak Burgers in an e-mail and you'll have the thought police hammering on your door, but set up a feed for illegal downloading of American movies and somehow nobody notices.
One thus smells a cult classic in the making. Whereas Bodyguards and Assassins just, well, it will be quietly forgotten. One doesn't want to completely run down what was obviously a labour of love for the set designers and costumers, but the actors looked bored and the editing looked somewhat hasty and unconsidered. I'm not sure if there were writers and directors involved in the proceedings. They probably rightly kept themselves inconspicuous. Budgetwise the two movies cost much the same.
And then Alex Law and Mabel Cheung with not much more than the change from their piggy bank put together "Echoes of the Rainbow" and manage to make a story about dying of leukemia, entertaining and thought provoking. That's another film that deserves a good wallop of word of mouth.
Fight the zombies I say!