All posts tagged li meng

VORTEX (2019) review

In Jacky Gan’s debut feature, Da Peng plays Liu Xiaojun, a washed-up car mechanic and a degenerate gambler, deep in debt and relying on the support of his deceased father’s partner in the police, Wang Yong (Cao Weiyu). To try and get out of a 100,000 RMB debt, a desperate Liu accepts work from shady car dealer Lao Wan (Cao Bingkun); the job is simple: steal unregistered cars and bring them to him, so that he can re-paint and re-sell them. But things go south very soon: as Liu is stealing the first car, he is chased and shot at by two criminals, Xia Tao (Sha Baoliang) and his brother Xia Xi (Oho Ou). And having just managed to escape them, he realizes there’s a little girl, Qi Qi (Wulantuoya Duo) tied up in the trunk of the car. Yet this vortex of misfortune seems like it might lead to riches: it turns out she was kidnapped for ransom by the two criminals, and when answering a call from her mother on a phone that was in the car, Liu realizes he might well be able to collect the 2-million RMB ransom instead of them…

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by LP Hugo on January 2, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Film Reviews

Tagged cao baoping, da peng, li meng, oho ou

Posted by LP Hugo on January 2, 2020

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/01/02/vortex-2019-review/

A BETTER TOMORROW 2018 (2018) review

There’s probably no Hong Kong film more seminal and iconic than John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. Mixing his own richly melodramatic sensibility with his mentor Chang Cheh’s themes of heroic brotherhood, Sam Peckinpah’s throbbing, elegiac brutality and Jean-Pierre Melville’s urban Bushido, Woo brought to life the Heroic Bloodshed genre and its visual grammar of slow-motion, bullet-riddled valor and gut-wrenching montages. He also revitalized Shaw Brothers stalwart Ti Lung’s career, made Leslie Cheung a star, and turned Chow Yun Fat from an affable TV lead to a true film icon. A Better Tomorrow was then milked for an entertaining sequel, a solid prequel, a mediocre Wong Jing re-run (1994’s Return to a Better Tomorrow) and a more recent, passable Korean remake. Announced concurrently to a rival remake to be directed by Stephen Fung (of which nothing has been heard since), Ding Sheng’s A Better Tomorrow 2018 isn’t the first time he tries his hand at an iconic Hong Kong property, and the flawed but interesting Police Story 2013 has shown that the writer/director isn’t one to slavishly regurgitate a franchise’s formula.

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by LP Hugo on January 19, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Film Reviews

Tagged darren wang dalu, ding sheng, eric tsang, han han, lam suet, li meng, ma tianyu, remake, wang kai, wu yue

Posted by LP Hugo on January 19, 2018

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/01/19/a-better-tomorrow-2018-2018-review/

NAMIYA (2017) review

Mere months after the Japanese adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s best-selling novel The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, comes a Chinese adaptation directed by Han Jie, with input from popular novelist, blogger and director Han Han. Three orphans, Xiaobo (Karry Wang), Tong Tong (Dilraba Dilmurat) and Jie (Dong Zi Jian) burglarize a rich woman’s house on new year’s eve, then run away in her car. They decide to lay low in an abandoned general store, but strange things start happening: a letter is dropped in an old letterbox at the front of the shop, and seems to have been written by someone more than twenty years before. The orphans decide to answer it, and get an almost immediate, handwritten answer through the same letterbox, once again apparently from the past. They learn that the store used to belong to a kind old man (Jackie Chan) who would impart wise advice to anonymous people in need through letters dropped in front and behind the store.

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EDGE OF INNOCENCE (2017) review

Based on the novel Summer, The Portrait of a 19 Year Old by Soji Shimada, Chang Jung-Chi’s Edge of Innocence follows Kang Qiao (Huang Zitao), a carefree student who ends up in the hospital with a broken leg after crashing his motorbike on the freeway. In between visits from his friends Zhao Yi (Calvin Tu) and Zhu Li (Li Meng), the latter hopelessly in love with him, he spends his time looking out the window, at a house where a stunning young woman (Yang Caiyu) lives with her parents (Chang Kuo Chu and Samatha Ko). Now spying on her daily with binoculars, Kang Qiao falls madly in love with the woman, until one day he witnesses her murder her own – apparently abusive – father with the help of her mother, and burying the body in their backyard. At the same time, he is approached on WeChat by a mysterious person who seems to know everything about him, and about what he has seen unfold in the house by the hospital.

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by LP Hugo on July 4, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Film Reviews

Tagged chang kuo chu, huang zitao, li meng, stanley fung, yang caiyu

Posted by LP Hugo on July 4, 2017

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/07/04/edge-of-innocence-2017-review/

LORD OF SHANGHAI (2017) review

After Law Wing Cheong’s Iceman and John Woo’s The Crossing, the ambitious diptych format took another hit with Sherwood Hu’s Lord of Shanghai, whose box office flop has led to the release date of its second installment (known as Lord of Shanghai II or The Concubine of Shanghai) being pushed back indefinitely. Based on a 2003 novel by Hong Ying, Lord of Shanghai starts in 1905, with the city controlled by western powers and dangerous triads. Chang Lixiong (Hu Jun), charismatic head of the Hong triad, is butting heads with Commander Song (Liu Peiqi) over the arrival of revolutionary agent Huang Peiyu (Qin Hao): in the last years of the Qing dynasty, Chang has chosen the side of the revolution. Chang and Song are also adversaries in the whorehouse of Madam Xin (Bai Ling), as they both covet the same newly-arrived peasant girl, Xiao Yuegui (Li Meng, then Yu Nan after years have passed). As their feud escalates, Yuegui becomes much more important than a mere prize.

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