All posts tagged simon yam

INSIDE OR OUTSIDE (2016) review

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Directed by Gary Mak Wing Lun, whose filmography as an assistant-director is much more illustrious than his filmography as a director, Inside or Outside follows a pair of private detectives: Fei Xin (Simon Yam) is a cool, collected retired police sergeant and Qiu Le (Wallace Huo) is a hothead who got expelled from the police. One day, successful writer Nanfang (Rayza) calls on their services to follow her husband Ou Jian (Jang Hyuk), whom she suspects of having an affair. She’s just given birth, and Ou’s coldness to her and the baby makes her think he doesn’t love her and married her for her father’s money and business connections. It turns out Ou is infertile but hasn’t told his wife, and thus believes she cheated on him and the baby is from another man. To complicate matters, a man from his past resurfaces: Xie Tianyou, his former business partner, against whom he testified in a trial and who subsequently went to jail. Xie is actually a dead-ringer for Qiu Le (and thus also played by Wallace Huo), which complicates matters even furtherer.

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by LP Hugo on March 13, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on March 13, 2016

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2016/03/13/inside-or-outside-2016-review/

MAGIC CARD (2015) review

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An impressively ill-conceived little caper, Keung Kwok Man’s Magic Card start with a quick-cut montage explaining that credit card fraud is widespread and complex, followed by the introduction of a well-organized credit card fraud gang. Then it sets all this aside for most of the film, before returning to it in the final 10 minutes. It’s as if the screenwriters bookended one screenplay with the introduction and conclusion of another, unrelated screenplay. The title refers to a card that the hero uses to determine if a bank terminal is fraudulent or not, but that card is not seen or mentioned in the film more than a few seconds in one single scene. And for most of its runtime, Magic Card tells of a computer expert (Kimi Qiao) who travels to Pavia (a idyllic town near Milan) to follow his foster sister (Dada Chan) and her vain, ineffectual and filthy rich boyfriend (Kainan Bai), as the latter prepares to buy and level an entire street to turn it into casinos and karaokes, much to the dismay of the locals, represented by a fortright lawyer (Maria Grazia Cuccinotta). Stepping in as a mediator is a rich Chinese businessman (Simon Yam), with whose daughter (Viann Zhang) the computer expert falls in love.

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by LP Hugo on December 12, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on December 12, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/12/12/magic-card-2015-review/

ULTERIOR MOTIVE (2015) review

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Ulterior Motive is Arthur Wong’s first film as a director in 28 years ; his last directorial effort had been the enjoyable, hard-hitting In The Line of Duty  3 in 1987. Not that he has been slacking off in the meantime : Wong is one of Hong Kong and China’s most illustrious cinematographers, having lensed everything from The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Once Upon A Time In China to The Warlords and Painted Skin. We encourage you to have a look at his filmography, it’s a head-spinning list of some of the most gorgeously-shot films in Hong Kong and China. For his return to the director’s chair, he has chosen a noirish thriller about a rich heiress (Qin Lan), whose husband (Archie Kao) and daughter are kidnapped and held for ransom. The cop in charge of the investigation is her ex-boyfriend (Gordon Lam), an acutely intuitive sleuth who quickly targets her father (Simon Yam) as a prime suspect, after finding out troubling similarities between this kidnapping case and one he was involved in 20 years ago, that ended in murder.

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by LP Hugo on November 1, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on November 1, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/11/01/ulterior-motive-2015-review/

BURNING AMBITION (1989) review

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Frankie Chan’s Burning Ambition transposes the plot of Kinji Kukasaku’s The Shogun’s Samurai (1978) to modern-day Hong Kong, with striking results. A Triad boss (Roy Chiao) is thinking about his succession: his elder son Wai (Michael Miu) is an irresponsible womanizer, and so he chooses his more level-headed and business-savvy younger son Hwa (Simon Yam). He’s killed the same evening in a drive-by shooting secretly organized by his brother Hsiong (Ko Chun Hsiung), who’s consumed by the titular burning ambition, and has made Wai his protégé. This triggers a fratricidal war as two camps are formed within the extended Triad family: on one side, the boss’s widow (a steely Seung Yee), the chosen heir Hwa and his trusted uncle Kau Chen (Eddy Ko); on the other side, Hsiong, his puppet Wai, his two loyal daughters Tao (Yukari Oshima) and Hong (Kara Hui), as well as his exiled son Chi-Shao (Frankie Chan), who comes back to Hong Kong to assist his father, not knowing, just like his sisters, what treacherous strings Hsiong has been pulling. It all escalates in a series of bloody acts of vengeance.

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by LP Hugo on September 9, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on September 9, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/09/09/burning-ambition-1989-review/

TWO THUMBS UP (2015) review

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With Two Thumbs Up, screenwriter Lau Ho Leung makes his directorial debut after writing quite a few prominent Chinese/Hong Kong films for people like Derek Yee, Daniel Lee, Gordon Chan and Dante Lam, among others. It’s a film that commands a lot of upfront goodwill by being part of a dying breed, an all-Hong Kong film not calibrated in any way to appeal to the Mainland, and also by casting a quartet of Hong Kong staples: Simon Yam, Francis Ng, Mark Cheng and Patrick Tam. They play four ex-criminals who decide to come back to their old ways when one of them hatches a plan he thinks is foolproof : steal a Police Emergency Unit van, dress as cops, then rob anyone that comes their way all the more easily, especially a shady funeral service that smuggles money through the border by hiding it in corpses. In the absence of an actual EU van, the plan is put into execution by painting a mini-bus, and soon the four friends are cruising Hong Kong as fake cops. But unexpectedly, they end up fighting for justice : after saving a girl from rape, they run afoul of another team of crooks (who have the same plan of disguising as cops but decidedly more ruthless methods) and decide to stop them. Meanwhile, a young cop (Leo Ku) is hot on their trail.

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by LP Hugo on June 27, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on June 27, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/06/27/two-thumbs-up-2015-review/

LOVERS & MOVIES (2015) short review

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Niu Chaoyang’s Lovers & Movies is one of those all-star Valentines Day cash-ins based on the blueprint of Gary Marshall’s Valentines Day : criss-crossing love stories across generations, played out by a few stars out for an easy paycheck. And so here we have a fifty-something woman (Kara Hui), who finds out her husband (Simon Yam) is having an affair, while her son is getting into bad ways and pushing away his girlfriend. Also, a cab driver (Francis Ng) is in love with a dance teacher (Yu Nan), whose five year-old son needs snow to win over a girl he likes at school. And a fangirl (Gulnazar) gets to meet her heartthrob idol (Kim Bum), after which they fall in love. It all unfolds in impossibly trite fashion, as platitudes about love are spoken in every scene over a treacly score, and grand romantic gestures are performed in ways that are often actually more creepy than endearing : witness Gulnazar barging in on a film scene being shot in a studio by the man she loves, by jumping off a wall, strapped on cables, with a red streamer that says ‘I love you’. Someone call the cops. The cast, which could have saved the film, is too uneven to manage that. Kara Hui and Yu Nan valiantly try to make unlikable characters worth sticking with, but Francis Ng expresses most emotions by smiling weirdly, and Simon Yam gives a performance so listless he probably took this film as a break from acting. And out of decency, let’s not mention the rest of the cast. *1/2

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by LP Hugo on June 22, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on June 22, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/06/22/lovers-movies-2015-short-review/

CROSS (2012) short review

cross-2012-2 It took 3 years and 4 different directors to complete Cross‘ sluggish 75 minutes about a man (Simon Yam) who is devastated by his wife’s suicide, which according to his beliefs condemns her to hell, and so decides to save as many souls as he can by killing suicidal people before they can actually do it themselves. He then surrenders himself to the police, only to realize that someone may have been pulling the strings all along. Though it’s often visually arresting, with evocative cinematography conjuring disquieting imagery that combines the mundane with the unnatural, Daniel Chan, Steve Woo, Lau King Ping and Hui Shu Ning’s Cross is too narratively inept to engage in the least. A thudding use of flashbacks and exposition often clashes with the ambiguity the filmmakers so clearly aim for. There’s no pacing to speak of, each scene fading listlessly into the next, with a major twist being so clumsily introduced that you’d be forgiven for not even realizing it’s a twist. Simon Yam is fine in the role of an unflappable killer reminiscent of his character in the infinitely superior The Man behind the Courtyard House (2011), but he simply has too little to work with. Randomly, Nick Cheung crops up in an amusing scene that may have been tacked on to capitalize on the success of Roy Chow’s Nightfall, which already cast him alongside Simon Yam earlier in 2012. *1/2

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by LP Hugo on April 13, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on April 13, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/04/13/cross-2012-short-review/

MIDNIGHT BEATING (2010) short review

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The marketing for Zhang Jiabei’s Midnight Beating called it the first real horror film made in Mainland China, no small feat in itself considering Chinese censorship’s ‘no ghosts, no gore’ directives. The film ultimately plays by these rules, but the fact that it’s so un-scary and indeed, boring, cannot be solely attributed to content restrictions. It is quite simply direly written and limply directed, its story – about a hospital that is haunted by a murdering ghost, and whose grieving doctor (Simon Yam) and philandering psychologist (Francis Ng) hold pivotal secrets – unfolding with little to no urgency or atmosphere. Simon Yam’s poignant performance and Yasuda Fumio’s classy score stick out in a swamp of TV-grade production values, tired jump scares, deadening exposition and shrill emotional displays, not to mention Francis Ng’s bored face and a staggeringly stupid scene involving a website that allows visitors to watch their own memories of departed loved ones as videos. *

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by LP Hugo on January 23, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on January 23, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/01/23/midnight-beating-2010-short-review/

THE MAN BEHIND THE COURTYARD HOUSE (2011) review

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Before he found success with the excellent courtroom thriller Silent Witness, Fei Xing directed The Man behind the Courtyard House, which despite its high-profile cast went fairly unnoticed. Much like Silent Witness, it starts out with a fairly straightforward narrative, whose conclusion arrives a bit too soon to satisfy. Then it rewinds itself not once but twice, each time revealing a new layer that helps not only to make sense of what we saw, but also to see it in a new light. And so after a first segment in which we see a group of backpacking students (Eva Huang Shengyi, Yu Shaoqun, Zhang Kejia and Zhang Shuyu) find shelter in a old traditional house whose sole inhabitant is cold, mysterious Chen Zhihui (Simon Yam) who claims he’s a distant relative of the old couple that is supposed to live there. What follows is a rote slasher where Chen kills the backpackers one by one by banging a nail in their skull, with no apparent motive. But then the film backtracks twice, and we are introduced to his backstory, and people he met in the days before : the old couple who lived in the house, but also an affable state investigator (Chen Sicheng), a recently-widowed hotel owner (Zhang Jingchu) and a desperate but determined ex-con (Wei Zi), among others. Slowly, Chen’s story takes fascinating, poignant shape.

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by LP Hugo on January 23, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on January 23, 2015

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/01/23/the-man-behind-the-courtyard-house-2011-review/

THE CONSTABLE (2013) review

997F273241EDAE19DBE9CDA5AC64EFC67764F0ACD8E71_950_1348 A real estate magnate and a chairman and executive producer at Johnnie To’s Milkyway Image, Dennis Law has had a strange career for the past ten years or so, with the law of diminishing returns, both critically and financially, leading him from the excellent and mildly successful Fatal Contact (one of Wu Jing’s best films as a lead), to the abysmal and little-seen Vampire Warriors. The Constable, though even less seen, can however be counted as a return to form of sorts. It follows Kuen (Simon Yam) a transportation officer in the Hong Kong police, who is also a single parent since his wife left, unable as she was to cope with the fact their son (Li Jin-Jiang) has Down syndrome. He is nevertheless helped by Yan (Niu Mengmeng) a kind girl whose lame, up to no good boyfriend (Sam Lee) is close to being recruited by local gangster Kim (Ken Lo) for an upcoming hold-up. We also follow clumsy rookie cop Mei (Zi Yi), and his burgeoning romance with a colleague (Maggie Li). Kuen’s colleague (Lam Suet) and superior officer (Maggie Siu) also pop up from time to time.

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by LP Hugo on November 8, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by LP Hugo on November 8, 2014

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2014/11/08/the-constable-2013-review/

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