Running Out of Karma: Introduction

I've spent much of 2013 immersed in Hong Kong cinema. This summer, which I declared The Summer of Sammo, I watched over 80 Hong Kong films, covering the heyday of the Shaw Brothers through the New Wave of the 80s and 90s and into the present day, delving deep into the work of directors like Sammo Hung, Chor Yuen, Lau Kar-leung, Patrick Tam, Tsui Hark, King Hu and Chang Cheh. But my year in cinematic Hong Kong actually began a few months earlier, in February, when on a whim I rented a couple of Johnnie To movies I that hadn't yet seen. That led to more and more To rentals (along with a few other Hong Kong films I'd been meaning to check out), the purchase and actual reading of a pair of books (two events that rarely go together for me), and the recording of a Johnnie To podcast (They Shot Pictures #13). But I didn't do a whole lot of writing. I talked To on twitter and made some occasionally pithy comments on letterboxd, but unlike with the Summer of Sammo, for which I managed to produce 29 long reviews and three podcasts, I really don't have a whole lot to show for my time with To. So I'm setting myself the task of writing about each and every Johnnie To movie, in chronological order.

Johnnie To has never been more popular in the US than he is right now, on the heels of the reasonably successful release this summer of his 2012 film Drug War (it's yet to be seen if that will translate to an American release for his 2013 film Blind Detective). As more and more people discover his work, there's been an explosion in writing about him, at least in the various corners of the internet I seem to frequent. But while much of that writing has been terrific, and I welcome all efforts to introduce what I think is one of the greatest filmmakers working today to a wider audience, I remain disappointed in the lack of a clear, comprehensive overview of his work, one that attempts to describe him as an auteur, as a product of a national film tradition and as a maker of genre films. First and foremost such an approach must deal with all of the director's films, not just, as is most often the case with To, the films in the most familiar or lofty genres. Even a very good book like Stephen Teo's study of To's career focuses almost exclusively on his crime films while neglecting the romantic comedies that have made up a significant chunk of his output (as Teo himself readily points out: the book is called Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film) while barely covering the first 15 or so years of his career. I've read my fair share of books about film directors over the years, and I can't recall any that have had so much of their extant work so readily ignored. It's as if someone wrote about John Ford and dismissed his Westerns with a few stock phrases (as genre quickies, as works-for-hire, as films made to pay the bill for the movies he really wanted to make, which I guess in Ford's case would be highbrow literary adaptations like The Plough and the Stars or The Fugitive). Such an approach seems self-evidently non-sensical to me.

While a film like To's second feature, the goofy 1986 comedy Happy Ghost III, may not be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Election series, or even show much of an auteurist "signature" at all, it nevertheless might have a lot to say about the state of the Hong Kong film industry in the mid-80s (the role of Tsui Hark and Raymond Wong's Cinema City studio, a subject ripe for a study of its own, for example). And the ways To navigated that climate, successfully or not, may tell us something about the approach he continues to take in running his own studio. And it may end up revealing something interesting about the auteur after all. One of my goals of this project, in fact, is to demonstrate just how vital the romantic comedies are to To's work, how they connect both thematically and stylistically with the "edgier" crime melodramas on which his reputation in the US almost exclusively rests. This was the goal of our They Shot Pictures episode: to develop and present a Grand Unified Theory of Johnnie To, and now I hope to put it in writing.

Additionally, just as I found that Sammo Hung could not be understood in isolation  and needed to be put in context, which meant exploring the films and filmmakers that influenced him as well as his predecessors and contemporaries, I hope to do the same with Johnnie To. To that end, not only am I hoping to watch and write about all of To's films, I plan to continue to explore the last 30-plus years of Hong Kong cinema, to better place him in context and present a fuller picture of the world in which he works. So directors of To's generation such as John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-tung, Corey Yuen, Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan and Ann Hui will be covered here, as will newer generations of directors that may have been influenced by him, both in Hong Kong and around the world.

One of the great paradoxes of cinephilia is that the more movies you watch, the more movies there are that you want to watch; the more you see, the more you realize how much there is you haven't seen yet. In that way, a project like this is never ending. So I might as well get started.

Next up: Running Out of Karma: Index

Running Out of Karma: Index

This is an index to Running Out of Karma, my writing on Johnnie To and his contemporaries, predecessors and influences in Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinema.

Chronological Johnnie To:

Introduction - Nov 13, 2013
The Enigmatic Case (Johnnie To, 1980) - Nov 14, 2013
The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko, Johnnie To & Ringo Lam, 84-86) - Nov 26, 2013
Seven Years Itch (Johnnie To, 87) - Dec 02, 2013
The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To, 88) - Nov 21, 2014

The Big Heat (Johnnie To, 88) - Jan 09, 2015
The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 93) - Aug 01, 2015
Drug War (Johnnie To, 12) - Dec 11, 2013
Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 13) - Oct 11, 2014
Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To, 14) - Nov 15, 2014

Previously produced works:

The Big Heat (Johnnie To, 88) - Mar 07, 2013
The Johnnie To Whimsicality Index - Mar 17, 2013
Infernal Affairs, The Departed and Johnnie To - Mar 19, 2013
They Shot Pictures #13: Johnnie To - Mar 26, 2013
The George Sanders Show Episode One: The Big Heat and Drug War - Jun 29, 2013
The Summer of Sammo Index - July 01, 2013
Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 13) - Sep 26, 2013
Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 93) - Oct 25, 2013

Running Out of Karma:

Introduction - Nov 13, 2013
The Enigmatic Case (Johnnie To, 1980) - Nov 14, 2013
Cinema City and A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987) - Nov 21, 2013
Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 86) - Nov 22, 2013
The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko, Johnnie To & Ringo Lam, 84-86) - Nov 26, 2013

Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 87) - Nov 27, 2013
Seven Years Itch (Johnnie To, 87) - Dec 02, 2013
Working Class (Tsui Hark, 85) - Dec 07, 2013
Drug War (Johnnie To, 12) - Dec 11, 2013
Royal Warriors (David Chung, 86) - Dec 19, 2013

She Shoots Straight (Corey Yuen, 90) - Dec 22, 2013
Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan, 96) - Jan 01, 2014
Young Detective Dee and the Rise of the Sea Dragon (Tsui Hark, 13) - Feb 27, 2014
Shanghai Blues (Tsui Hark, 84) - Mar 03, 2014
Seven Swords (Tsui Hark, 05) - Mar 11, 2014

The Blade (Tsui Hark, 95) - Mar 19, 2014
Heroes Shed No Tears (John Woo, 86) - Mar 28, 2014
Once a Thief (John Woo, 91) - Mar 28, 2014
Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (Stephen Chow & Derek Kwok, 13) - Apr 03, 2014
Love in the Time of Twilight (Tsui Hark, 95) - Apr 04, 2014

The Lovers (Tsui Hark, 95) - Apr 04, 2014
Red Cliff (John Woo, 08) - Apr 04, 2014
Zodiac Killers (Ann Hui, 91) - Apr 09, 2014
SPL: Sha Po Lang (Wilson Yip, 05) -  Apr 23, 2014
New Dragon Gate Inn (Raymond Lee, 92) -  Apr 24, 2014

Wuxia (Peter Chan, 11) - Apr 25, 2014
The Legend is Born: Ip Man (Herman Yau, 10) - Apr 27, 2014
The Duel (Chang Cheh, 71) - Apr 28, 2014
Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (Chang Cheh, 80) - Apr 29, 2014
Ip Man: The Final Fight (Herman Yau, 13) - Apr 29, 2014

Tai Chi Zero/Tai Chi Hero (Stephen Fung, 12-13) - May 01, 2014
The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee, 71) - May 02, 2014
The Assassin (Chang Cheh, 67) - May 12, 2014
The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 14) - May 25, 2014
Martial Club (Lau Kar-leung, 81) - Jun 11, 2014

The Bride with White Hair (Ronny Yu, 93) - Jun 25, 2014
Three Hong Kong Romantic Comedies - Jul 29, 2014
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father (Peter Chan, 93) - Jul 29, 2014
Isabella (Edmund Pang Ho-cheung, 06) - Aug 01, 2014
Painted Faces (Alex Law, 88) - Aug 02, 2014

Golden Chicken 2 (Samson Chiu, 03) - Aug 03, 2014
Painted Skin (King Hu, 93) - Aug 03, 2014
Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, 05) - Aug 04, 2014
Legend of the Mountain (King Hu, 79) - Aug 07, 2014
Shanghai Blues (Tsui Hark, 84) - Aug 27, 2014

Accident (Soi Cheang, 09) - Sep 23, 2014
Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 13) - Oct 11, 2014
A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Tsui Hark, 89) - Oct 21, 2014
Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (Tsui Hark, 11) - Oct 29, 2014
My Lucky Star (Dennie Gordon, 13) - Nov 07, 2014

Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To, 14) - Nov 15, 2014
The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To, 88) - Nov 21, 2014
Aberdeen (Pang Ho-cheung, 14) - Dec 04, 2014
The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Tsui Hark, 14) - Jan 05, 2015
The True Story of Wong Fei-hung: Whiplash Snuffs the Candle Flame (Wu Peng, 49) - Jan 07, 2015

The Big Heat (Johnnie To, 88) - Jan 09, 2015
The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 83) - Mar 20, 2015
The Time to Live, The Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 85) - Mar 21, 2015
Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 86) - Mar 22, 2015
Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 98) - Mar 24, 2015

Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 01) - Mar 27, 2015
Masked Avengers (Chang Cheh, 81) - Apr 11, 2015
Kung Fu Jungle (Teddy Chan, 14) - Apr 27, 2015
Temporary Family (Cheuk Wan-chi, 14) - May 14, 2015
A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 86) - Jun 26, 2015

Yes, Madam (Corey Yuen, 85) - Jul 02, 2015
Wild City (Ringo Lam, 15) - Jul 30, 2015
The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 93) - Aug 01, 2015
Project A and Project A 2 (Jackie Chan, 83 & 87) - Aug 02, 2015

Capsule Reviews:

Aces Go Places (Eric Tsang, 82) - Nov 21, 2013
The Contract (Michael Hui, 78) - Nov 27, 2013
All the Wrong Clues (...For the Right Solution) (Tsui Hark, 81) - Nov 27, 2013
Aces Go Places II (Eric Tsang, 83) - Nov 28, 2013

Love in a Fallen City (Ann Hui, 84) - Dec 01, 2013

The Killer (John Woo, 89) - Dec 01, 2013

An Autumn's Tale (Mabel Cheung, 87) - Dec 03, 2013
Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (Tsui Hark, 84) - Dec 04, 2013
The Private Eyes (Michael Hui, 76) - Dec 05, 2013
All's Well, Ends Well (Clifton Ko, 92) - Dec 09, 2013

Aces Go Places IV: You Never Die Twice (Ringo Lam, 86) - Dec 11, 2013
Security Unlimited (Michael Hui, 81) - Dec 13, 2013
The Banquet (Tsui Hark et al, 91) - Dec 16, 2013
Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit (Lau Kar-leung, 89) - Dec 19, 2013
Final Justice (Parkman Wong, 88) - Dec 19, 2013

In the Line of Duty 3 (Arthur Wong & Brandy Yuen, 88) - Dec 20, 2013
In the Line of Duty 4 (Yuen Woo-ping, 89) - Dec 20, 2013
Magnificent Warriors (David Chung, 87) - Dec 20, 2013
God of Gamblers (Wong Jing, 89) - Dec 23, 2013
All for the Winner (Jeffrey Lau & Corey Yuen, 90) - Dec 25, 2013

Casino Raiders (Wong Jing, Jimmy Heung & Corey Yuen, 89) - Dec 26, 2013
Tricky Brains (Wong Jing, 91) - Dec 26, 2013
God of Gamblers II (Wong Jing, 90) - Dec 27, 2013
The Romancing Star (Wong Jing, 87) - Dec 28, 2013
Boys are Easy (Wong Jing, 93) - Dec 30, 2013

Ninja in the Dragon's Den (Corey Yuen, 82) - Dec 30, 2013
Tiger Cage (Yuen Woo-ping, 88) - Jan 02, 2014
The Magic Crystal (Wong Jing, 86) - Jan 02, 2014
No Retreat, No Surrender (Corey Yuen, 86) - Jan 03, 2014
Rich and Famous (Taylor Wong, 88) - Jan 06, 2014

Games Gamblers Play (Michael Hui, 74) - Jan 07, 2014
Time and Tide (Tsui Hark, 00) - Mar 25, 2014
Tri Star (Tsui Hark, 96) - Apr 01, 2014
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 94) - Apr 01, 2014
Mission: Impossible II (John Woo, 00) - Apr 04, 2014

Double Team (Tsui Hark, 97) - Apr 04, 2014
Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 98) - Apr 07, 2014
A Moment of Romance (Benny Chan, 90) - Apr 15, 2014
Running on Karma (Johnnie To, 03) - Apr 22, 2014
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, 10) - Apr 25, 2014

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Jeffrey Lau, 02) - Apr 25, 2014
Motorway (Cheang Pou-soi, 12) - Apr 25, 2014
Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 71) - May 02, 2014
The Dead and the Deadly (Wu Ma, 82) - May 02, 2014
The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen, 07) - May 05, 2014

Perhaps Love (Peter Chan, 05) - May 06, 2014
The Chinese Boxer (Jimmy Wang Yu, 70) - May 07, 2014
The Boxer from Shantung (Chang Cheh, 72) - May 09, 2014
The Sword (Jimmy Wang Yu, 71) - May 13, 2014

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Andrew Lau, 10) - May 13, 2014
Legend of a Fighter (Yuen Woo-ping, 82) - May 13, 2014
Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (Wong Ching-po, 14) - May 28, 2014
The Singing Thief (Chang Cheh, 69) - Jun 01, 2014
Dead End (Chang Cheh, 69) - Jun 03, 2014

The Spiritual Boxer (Lau Kar-leung, 75) - Jun 06, 1014
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, 14) - Jun 07, 2014
Challenge of the Masters (Lau Kar-leung, 76) - Jun 09, 2014
The Love Eterne (Li Han-hsiang, 63) - Jun 11, 2014
The Shadow Boxing (Lau Kar-leung, 79) - Jun 12, 2014

Cat vs. Rat (Lau Kar-leung, 82) - Jun 14, 2014
Heroes of the East (Lau Kar-leung, 78) - Jun 15, 2014
My Young Auntie (Lau Kar-leung, 81) - Jun 16, 2014
Shaolin Mantis (Lau Kar-leung, 78) - Jun 17, 2014
The Lady is the Boss (Lau Kar-leung, 83) - Jun 17, 2014

Martial Arts of Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 86) - Jun 18, 2014
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 78) - Jun 19, 2014
Drunken Master III (Lau Kar-leung, 94) - Jun 20, 2014
Tiger on the Beat 2 (Lau Kar-leung, 90) - Jun 20, 2014
The Dream of the Red Chamber (Li Han-hsiang, 77) - Jun 21, 2014

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (Lau Kar-leung, 84) - Jun 21, 2014
Dirty Ho (Lau Kar-leung, 79) - Jun 22, 2014
Full Alert (Ringo Lam, 97) - Jul 24, 2014
Golden Chicken (Samson Chiu, 02) - Jul 25, 2014
Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen, 00) - Jul 29, 2014

Summer Palace (Lou Ye, 06) - Jul 29, 2014
Empress Wu Zetian (Fang Peilin, 39) - Jul 29, 2014
The Enchanting Shadow (Li Han-hsiang, 60) - Jul 31, 2014
The Dream of the Red Chamber (Bu Wancang, 44) - Jul 31, 2014
The Story of Sue San (King Hu, 64) - Aug 04, 2014

Sons of the Good Earth (King Hu, 65) - Aug 05, 2014
House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 04) - Aug 06, 2014
The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 73) - Aug 07, 2014
The Post-Modern Life of My Aunt (Ann Hui, 06) - Aug 12, 2014
Jade Goddess of Mercy (Ann Hui, 03) - Aug 13, 2014

Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 04) - Aug 13, 2014
20 30 40 (Sylvia Chang, 04) - Aug 14, 2014
Tempting Heart (Sylvia Chang, 99) - Aug 14, 2014
The Golden Era (Ann Hui, 14) - Sep 27, 2014
Uncertain Relationships Society (Heiward Mak, 14) - Sep 29, 2014

 The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 14) - Oct 04, 2014
Love Battlefield (Soi Cheang, 04) - Oct 19, 2014
The Shopaholics (Wai Ka-fai, 06) - Oct 20, 2014
So Young (Zhou Wei, 13) - Oct 22, 2014
Beyond the Great Wall (Li Han-hsiang, 64) - Oct 23, 2014

The Death Curse (Soi Cheang, 04) - Oct 24, 2014
King of Comedy (Stephen Chow & Lee Lik-chi, 99) - Oct 25, 2014
Cocktail (Herman Yau & Long Ching, 06) - Oct 26, 2014
Fantasia (Wai Ka-fai, 04) - Oct 27, 2014
High Noon (Heiward Mak, 08) - Oct 27, 2014

Young and Dangerous (Andrew Lau, 96) - Nov 05, 2014
Exodus (Pang Ho-cheung, 07) - Nov 10, 2014
Anna Magdalena (Yee Chung-man, 98) - Nov 10, 2014
Project A (Jackie Chan, 1983) - Nov 11, 2014
Diva (Heiward Mak, 12) - Nov 15, 2014

The Monkey King (Soi Cheang, 14) - Nov 18, 2014
Flash Point (Wilson Yip, 07) - Nov 18, 2014
Unbeatable (Dante Lam, 13) - Nov 21, 2014
Golden Chickensss (Matt Chow, 14) - Dec 11, 2014
Uncertain Relationships Society (Heiward Mak, 14) - Dec 31, 2014

The Spring River Flows East (Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, 47) - Jan 13, 2015
From Vegas to Macau (Wong Jing, 14) - Jan 17, 2015
Black Comedy (Wilson Chin, 14) - Feb 15, 2015
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 05) - Mar 08, 2015
HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Olivier Assayas, 97) - Mar 12, 2015

The Sandwich Man (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 83) - Mar 13, 2015
Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 85) - Mar 15, 2015
The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 86) - Mar 15, 2015
A Borrowed Life (Wu Nien-jen, 94) - Mar 16, 2015
Cute Girl (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 80) - Mar 18, 2015

Yes, Madam (Corey Yuen, 85) - Mar 24, 2015
Twin Dragons (Tsui Hark & Ringo Lam, 92) - Apr 14, 2015
Ballistic Kiss (Donnie Yen, 98) - Apr 27, 2015
Overheard (Alan Mak & Felix Chong, 09) - May 06, 2015
Overheard 2 (Alan Mak & Felix Chong, 11) - May 08, 2015

Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang Wen, 10) - May 14, 1015
The Coffin in the Mountain (Xin Yukun, 14) - May 22, 2015
Overheard 3 (Alan Mak & Felix Chong, 14) - May 29, 2015
Dearest (Peter Chan, 14) - May 29, 2015
Cave of the Spider Women (Dan Duyu, 27) - Jun 03, 2015

Cave of the Silken Web (Ho Meng-hua, 67) - Jun 03, 2015
The Chinese Mayor (Zhou Hao, 15) - Jun 07, 2015
Love in a Puff (Pang Ho-cheung, 10) - Jun 22, 2015
The East is Red (Ching Siu-ting & Raymond Lee, 93) - Jun 22, 2015
Temple of the Red Lotus (Hsu Tsung-hung, 65) - Jun 23, 2015

The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (Patrick Lung-kong, 67) - Jul 04, 2015

Podcasts:

The George Sanders Show Episode Twenty-Four: Crank and The Victim  Dec 15, 2013
They Shot Pictures #32: Lau Kar-leung  Jun 25, 2014
The George Sanders Show Episode 48: Renaldo & Clara, Masked & Anonymous and Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 - Nov 15, 2014
They Shot Pictures #34: King Hu  Nov 17, 2014
The George Sanders Show Episode 50: Coffy, Golden Chicken and 2014 Discoveries  Dec 13, 2014
The George Sanders Show Episode 59: The Clouds of Sils Maria and Centre Stage - May 2, 2015
The George Sanders Show Episode 63: Blackhat and A Better Tomorrow - Jun 29, 2015

Lists:

Running Out of Karma Movies
100 Must-See Chinese Language Films of the 21st Century
Top (East) Asian Films of the Decade (So Far)
Hong Kong Romances
Hong Kong Action Movies with Guns

Johnnie To Movies

Tsui Hark Index
Lau Kar-Leung Index
Hou Hsiao-hsien Movies
Chang Cheh Movies

Wai Ka-Fai Movies
Wong Jing Movies
Pang Ho-cheung Movies
King Hu Movies
Jia Zhangke Movies

Ann Hui Movies
Peter Chan Movies
Tsai Ming-liang Movies
Yuen Woo-ping Movies
John Woo Movies

Corey Yuen Movies
Sammo Hung Movies
Patrick Tam Movies
Wong Kar-wai Movies
Chor Yuen Movies

Jackie Chan Movies
RunRun Shaw Movies
Donnie Yen Movies
Tony Leung Movies
Maggie Cheung Movies

Stephen Chow Movies
Bruce Lee Movies
Andy Lau Movies
Michelle Yeoh Movies
Chow Yun-fat Movies

Running Out of Karma: The Happy Ghost Series

Running Out of Karma is my on-going series on Johnnie To and Hong Kong cinema. Here is an index

After the failure of his debut film, The Enigmatic Case, Johnnie To went back to television for several years (where he directed an acclaimed adaptation of Louis Cha's Legend of the Condor Heroes), not returning to film until 1986, when Raymond Wong hired him to direct the third film in his Cinema City studio's successful Happy Ghost comedy series. In the west, even today, To is known primarily as a director of hard-hitting, violent gangster dramas starring taciturn men who find themselves trapped in the inexorable machinations of fate, the state or the ancient honor codes governing cops and crooks alike. But that description only comes close to describing about half the 50+ films he's directed to date. His filmography is vast and diverse and we do it a disservice when we privilege the darker part over the brighter. This is one of the main goals of Running Out of Karma: to reach a fuller understanding of the man's career by looking at all of his work, not just those that fit with our understanding of what counts as "serious" genre cinema. It's one of the fundamental tenets of auteurism that the critic must look at all of a filmmaker's work, or at least as much as they can. That it isn't merely in the prestige films that an auteur shows their artistry, that it can be found in the most humble of program pictures as well. And indeed, Happy Ghost III shows exactly that, especially when seen in comparison with the first two films in the series, helmed by Clifton Ko.

But first, a note about authorship. As with most, if not all, of Johnnie To's films in this period, it's impossible for an outsider like me to assert with any confidence who exactly was responsible for any given element in a film. Especially given the communal working conditions at a studio like Cinema City, where the star of the film, Raymond Wong, is also the writer and the studio co-founder and where Tsui Hark, as dominant a force as there was in 1980s Hong Kong film (exceeded perhaps only by Jackie Chan) is in charge of the visual effects. The imdb doesn't even credit Johnnie To as director on the film, giving Ringo Lam that title and relegating To to Assistant Director (which is just weird, To talks about it in an interview in Stephen Teo's indispensable book on To as if he directed it, though he does make a special point of saying how happy he was to just be the working director on the film, and not be responsible for writing the screenplay as well. Wikipedia and Hong Kong Cinemagic credit Lam and To as co-directors). The on-screen credit lists To as "Acting Director" which is somewhat ambiguous: did he just direct the actors while another person was in charge of camera placement, shot construction, etc, or was he merely filling in for the real director? But the simple fact is that none of that really matters. It's fascinating (at least to me) as historical background trivia, but when looking at the film through the auteurist lens, when trying to see glimpses of the Johnnie To to come in this early film, it doesn't so much matter who was responsible for what. If there are qualities of To-ness in Happy Ghost III, elements of the film that would become distinctive traits of his later work, then it doesn't really matter if the initial creation of those elements was the idea of Lam, Wong, Tsui, Maggie Cheung, a particularly skilled gaffer or anybody else. In fact, I assume that at this relatively early stage in his career, To was still soaking up influences wherever he found them. Throughout the next decade, a hallmark of To's career would be his willingness to collaborate, his ability to work with other, often dominant personalities (like Tsui Hark, Stephen Chow and Ching Siu-tung). Indeed, his collaborations with Wai Ka-fai continue to account for some of his best work. Auteurism isn't about assigning credit, it's an inductive process whereby looking at a vast number of films we can begin to tease out the particular elements that a certain artist brings to their work. We can't fully understand what makes a Johnnie To film just by watching the films for which he was the sole, or at least most dominant, creative force, because we'd have nothing with which to compare them. We would have no way of knowing which elements are peculiar to the genre he's working in, which are culturally specific to the nation he's from and which are uniquely his own contributions. And still we wouldn't be able to assign credit anyway because we have no way of knowing what actually goes on on his film sets (maybe Milkway Image is an elaborate conspiracy set up by To to steal credit for other directors' work, I don't know, I suppose it's possible). The best we can do is gather evidence, make comparisons and propose hypotheses.

The Happy Ghost was released in 1984 as a vehicle for studio head Raymond Wong, a comic actor and writer (note that Raymond Wong Bak-Ming is a different person from Raymond Wong Ho-yin, a much younger actor who appears in many later Johnnie To films beginning with 1997's Lifeline and also Raymond Wong Ying-wah, a composer who scored several To films as well as many of Stephen Chow's, including Kung Fu Hustle). It's part of a cycle of horror-comedy hybrids that swept Hong Kong in the early 1980s, influenced by Sammo Hung's Encounters of the Spooky Kind and Tsui Hark's films (his early genre hybrids as well as his pioneering importation of Hollywood-style effects with Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain). These films play off Western horror movie conventions, but place them within the Chinese religious tradition of Buddhist and/or Taoist folk tales (see for example the Mr. Vampire series, Ching Siu-Tung's A Chinese Ghost Story and even Tsui's Green Snake). Like Encounters, The Happy Ghost provides an intriguing blend of moods: not just horror and slapstick comedy, but also a surprisingly dark portrait of Hong Kong youth. Beginning with a prologue ripped straight out of any given Hollywood slasher film: a group of teenagers on a camping trip find themselves in a temple ruin, haunted by the eponymous specter. The film then becomes, for the most part, a teen drama as the Ghost is brought back by one of the girls to their boarding school, where he has a series of adventures (basically he makes things worse and then better and then is threatened and then saves the day). It's the unsettlingly realistic depiction of the girls' lives that is most memorable: one sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, gets pregnant and is abandoned by him; another is severely stressed out by a test, gets caught cheating and tries to kill herself. These aren't sitcom kids along for a goofy ride, they're recognizably of the same cohort as the nihilistic youths of New Wave films like Yim Ho's The Happening or the hopeless rich kids of Patrick Tam's Nomad. It's like Scream but with the characters from Kids. The Ghost himself, despite his moniker and outward appearance, conceals a dark past: he killed himself after repeated failures both professional and marital. This mixing of moods, wild, unpredictable swings from farce to melodrama to action movie and back again, are one of the more intriguing features of Hong Kong cinema, the best of them deftly avoiding the feeling of calculated sentimentality that can plague similarly blended Hollywood films.

Following the success of the first film, Happy Ghost II was released in 1985, again with Clifton Ko directing and Raymond Wong serving as star and co-writer. Set at a different girls' school, Wong this time plays a dual role as the Ghost and his reincarnation, a clumsy teacher named Sam Hong. Sam has been plagued his whole life by an unwelcome super power bequeathed him by his ancestor, which tends to magnify his clumsiness (it's basically a telekinesis type thing). He arrives at the school after a cadre of mean girls has run off their latest victim (Sam is their eighth teacher, if I remember correctly). Leading the girls is Fennie Yuen, in her first role (she went on to play Blue Phoenix in the Swordsman movies, among other things), playing "the Chairman" with an air of disaffected maliciousness. The girls spend most of the film making life miserable for Sam, despite his using his powers to help them cheat at sports (which the Ghost did in the first film as well). Eventually he gets fired, gives up his powers and gets them back (a plotline not unlike that of Superman II) and everyone has a party on the beach. This sequel is much brighter than the original, with Wong playing up the slapstick (a scene where he destroys the classroom of his love interest teacher is particularly impressive) while any trace of the series' horror roots is lost.

The third Happy Ghost film was released in 1986 and though it still starred and was written and produced by Raymond Wong, it has a distinctly different look to it. Partially this is the result of the special effects, much more elaborate and modern than in the first two films, utilizing computer graphics and supervised by Tsui Hark (who also has a small role in the film as The Godfather, the gatekeeper of the afterlife). But also the film is simply more composed visually than the first two, which are rather perfunctory in style. Whether To or Lam is responsible for that I can't say, as both have shown keen eyes as directors. But there are a couple images or motifs that will recur in To's later work. The most obvious is the use of colored light, electric reds and blues that suffuse and dominate the screen, especially in night scenes (the blues) and interiors (the reds). This trope is by no means unique to To (Ching Siu-tung, who choreographed the action in Happy Ghost III, uses it in Swordsman II, to name one example) and I'd actually taken it as an 80s Hong Kong, or at least Cinema City, trademark. But then in watching A Better Tomorrow II I realized that John Woo's films are almost always realistically lit, so maybe it's a To-specific contribution? A subject for further research. To will continue to use this kind of color abstraction throughout his career, most especially in the late 90s with Milkway films like A Hero Never Dies (red), Where A Good Mans Goes (blue) or The Odd Ones Dies (orange). Less obvious, but perhaps no less indicative of an artist at work is a very simple, very brief shot, an establishing shot of the school. Shot from enough of a distance that the white, four-story building fills the frame, doors and windows fronted by open balconies running the breadth of the structure, we see the girls waking between classes. It's an elegant image, one that captures the unique architecture of the building (and perhaps implies something about the rigid, ant farm-like qualities of the school environment), the kind of throwaway transitional shot you don't think much of at all. Except we never saw it in the second film, though it uses the same building, the same walkways and classrooms. It may not be the shot of a great artist, but it is evidence that someone was paying attention. This kind of detail, of care in framing and composition is striking when watching the second and third films back-to-back: Ko and Wong are good at setting up gags and sustaining a variety of tonal moods, but Lam and/or To have a better sense of where to put the camera and what to put in front of it.

But the most striking thing about Happy Ghost III is the performance of Maggie Cheung. We know her now as one of the great stars of the last 30 years, with a string of brilliant performances in art house classics (In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, Centre Stage, Hero, Comrades Almost a Love Story and so on). But in 1986 she was a former Miss Hong Kong runner-up most known for playing Jackie Chan's cute girlfriend in 1985's Police Story. But she gets the central role here, as the ghost of a failed singer in search of reincarnation who is continually stymied by Wong's clumsiness (here reprising his role as the teacher Sam, as well as the Happy Ghost). After two failed reincarnations, she vows revenge on Sam and begins making his life miserable, terrorizing his classroom and possessing his students. The students have undergone another change as well: from the barely getting by strivers of the first film, to the arrogant and entitled mean kids of the second to well-behaved and rather dull kids this time around. This is most evident in the transformation of Fennie Yuen's character, from a bad girl in dark glasses to a perfect class prefect, the only time she shows the spark the character had the the previous film is when she's possessed by Maggie Cheung (literally) and gives the famed Kubrick stare: chin down, eyes up, maniacal grin. The first half of the film is a series of tricks Maggie mischievously plays on Sam (the spirit is always playful here, no darkness to be found). In the second half they become friends (including a magical music video sequence as they frolic around the city at night) and eventually end up saving the prefect from a gang of pimps.

There is a tonal mixture to the film, but it's of a different flavor than that of the first film. Instead of horror and comedy, it's a blend of comedy and melodrama, and melodrama of a surprising depth and resonance. In this respect it fits in very well with Johnnie To's later romantic comedies, many of which blend an anarchic style of body humor (either with slapstick or makeup effects, for example the use of fat suits on Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng in Love on a Diet) with an almost tangible sadness and sense of loss (My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Romancing in Thin Air). This film doesn't reach anything like those heights, and I'm inclined to give most of the credit for the film's emotional ambivalence to Maggie Cheung, who is of course adorably spunky yet also reveals her character's sadness (she too committed suicide, but also her heartbreak when Sam kicks her out as well as late in the film, when she's convinced she'll never be reincarnated (which is also a cool visual effect where Maggie fades to black and white)) and joy. The movie is better at the joy: the profound kind when Maggie hears that people have discovered her lovely pop song 20 years after her death for sure, but more importantly the sheer glee with which she toys with poor Sam. She's the first incarnation of a character that more than any other typifies and unifies Johnnie To's cinema: the game player. From crime epics to romantic comedies; in cops, gangsters, bankers, gamblers, thieves, musicians, actors, wrestlers, and pickpockets, what marks a Johnnie To character is the spirit of play, the complex interweaving of chance and fate and the pleasure they take in competition, in performance.

Next Up: Seven Years Itch

On Infernal Affairs, The Departed and Johnnie To

In the midst of a lengthy binge on Johnnie To movies, preparing for a They Shot Pictures episode we hope to record this weekend, I’ve tried to fit in a few other Hong Kong films that I thought might have influenced, or been influenced by To’s work. I rewatched Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and John Woo’s 1986 A Better Tomorrow, two of the first Hong Kong movies I ever saw way back in the late 90s and the latter of which I’m now convinced is not only one of the most influential movies of the last 25 years, but also one of the best. I also watched the one major Woo film that had previously eluded me, his Vietnam epic Bullet in the Head, featuring a star-making turn from future To regular Simon Yam. Additionally I finally watched Peter Chan’s acclaimed romance Comrades, Almost a Love Story, a movie that doesn’t appear to have had much impact on To: his romances are almost always more tongue-in-cheek (with the notable exception of Linger, which might be the most inert film he’s ever made), though his 2003 film Turn Left, Turn Right is a kind of variation on the last 20 minutes or so of Chan’s film. The least interesting film I watched was The Heroic Duo, by Benny Chan, a To-knockoff with Ekin Cheng and Leon Lai playing a cat and mouse cops and robbers game (think Running Out of Time) with a silly supernatural gimmick (Lai can hypnotize people just by staring into their eyes and asking them highly personal questions).

The last film I watched is Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s smash 2002 hit Infernal Affairs, a film impossible to imagine without Johnnie To’s Milkway Image cops and gangsters movies (The Mission, The Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected) that nonetheless proved far more financially successful than any of To’s films had been to that point. The first time I saw it was shortly before Martin Scorsese’s remake The Departed was released in the fall of 2006 and it was weird coming back to it almost a decade later, having seen Scorsese’s version a few times since its release. The plot, if you’re not familiar, follows two undercover agents: Tony Leung (Leonardo Di Caprio in the remake) plays a cop who has infiltrated a Triad gang and Andy Lau (Matt Damon) is a gangster who has infiltrated the police. Both characters rise to a trusted position and are each ultimately tasked with uncovering the other as both sides become aware that there’s a mole within their group. Infernal Affairs clocks in at a mere 100 minutes, lightning-fast by the standards of contemporary American film, where even the slightest of romantic comedies regularly slog past the two hour mark, which I think reveals something interesting about the ways the two industries (Hong Kong and Hollywood) work.

The running time difference is not merely the result of the remake having added more story. Though it does integrate some elements of Infernal Affairs’s two sequels, this amounts to maybe fifteen minutes or so of the extra time. The only major transformation of the narrative The Departed makes to the original (one which has no real major effect on the running time) is to combine the two female characters into one person. Instead of Andy Lau having a girlfriend (Sammi Cheng) and Tony Leung having a therapist (Kelly Chen) with whom he has a platonic friendship, Scorsese gives us only one character: Vera Farmiga as both Damon’s girlfriend and Leo’s therapist. This adds an element of wild metaphysical coincidence, as if there's only room for one woman in this hyper-masculine gangster world. In this respect, an improbable coincidence that reinforces the doubling between the hero and villain, the Scorsese movie is actually more Johnnie To-like than the original, as many of To’s films are built around chance and fate. Scorsese gives the material a further complication by having DiCaprio sleep with Farmiga (something Leung does not do in the original), the professional rivalry between the two men thus becomes a sexual one as it’s implied that Damon is impotent while Leo is. . .the opposite. Scorsese films are littered with sexual insecurities and rivalries between men, so this addition thus makes the film even more his own.

So it’s not story changes that account for the difference in length between the two films. Rather it is the approach to characterization, genre and action. The kind of ruthlessly efficient filmmaking on display in Infernal Affairs is typical of the output of a genre-based studio system that relies on familiarity, both with character types and the various actors’ star personae, to do a lot of the narrative background work, much like Hollywood’s pre-Code gangster or ‘good-bad woman’ cycle, the films of which rarely clock in at more than 75 minutes. Scorsese's film, by comparison, has to take its time developing its characters, because every Leonardo DiCaprio performance is different and this particular type of cop movie is fairly rare in modern Hollywood, where crime films are built more around action set-pieces (Michael Mann’s Heat or Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, to take examples from two extremes, though it should be noted that hero-villain doubling is an essential part of Mann’s film) or gruesome bits of horror (David Fincher’s Se7en, or Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs).

Hong Kong fans can just look at a massive star like Andy Lau and know that he's a cool, charming striver who might be a bit stiff, a bit amoral, but is probably a decent guy, while Tony Leung always looks anguished and his goatee tells you he's done bad things he regrets (he also played almost the exact same role in John Woo’s Hard-Boiled ten years earlier: a cop who’s been undercover too long) but is almost assuredly the hero (a notable exception is in Johnnie To’s The Longest Nite, where Leung plays a very dirty cop who somehow manages to still elicit audience sympathy by the end of the film, partially because he’s Tony Leung and he’s a great actor and partially because he isn’t quite as bad as the gangsters trapping him). Similarly, Sammi Cheng’s character is given almost no dialogue or character, but she is also major pop and movie star in Hong Kong who we know well from her other work, especially her prior films with Andy Lau, like Johnnie To’s Needing You and Love on a Diet.

Additionally, Infernal Affairs was merely the latest in a long string of so called ‘heroic bloodshed’ films, inspired by A Better Tomorrow and City on Fire: films about cops and triads with elaborate codes of honor and where the mirroring identification of hero and villain is a recurrent trope (see also Woo’s The Killer and Hard-Boiled, To’s The Big Heat, The Longest Nite and Running Out of Time among many others). These films in turn are a continuation of older traditions, such as the Shaw Brothers films of the late 60s and 70s, especially those directed by Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman, Crippled Avengers) and the samurai movies of the 50s and 60s, especially those of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo). The audience for Infernal Affairs was likely familiar with many of these antecedents, even if they weren’t conversant with the films that had originally inspired them (American gangster films and film noir, Spaghetti Westerns, Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime movies, the whole history of action-adventure literature in Japan and China, American hard-boiled fiction and so on). A filmmaking culture with a strong genre- and star-based system is able to cut narrative corners based on the assumption that the audience will be able to follow along simply because they’ve seen this kind of thing, by these actors (or actors much like them) before. The Departed is almost an hour longer than Infernal Affairs, and much of that difference is in giving character-defining speeches and actions to the performers, as well as in the Hollywood-mandated repetition of key plot points in order to create the relatively unique generic world.

(It’s apparently some kind of rule in mainstream American film that you have to state everything three times in order to make sure everyone in the audience always knows what’s going on (or in case they got up for popcorn or something). Infernal Affairs in this respect is much closer to the way Johnnie To works. In a film like Sparrow, for example, To only relays a bit of information once. If you miss it the first time, you’re just going to have to figure it out on your own. This has the affect of making the audience both more attentive (don’t want to miss anything) and less (once you’ve missed something, you’re forced to take in other, non-story elements of the film, compositions, editing, music, etc, until you catch up again). In either case, its very rare in a Johnnie To film to feel like you’ve been pummeled, something all-too-common in contemporary Hollywood.)

The other big difference is in the approach to the violent sequences. Infernal Affairs is very matter-of-fact in its depiction of violence: it erupts suddenly and is over quickly. Scorsese though follows a build-and-release model, where suspense and tension accumulates over the course of a scene (often while Jack Nicholson is making a crazy speech) before being capped by an act of graphic violence. Take for example the breaking of Leung/DiCaprio’s cast. In both films, the undercover cop is wearing a hard cast on their forearm when the top gangster begins to suspect there’s a mole in his group. We’re shown before the scene begins that the cop will be wearing a wire, the implication being that it will be located in the cast. In Infernal Affairs, the gangster, with no lead up, simply grabs Leung’s arm and smashes it on the table just as their criminal scheme has been foiled. The violence is shocking, and the fear that Leung has been exposed is quickly felt and just as quickly resolved as no wire appears. In The Departed, the action takes place sometime after the scheme has been foiled. DiCaprio meets Nicholson in a bar and listens to him talk. They go to a back room where Nicholson talks some more (the tension here is all verbal: Nicholson can explode at any time (something we know well from his star persona) and we’re in a constant state of anticipation/dread). Ray Winstone, playing Nicholson’s enforcer calmly walks up, takes DiCaprio’s arm, and smashes the cast on a pool table. Nicholson then hammers his hand a few times with a boot, in case he (or we) didn’t get the message (Nicholson is angry with DiCaprio and doesn’t entirely trust him). Again, the wire is not there and DiCaprio’s cop remains safe, if rattled. It takes four minutes for Scorsese to cover the same story terrain Infernal Affairs accomplished in 15 seconds.

(Here’s where I explain that I don’t think this is a flaw of The Departed, merely a different approach to filmmaking. Yes, those speeches don’t advance the story much, but much of the pleasure of the film comes from the delightfully profane dialogue, spoken with relish in broad Boston accents by the film’s remarkable actors.)

The difference here is simply one of approach. Infernal Affairs is all quick, punctuating violence, violence that appears and disappears with no warning, no time to prepare. The Departed, on the other hand, creates a palpable dread. It very much wants to put us inside the mind of DiCaprio, to feel the kind of paranoia and pressure he has to deal with every day in his life as the only good guy in a world of very scary men. The Departed is as much about the psychology of violence as it is anything else and it creates a world dominated by this kind of pathological fear. Infernal Affairs is about tracing an intricate web and much of our enjoyment comes from watching the ways it plays on and varies its generic forebearers. To drastically simplify: in The Departed, we identify with the characters, in Infernal Affairs, we admire the filmmaking craft.

The success of Infernal Affairs certainly inspired a burst of creativity from Johnnie To, as he followed it up with his greatest cops and gangsters films, movies that challenged and critiqued the genre more successfully than he ever had before. Where his 1999 The Mission is a perfect expression of the heroic bloodshed genre, later films broke down and analyzed the genre’s ideals, codes, and psychology from within both the cops (PTU, Breaking News, Mad Detective) and the gangsters (Exiled, Vengeance, the Election films). None of these films managed to be as popular as Lau and Mok’s film, though they did win To critical acclaim both in Hong Kong and around the world. As yet, none of them have been remade in Hollywood.

VIFF 2013 Preview: Blind Detective

Part of my on-going coverage of VIFF 2013. Here is an index.

I'd heard of Johnnie To before I ever went to the Vancouver Film Festival, having read David Bordwell on him at his website. I'd even seen a few of his movies before: dubbed versions of the Heroic Trio films during my first brush with Hong Kong movies in the late 90s, and Election 2 on Instant Netflix (under its American release title, Triad Election, I watched it not knowing it was a sequel). But seeing Sparrow at my first trip to VIFF in 2008 was a revelation. I knew To as a Hong Kong action director, John Woo with more shadows, less Chow Yun-Fat. But Sparrow was something else entirely, that same heroic bloodshed world but with a Jacques Demy twist. Light, colorful, whimsical and warm. In the years since, I've dipped in and out of To's Milkyway world (including a lengthy run through his filmography earlier this year, in preparation for a They Shot Pictures episode about him), loving almost all I've seen, including Written By by his longtime collaborator Wai Ka-fai, which I saw at VIFF 2009. I missed Vengeance that year and Drug War last year (though I caught up with them a few months later at the San Francisco and Seattle Film Festivals, respectively. Neither fest holds a candle to VIFF, of course) and, much to my dismay, my train leaves town in the middle of the screening of his latest film, Blind Detective at this year's VIFF. So, as part of my warm-up for the festival, resorted to other means to see it (it's out on Blu-Ray in Hong Kong already, pretty easy to find).

The big draw in Blind Detective is the reunion of Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. Pop stars and cultural icons, it was the series of romantic comedies they made with To in the early 2000s that essentially saved his Milkyway Image company from collapse. The first few years of the studio saw the release of several dark gangster dramas, mostly ghost-directed by To, that failed to find much of an audience. But Needing You, an office romance with Lau and Cheng, proved to be a big hit and for years thereafter To would mix wacky romances in with his more serious crime films. Cheng and Lau each made six films with To from 2000 to 2004, including two where they were paired together (Love on a Diet and Yesterday Once More). But after 2004 neither worked with To again until 2012's Romancing in Thin Air (in which Cheng stars opposite Louis Koo, who is playing a very Andy Lau-type movie star). This period also coincides with a more serious turn in To's work. From 2005 until 2011, he didn't make a single romantic comedy, and with the notable exception of Sparrow, the films are serious melodramas (albeit often darkly sardonic ones) all taking place in the triad gangster world (except for the strangely inert romantic drama Linger, from 2008, a more straightforward, less interesting version of the 2002 Cheng vehicle My Left Eyes Sees Ghosts). But in 2011, To returned to the romance genre with the lush screwball Don't Go Breaking My Heart, and 2012's meta-epic Romancing in Thin Air.

Johnnie To's filmography is so dense and so vast, that part of the fun of each new release is in finding the connections between it and his previous work. Drug War, for example, forms part of a trilogy with Expect the Unexpected and PTU, each film a procedural following a team of cops tracking a group of criminals and ending in a dramatic gunfight. The 2009 film Vengeance forms a rough trilogy about groups of hitmen with The Mission and Exiled, all ultimately about the pointlessness of the revenge demands in the Triad honor code. Similarly, both his 2011 films deal with the fallout of the financial crisis, with Life Without Principle's crime drama highlighting its effects on the various middle and criminal classes and drawing somewhat unexpected parallels between them, where Don't Go Breaking My Heart uses the crisis as a plot point that barely registers as a blip in the lives of its upper class financier characters, consciously recalling the fanciful milieux of Depression Era screwball comedies. Romancing in Thin Air is a summarizing film, one that incorporates and synthesizes elements of romantic films from throughout To's career into a single grand statement on the cathartic power of cinema; it's To's 2046. Blind Detective presents a couple of interesting contrasts. The most obvious is with 2007's Mad Detective, which has a similar title and is also the story of a young cop enlisting the eponymous former cop to help solve a recent crime. Lau Ching Wan's Mad Detective approaches his investigations with the same techniques as Andy Lau's Blind Detective: he goes through the criminals' motions until he sees exactly what they did, and we see his vision of the recreation on-screen. These visions recall as well Running on Karma, in which Andy Lau plays a former monk who can see people's karma, the crimes they committed in past lives. Again, he's called in to help a young detective solve a crime.  Like that film as well, there's a strong romantic element to Blind Detective, though it's played here as comedy where in Karma it's tragedy (there's a smaller tragic love story in Mad Detective as well). The new film then represents not only the third part of a "vision"-based crime solving trilogy, but a synthesis of To's comedies with his crime films. (Yesterday Once More accomplished something similar, in combining elements of the romantic comedies with To's Running Out of Time caper films). The violence in these films is at times stomach churning, the dark and depraved killings clashing tonally with the wide-open romanticism of To's heroes, as if to say "the world is scary and terrible, but. . ."

Most interesting to me is the formal contrast between Blind Detective and Drug War. The latter might be To's tersest film: its characters are almost entirely defined by action, with no back story, no history, no personal lives or small talk. They are professionals, cops and criminals alike, and the story is relentlessly forward-moving, like the long non-stop drives the cops must endure as they crisscross the country pursuing the crooks, it never lets up until the explosive finale. Blind Detective, though, meanders here and there, taking its time, losing itself down subplots of other, unrelated crimes actual (with To stalwart Lam Suet) and romantic (with Gao Yuanyuan, who sparkled in Don't Go Breaking My Heart but is clearly outshone by Cheng here) all while indulging in Andy Lau's prodigious appetite (this may be the most food-obsessed of all Johnnie To's movies, even more so than Love on a Diet, which was largely about Andy and Sammi wearing fat suits and eating everything they came across). Where Drug War is tension and suspense and momentum, Blind Detective is leisurely digression. It's the Hatari! to Drug War's Scarface.

Similarly, Andy Lau's performance is in contrast to his prior work. His character resembles the one he played in Tsui Hark's very popular Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Like that film, Blind Detective is a mystery rather than a noirish gangster melodrama like most of To's crime films, and Lau plays the Holmes/Poirot figure. But where Detective Dee matches Lau's suave star persona, the Blind Detective is something new. He looks and dresses like the coolest guy on the planet Andy Lau of previous To collaborations Running Out of Time and Yesterday Once More, but he's wildly antic, shouting his lines and gleefully running with abandon from one inspiration to the next. (One of the film's best jokes involves someone finding Lau's partner, Guo Tao, to be the "cool" one of the pair). At times Lau almost seems to be parodying Lau Ching Wan's manic To performances (most obviously the one in Mad Detective). More than 30 years after his breakthrough in Ann Hui's Boat People, I can't recall a more buoyant, more childlike, more aggressively open Andy Lau.

At over two hours long, this is one of the longest of Johnnie To's films (they usually clock in around 100 minutes). It's even longer than the Sammi Cheng-starring wuxia farce Wu yen, a similarly digressive tale, but one that tends to sag with the accumulation of subplots and wild gags. Blind Detective never drags. The more time we get to hang out with Andy and Sammi, the better. And the more romantic comedies from Johnnie To, the better as well. For too long they've been shunted aside in favor of the supposedly more "serious" crime films. His next film is Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2, and I can't wait.