Lo kong ching chuen (2007) User Reviews

Entertaining Sentamental piece, but contains slanted view

[gwfung · 6/10 · 4 October 2007]

A touching life and love story of a family and childhood sweethearts, it is set in the rapidly changing backdrop of Hong Kong as it grew as a city and returned to China.

The human drama leads to an entertaining story, but as person who grew up and identifies as being from Hong Kong, I can see the obvious bias in representing the city's culture. The film highlights various significant historical historical events in Hong Kong, but conveniently skips over the international role of the city and the impact of the uprising leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Still a tear jerker and brings back great sentiments about a unique place which will never be the same, but it could have been much more neutral. Makes me question the political motivations and purpose behind this film.

Resonant

[harry_tk_yung · 19 June 2007]

Embracing the last 40 years' sprawling history of Hong Kong, this movie will strike a heart-felt chord of resonance with her people. There is in fact a similar movie almost a decade ago, renowned director Ann Hui's "Ordinary heroes" (1999) which, however, is the story of real people. "Mr Cinema", on the other hand, uses fictitious characters…….characters, however, that are so iconic that they are almost as good as real. Incidentally, two of the stars in "Mr Cinema", Anthony WONG Chau-sang and PAW Hee-ching, also starred in "Ordinary heroes".

The story of "Mr cinema" evolves around two grass-root families, the head of which are ideologically as polarized as you can imagine, but get along as friends. At the main plot are parents played by Wong and Teresa MO Shun-kwan, with a son played by Ronald CHENG Chung-kei (when grown up). The sub-plot rests of on the shoulders of SUM Kin-fun and Paw, as well as Karen MOK Man-wai playing their daughter (when grown up). The story is about things unique to Hong Kong, but also about things universal – family value, holding firmly onto one's principals and believes, growing up, going away to study and coming back, career and frustration, birth and death, friendship, love, sacrifices……. While not to the extent of minimalism, the story is told with honest simplicity, touching without being sappy.

The cast is simply wonderful. Every scene is a gem. But if I were to pick only one, I would, without any hesitation, choose the scene when Cheng, playing a rebellious son, gets into a nasty verbal fight with the father played by Wong. But the Oscar goes to Mo. Playing the conciliating mother (as mothers usually are), she speaks quietly to the son, with such pain and love and understanding that will break the most cynical of hearts.

The best movie I have seen so far in 2007.

Superficial portrait of a leftist

[kongjr · 3/10 · 18 July 2008]

The movie tried to portrait the life of a simple, kind and helpful Hong Kong leftist, Ah Kong ("Kong" used the same Chinese character in Hong Kong), who worked in a cinema throughout his life, time frame spanning from the liberation of China in 1949 to the anti-British riot in 1967, stock market crash in 1973, China reform during the 1990s, handover of Hong Kong in 1997, outbreak of SARS of 2003 and even the Olympics in 2008.

The ambition was strong, but the character Ah Kong was so unreal and superficial that it was difficult to find any resonance in the audience, the patriotism shown by Ah Kong was so manipulated that it was simply unreal. While it's easy to find some nice people around in Hong Kong, the selflessness of Ah Kong was definitely fallacious to a point that it was easy to imagine it existed in the imagination of the director only.

The director also downplayed or just ignored some other very important events for Hong Kong leftists in the last century, namely the notorious Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976 and the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Both events were absolutely important and shaped many leftists' hearts and psychology, no leftists' stories can be told without mentioning these two events.

This story is unfortunately amateurish when compared to the movies directed by Fruit Chan in terms of Hong Kong historical background.