Boys are Easy

What a absolutely funny movie - I was either in a very silly mood when I watched this or it is just hilarious. It is about a father, Richard Ng, who is worried that his three daughters will never get married so he tells them that he is dying and that his last wish is to see them with boyfriends by his birthday. So the girls frantically scramble around to show up with a man for this dinner so that he can die happy.
Now one has to suspend belief a bit as the three daughters have to either pay or trick or persuade men to pretend to be their boyfriends. Suspend belief because the daughters are played by the incredible trio of Brigitte Lin, Chingmy Yau and Maggie Cheung. Yow !!!. All three as you might imagine are stunning in this film.
The boyfriends that they end up with are not too shabby either - Jackie Cheung, Tony Leung Ka Fai and Dior Cheng. The relationships of all three couples are just so silly that you can't help but find them funny. Chingmy pretends to be a prostitute to feed her sick mother, Maggie is adorable when she takes on the image of a tough triad moll to rope in Jackie and Brigitte is very funny as she does her gender blender thing with Tony Leung.
There are just lots of silly bits and pieces such as the HK Olympic Triads in which the long jump was performed in cement shoes and the relay race uses a machete as the baton or there is a musical number performed in a bowling alley. This film never takes itself seriously for a second and is constantly throwing some nonsense at the viewer. I found nearly all of it quite amusing.
Besides the six leads and Richard Ng, the film has a wealth of other talent in smaller roles. Sandra Ng, Shing Fui-On, Ken Lo, Helen Law Lan, Yuen King-Tan and Jimmy Lin also have parts. Ah, the days when so much talent could be put together!
 

My rating for this film: 8.0


DVD Info:

I don't own this one, but I had a chance to watch it and wanted to warn people NOT to buy the Mercury DVD.

Watched Boys are Easy today on dvd - and something felt wrong - either I am losing it or there were missing scenes - and sure enough I checked my old copy from LD and 3 major scenes are totally screwed up.

In the Triad Olympics only one event - the machette relay race is shown - the other three are discarded completely, the entire scene in which Chingmy borrows the baby to fool Ekin into thinking she is poor is gone and the greatest travesty of all is the musical bowling scene with Yuen King was cut out completely. It makes you want to cry.

I checked the DVD site and realized it is Malaysian - Mercury - but its the only one out so far. I can't imagine these were censorship cuts as they left in the "Little Mushroom" and "Little Forest" bits - so why? Hopefully a full cut will be released by some HK company - until then stay away from this = perhaps not classic film - but one that deserves much better than this.