Director: Riley Yip
Year: 1997
Rating: 7.5/4.5
I very much enjoyed this movie portraying life about a group of 20 somethings in contemporary Hong Kong much more than I had expected. It is a bit of a fairy tale about three Chinese male university students from Vancouver (Andy Hui, Jan Lamb, Wallace Chung) coming to Hong Kong to look for the same elusive girl. There is a bet among them about who will find her first. In their search they all find other loves and discover something about themselves.
Trite sounding, but the movie was quite well done and the images of HK
were magical at times. The three male actors seemed nothing special to me
and I never really understood the circumstances that led them to all be looking
for this girl. But the three women they eventually find are wonderful and
all give terrific performances - Teresa Lee as a nimble fingered girl living
on her wits and speed of foot, Christine Ng as a sympathetic bus driver
who loves to challenge red lights and Hsu Chi.
In particular, I thought Hsu Chi was just outstanding. She plays a policewoman
madly in love with a rough triad member (Vincent Wan) who won’t return her
love. One scene of her starring at him from the shadows with intense unrequited
love and teardrops falling down her cheeks was astonishingly beautiful and
distressing to watch. She has a face full of varied expressions and is endlessly
fascinating to watch, but I think it’s time to realize that she is much
more than a stunning beauty and that her acting is improving quite dramatically.
Rating:
7.5
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is the most "lovey-dovey" movie I have seen in ages, and surely, a top candidate for the sickliest sweet yet bland vanilla concoction ever produced by Hong Kong moviemakers. By this description, it should be eminently clear that I was none too enamoured by this puff-cake offering.
Although LOVE IS NOT A GAME BUT A JOKE has a promisingly
quirky premise (three guys having a competition to find the same gal, with
the one who did so before the others getting to keep her. Somewhat
annoyingly though, we never learn whether she had any say with regards to
this arrangement), what we come to see and realize as the movie progresses
is that these early twenty-something -- or maybe younger...gosh, do they
act as well as look SO young! -- year old boy-men (played by Andy Hui,
Jan Lamb, Wallace Chung) are more generically intent
on pursuing love with a(ny) member of the opposite sex than going after
a particular person. Consequently, and too easily as well as expectedly,
before too long, the attention of the
three guys get diverted and they abandon their "game".
The objections of their affections come in the
form of: A sprite-like ragamuffin (played by Theresa Lee); a policewoman
who pines for a Triad (unconvincingly played by Hsu Chi...who looks like
she's 18, is probably supposed to be in her 20s in this movie but acts like
she's 15); and a bus driver whose bus never seems full (played by Christine
Ng...whom I thought was the most mature-looking individual of the six main
actors AND the best thing about this movie). How these women manage
to effortlessly wrap the men around their little fingers as well as warm up
to these really unattractively immature (one of them likes to sniff perfume
samples and regularly carries a stuffed animal and a toy gun in his backpack
-- Enough said, I think!) individuals is something I find really puzzling
and actually disturbing.
Maybe my problem is that I do not believe in love for love's sake. All I know is that while I can suspend my disbelief and accept the (on-screen) existence of flying kung fu masters and hopping vampires along with the possibility of a hand-flicked bullet being able to kill a person (in "Once Upon a Time in China I") and a castrated male coming in the form of the gorgeous Brigitte Lin (in "Swordsman II" and "The East is Red"), I found it immensely difficult to find credibility in much of this movie. Perhaps if you are an avowed romantic, this production might make for pleasurably light viewing. For my part, I felt like the joke was on me for misguidedly thinking that this movie was one which I would enjoy.
My rating for this film: 4.5.
