Happy Lunar New Year, everyone!

Rather, Happy Late Lunar New Year. I’m forever getting behind. I’m so behind, in fact, that I’ll post up this celebrity Lunar New Year photo from last year:

“I think this is going to be a good year!”

Yes, this photo was taken before…uh, that thing that happened.

(more…)

I should not call what I’m doing blogging, because I don’t actually blog. I just post every month or so.

I would apologize for this long absence from Damn You, Kozo!, but that would assume that people actually read this thing. In many ways, LoveHKFilm.com is what it is because I assume nobody ever reads it. Our lack of attentiveness to our visitors is also why we’re totally behind, and why many other sites have leapfrogged us in traffic, popularity, and online self-congratulation. It’s also why I named this blog Damn You, Kozo!, because aside from completely usurping another person’s real name and identity, Kozo simply can’t keep up with the Joneses.

Bruce Lee said it best:

“DAMN YOU, KOZO!”

Ah, that feels better.

Anyway, in recent Hong Kong news, this person is getting married:

NOTE: Not an actual wedding photo

Everybody loves Kelly Chen - provided that you talk to the correct six out of ten people. Chances are that the four out of ten people who actually liked An Empress and the Warriors can be found in those six, and why not? The film features Kelly in heavy armor, plus the wonderful sight of Leon Lai spitting on Kelly’s bare back:

The magic of the movies!

This picture cracks me up:

You could interpret this photo at least three different ways

About Empress, someone should really talk about the genius casting one day. Thanks to the triumvirate of Donnie Yen, Kelly Chen, and Leon Lai, every audience member is guaranteed to dislike at least one person in the starring cast. Could it have killed them to cast a single actor who doesn’t have active detractors?

If you hate Hui Siu-Hung, you will go to hell

Empress and the Warriors also marks the first Mei Ah Blu-ray Disc. Ownership of a PlayStation 3 has put me on the Blu-ray bandwagon, and despite not being entirely enthused about Empress, I will be buying it. Other titles on my Blu-ray to buy list include the Infernal Affairs Trilogy, Chungking Express, and nearly anything with Tsui Hark’s name on it - short of Black Mask 2 and Missing, that is. I’d still pick up The Legend of Zu.

“Wow, I’m really sorry about Missing!”

He better be.

I doubt that the victory of Blu-ray over HD DVD will inspire a flood of Hong Kong catalog titles onto Blu-ray Disc. Such a flood did occur during the late nineties when DVD first hit the market, but even now, Hong Kong home video is beset by a terrible, terrible scourge that has destroyed home entertainment:

This logo is evil

Illegal downloading is the evil stepchild of the above, and is responsible for far more lost revenue, but I sincerely believe that crappy VCD quality - and its willing acceptance by Hong Kong consumers - is indicative of how the populace as a whole thinks of entertainment. Basically, everyone here is okay with watching movies with poor resolution, bad color, and zero features. Given that, is it a surprise that everyone’s okay with watching the latest and greatest in Asian Entertainment on You Tube?

Everyone in this photo illegally downloads

Back to Kelly’s concert:

Probably one of Kelly’s more conservative outfits

Kelly announced her upcoming marriage at the final show in her recent Hung Hom Coliseum concert series - a nice touch, since hers was the final appearance from a big star before the venue undergoes at least a year of renovation. I actually attended an earlier show (a.k.a. not the one where she said she was getting married), and here was my vantage point:

Kelly has always been a decent, if not spectacular singer - and really, she’s much better at singing than acting. The main draw here was her eye-popping assortment of wacky costumes and themes, which ranged from the cute bear-headed thing:

Love the boots

To the mermaid thing:

Hopefully Disney won’t sue

To the midriff-baring thing:

I think this was my favorite

To the white futuristic outfit with mega-huge goggles thing:

In the future we’ll all dress like this

Here’s one with Leon Lai as an accessory:

Too bad Donnie wasn’t there

Special mention must go to Kelly for her various yoga poses and exceptional good humor, which was evident because she didn’t act bothered by the people leaving their seats during her concert. For some reason, it seemed like every number was a new excuse for a bathroom break for the audience. Some people even got up to leave early. I felt like I was at a Laker game.

“Is this concert EVER going to get any better?”

In general, the concert was a fine diversion, but it was also curiously low-energy. Having attended a few other concerts in my time in Hong Kong, I must rate Kelly’s as the most non-crucial of the bunch - at least, from an audience standpoint.

About her marriage, it managed to occupy all the newspapers for a good 2-3 days here in Hong Kong - a nice change, since the news was entirely positive, and had nothing to do with scandal, judgmental mud-slinging, or accidental exposure. Sadly, it’s the exception to the norm over here.

Anyway, seeing Kelly allows me to check off yet another on my “Stars I Want To See Live, But Not Necessarily Meet” List. Now that Kelly is out of the way, my number one is sadly Leon because I’d like to see him, but yeah, meeting him is not a priority at all. If a meeting ever occurred, this could be my reaction:

An actual photo from the Kelly Chen concert

If someone asked which celebrity is the one I would most like to meet, that’s obvious: Ekin Cheng is still the number one. I hope it occurs one day, simply so we can take a picture and I can send a general “nyah-nyah” in the direction of those who think I don’t like Ekin Cheng.

Ekin and Charlene Choi on the set of Storm Warriors:

I think they’re made of wax

By the way, I still have not written about my Aaron Kwok concert experience. It may never happen now. I’m sure he’s all broken up.

Here’s a pic of him anyway:

“Tetsuooooo!!!!!”

Aaaand one last photo of Kelly:

She has something in her eye

Photo credits: As usual, thanks to Apple Daily - with an assist from Ming Pao, Sina.com, plus the World Wide Web.

Again, it’s been a while. Chow Pak-Ho wears the message that I wish to share:

I know one person who owns this shirt,
and about seventy-five people who should wear it.

Welcome to your regularly scheduled bi-weekly Damn You, Kozo! blog post. As usual, I’d like to thank Apple Daily for supplying all our photos. Frankly, they’re the greatest newspaper in the history of time EVER.

Kelly Chen’s facial expression shows her appreciation of my sarcasm:

“Do you have to be such a prick?”

On to the actual subject here: Man, I’m beat.

The Hong Kong International Film Festival has finally ended the majority of its program, and I have zero screenings left to attend. I saw some good films and some bad films at the fest. Most will be showing up on LoveHKFilm.com as reviews, but there will likely be a few that I don’t touch. One film in particular I don’t wish to review because I was so unimpressed with it that even writing about it makes me sad. Also, despite the general perception that I’m picky and mean, I find negative opinion tiring and sometimes more damaging than saying nothing at all. So…at least one film won’t get reviewed.

Shawn Yue is down with that:

“Man, that’s awesome! I’ve so got the munchies.”

I also won’t be reviewing another film, Coffee or Tea, until its official theatrical release because the fest screening had a temp music track that I found egregiously overblown. As a result of its completely overwrought music score, my perception of the entire film was probably affected. I would prefer to wait a few months until its finalized before I pass judgment on whether or not I liked it.

Also, I got ill during the fest and missed three films, including a couple I was really looking forward to. Those films were the award-winning Home Song Stories, and quite sadly, the Lawrence Lau duo City Without Baseball and Besieged City. I’ll have to check them out later, but my attempt to be timely has failed miserably.

I did drag myself out of bed those days to check out a few films that I really wanted to see, including Sylvia Chang’s Run Papa Run, but thanks to my lack of complete recovery, I ended up with a five-to-seven day period of sluggishness and discomfort I fondly refer to as “Hell in March”. As a result of the sick days my work fell way behind, my LoveHKFilm.com review writing fell way behind, and this blog - which occupies a lower rung on the importance ladder than everything else in my life - fell totally behind.

So yeah, I’m tired. This is what I look like now:

Permanent ink is a real killjoy

Film Festivals are tiring - and potentially dangerous to my health - but I have to say that I really enjoy them. Prior to coming to Hong Kong, I was never really partial to film fests, but after attending a few here, I’ve changed my mind. I now like film festivals so much, that I simply can’t go a whole month without a new one.

As a result, I’ll be off to another film festival at the end of the week, the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, where I’ll get to see one of Johnnie To’s new PTU television movies, plus The Sparrow, and a bunch of other Asian films that I look forward to checking out. I’m not sure why I’ve decided to go film-fest-o-rama with my life, but hey, that’s where the wind is taking me right now: to Italy, and far away from Hong Kong’s increasingly muggy weather.

As far as LoveHKFilm.com is concerned, all this rampant movie-watching means that I should probably institute a 600-words-or-less limit when writing future reviews because my potential review backlog will likely number twenty or more films. The other option is to turn off that portion of my brain, not review anything, and just act like your average paying audience member. It could make me happier. Like this man:

Andy Lau is thinking of the poor people
who paid to see All About Love.

Also, during my time in Italy, I will be completely unwired. I don’t have a working wi-fi laptop, and I don’t intend to queue for public workstations so it’s entirely possible that I won’t be checking out this site, this blog, or the entire damn Internet for close to a week. Once I return from Italy, I’ll have a whole slew of Hong Kong movies to catch up on reviewing, including the sequel to Barbara Wong’s Truth or Dare, plus the new Wong Jing spectacular My Wife is a Gambling Maestro. There’s also that Jet Li/Jackie Chan debacle movie, The Forbidden Kingdom, to check out.

Considering the above, this may be the only time I update Damn You, Kozo! in April. I would say that’s sad, but anyway, most of the stuff that appears on blogs is extraneous and unnecessary, so we can think of this month as simply “cutting the fat” from this website and the World Wide Web at large. I’m happy to do my part to slim down the Internet. We should get an award for Bandwidth Conservation.

These guys are also enthused:

“We support your decision to conserve bandwidth!
Please stop this website and blog immediately!”

No problem. I’ll get right on it.