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Review
by Kozo: |
Sam
Lee goes under the gun in the sublimely awful thriller
A Wedding or a Funeral. Lee plays Joe, an aptly-named
normal guy who's about to marry the pretty Shirley (Pauline
Suen), a woman who is clearly his physical superior.
Still, she's attracted to him because he's such a good
guy, a factor outlined in a brightly-lit flashback where
Joe saves Shirley from a flaming taxi wreck. But Joe
gets a rude wedding gift when Shirley gets kidnapped
by a mystery bad guy, who proceeds to blackmail Joe
into doing all sorts of sordid stuff, namely kidnapping
and detaining three seemingly innocent men (Tan Lap-Man,
Jim Chim, and Lam Suet). Joe is a non-confrontational
sort who could use a couple of lessons in assertion
and general kick-ass manliness. Apparently, this whole
ordeal looks to be a way for him to transform from mousy
good guy to awesome beefcake hero who can make a lady
like Shirley go weak in the knees. Right?
Wrong. You're mistaking A Wedding or a Funeral for a film by people who've
actually studied filmmaking. If they had, they might
have realized that a cheesy storyline like the "man
who finds himself through adversity" cliché
would have raised A Wedding or a Funeral to mediocrity.
Since this film can't even find a cliché to use,
what's left is an uninteresting motion picture that
falls below mediocre into all-out terrible. This is
ostensibly a thriller, but instead of thrilling anyone,
the film bores us with nonexistent characters, annoying
supporting actors, lame dialogue, and some revelatory
plot twists that are as surprising as the outcome of
your usual celebrity media trial. This shouldn't be
too surprising since the film was produced by B&S
Films, Hong Kong's leading purveyor of amateurish shot-on-video
cinema. A Wedding or a Funeral was not shot on
video, but that doesn't help it much. If anything, the
fact that it was shot on film calls more attention to
the poor art direction and cinematography.
It's sad that Sam
Lee and Pauline Suen—two actors who have have actually
turned in good performances before—had to appear
in tripe like this. What's even more worrisome is that
their performances are either overdone or uninteresting,
suggesting that boredom led them to overact or phone
it in. This is especially true for Lee, whose overdone
mugging and undiscplined acting seems to suggest a kid
trying to stave off boredom by amusing himself. Hopefully
he succeeded, but whatever amusement he created is not
transmitted to the audience. Director Ho Chi-Hang does
nothing to suggest that he deserves better filmmaking
gigs, and the appearances by Law Koon-Lan and Lam Suet
only remind us how far the industry has fallen. Reduced
revenue means reduced budgets, so you have to make do
with what you got. In the interests of low costs, they
likely spent nothing on this production, with the hopes
that whatever money was spent would be used on film
quality and not inflated salaries or exorbitant production
costs. However, given the ultimate quality of A Wedding
or a Funeral, simply burning the money might have
been the same thing. (Kozo 2004) |
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