People smoke. It's a fact of life that men and women by their own volition, satiate this need to tempt fate with dangerous chemicals, all for the sake of looking cool in the presence of the opposite sex. People used to smoke all the time in classic Hollywood films because, to put it frankly, they couldn't get it on. Now that the humans make like the bees, thanks largely in part to the dismantling of the production code(Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" did the honors), ironically, nobody hardly ever seems to light up anymore in a major studio picture. In a period piece like Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor", a smoke-free bar calls attention to its milieu because these patrons seem incongruous to the film's time and place, with their abiding of health code violations and cancer prevention measures. The end of gratuitous smoking might have started with Winona Ryder's pack-a-day habit in Ben Stiller's "Reality Bites"(ironic, huh?). Thankfully, people still smoke in independent and foreign movies.
Smoking belongs on celluloid. Without smoke, you're presenting to the moviegoer an alternate universe. In "Man jeuk", for example, the smoking scene between two rival pickpockets is so highly fetishized, it plays like coded pornography. Similar to the professional dynamics between Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner in John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor", Kei(Simon Yam) and Chung Lei(Kelly Lin) aren't supposed to be together, but the man on the bike gets into the shady lady's car, and sublimate their passion in a haze of smoke, just as Bogie and Bacall did in "Key Largo" and countless other movies. The filmmaker goes for a close-up on the woman's red lips, so when she inserts her cigarette, its penetration suggests an oral fixation of a more lascivious sort. The cigarette looks big in her mouth. After Chung Lei has her fill, she hands the lipstick stained cancer stick to Kei, and he takes a drag, as if returning the favor. Surprisingly, this scene of seduction isn't a prelude to lovemaking. That's because "Man jeuk" is a stylized ode to another era. They end up in his dark room instead. He's a photographer who shoots in black and white, because "colors can be deceiving".
"Man jeuk" is a crime movie where nobody seems to own a gun. For weaponry, the pickpockets conceal razor blades on their tongues. Not only sex is imparted through the mouth, but the violence as well. When the two pickpocketing factions square off, it's like something out of Robert Wise's "West Side Story", in which the skirmish's form takes precedence over its content. Kei, and the gang that holds Chung Li in bondage under Mr. Fu(Hoi-Pang Lo), are pedestrians on opposite sides of the street, waiting for the "walk" signal, in the film's major action set piece. The green icon initiates a choreography that has more in common with dance than a fight sequence. It's as if somebody forgot to supply them with words and music. Kei attempts to be the better pickpocket seemingly by going after style points when he converges with his opponent, just as the imperative for the Sharks and Jets in "West Side Story" was to be the better dance troupe. As the dueling men bypass each other, they employ their weapon in a completely artificial way as in a Jerome Robbins routine, "Cool" or "Rumble", for instance. The razor blades are used to slash pants pockets only, not faces. If Kei wins, Chung Li, a reformed femme fatale(a characteristic that's antithetical to the crime film, or noir), gets asylum from Mr. Fu's clutches. Equally unconventional to the woman's vulnerability(earlier in the film, all of Kei's colleagues meet Chung Li and are the worse for it), Kei's shutterbug habit has nothing to do with surveillance. Working solely with black and white, the comment he makes to Chung Li about color, aligns itself with the film's seeming love for classic Hollywood movies. In particular, black and white film, a dream world where everybody smoked, and people who were shot never bled.
Smoking belongs on celluloid. Without smoke, you're presenting to the moviegoer an alternate universe. In "Man jeuk", for example, the smoking scene between two rival pickpockets is so highly fetishized, it plays like coded pornography. Similar to the professional dynamics between Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner in John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor", Kei(Simon Yam) and Chung Lei(Kelly Lin) aren't supposed to be together, but the man on the bike gets into the shady lady's car, and sublimate their passion in a haze of smoke, just as Bogie and Bacall did in "Key Largo" and countless other movies. The filmmaker goes for a close-up on the woman's red lips, so when she inserts her cigarette, its penetration suggests an oral fixation of a more lascivious sort. The cigarette looks big in her mouth. After Chung Lei has her fill, she hands the lipstick stained cancer stick to Kei, and he takes a drag, as if returning the favor. Surprisingly, this scene of seduction isn't a prelude to lovemaking. That's because "Man jeuk" is a stylized ode to another era. They end up in his dark room instead. He's a photographer who shoots in black and white, because "colors can be deceiving".
"Man jeuk" is a crime movie where nobody seems to own a gun. For weaponry, the pickpockets conceal razor blades on their tongues. Not only sex is imparted through the mouth, but the violence as well. When the two pickpocketing factions square off, it's like something out of Robert Wise's "West Side Story", in which the skirmish's form takes precedence over its content. Kei, and the gang that holds Chung Li in bondage under Mr. Fu(Hoi-Pang Lo), are pedestrians on opposite sides of the street, waiting for the "walk" signal, in the film's major action set piece. The green icon initiates a choreography that has more in common with dance than a fight sequence. It's as if somebody forgot to supply them with words and music. Kei attempts to be the better pickpocket seemingly by going after style points when he converges with his opponent, just as the imperative for the Sharks and Jets in "West Side Story" was to be the better dance troupe. As the dueling men bypass each other, they employ their weapon in a completely artificial way as in a Jerome Robbins routine, "Cool" or "Rumble", for instance. The razor blades are used to slash pants pockets only, not faces. If Kei wins, Chung Li, a reformed femme fatale(a characteristic that's antithetical to the crime film, or noir), gets asylum from Mr. Fu's clutches. Equally unconventional to the woman's vulnerability(earlier in the film, all of Kei's colleagues meet Chung Li and are the worse for it), Kei's shutterbug habit has nothing to do with surveillance. Working solely with black and white, the comment he makes to Chung Li about color, aligns itself with the film's seeming love for classic Hollywood movies. In particular, black and white film, a dream world where everybody smoked, and people who were shot never bled.