Tonight I saw Tsui Hark & Ringo Lam & Johnnie To's new action/thriller collaboration, TRIANGLE, the opening screening of Lincoln Center Film Society's series "10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema." It's quite a bit better than I had feared it might be, given that two of the three directors have seemed past their peak for a while, and the whole round-robin storytelling/filmmaking gimmick sounds dubious no matter who's involved. It actually turns out to be a lot of fun, although it's minor in every respect.

Poor Tsui gets saddled with the exposition-clogged opening section (and storytelling has never been exactly his strength or even interest). He tries halfheartedly to jazz it up with some of the graphical visual stuff he's been playing with since TIME & TIDE, but it takes a long time to get the lead out. Things improve as the "and then this and then this happened AND THEN THIS HAPPENED" narrative twists keep piling on and the movie gets more baroque and ridiculous. Louis Koo's performance suddenly develops some truly strange but not unamusing ticks about a third of the way through, which I'd like to attribute to some perverse mucking-about by Lam.

Not surprisingly, the join with To's final section is pretty obvious, and his is by far the strongest - energetic, suspenseful and very funny. He doesn't break any new ground, but he does his thing with infectious zest: the beautiful orchestration of space and movement, often on different planes within the same shot, generally in a confined space, etc., sprinkled with lots of character business and puckish humor. The jaw-dropping appearance from Lam Suet is maybe the highlight of the whole movie. The audience really woke up in this home stretch and began responding really well and audibly.

As a nifty little bonus, I got snagged on my way in by an interviewer from some HK-affiliated TV outfit - unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to even remember the name on the side of the video camera. I remember the words "Hong Kong" in red lettering, that's all. But I got asked a couple questions and managed to stammer out some not-embarrassing comments about how it was hard to see HK film on the big screen anymore, how all the Chinese movie theaters on the East Coast are gone now, how HK film of the last ten years has become more Westernized and while it's more technically and technologically sophisticated now, it's also lost some of its unique cultural identity and Hong Kong spirit. That's about it. I guess I'll always wonder who those people were and whether or not my comments were ever viewed by people in Hong Kong. [Now that I've finished writing that, it occurs to me they may have been affiliated with the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office, who are co-sponsoring the series and had reps there tonight to speak in snooze-inducing bureaucratese before the show.]

Michael, make sure you pick up the DVD when it comes out in Chinatown and check those special features--you may be in it! (Hey, that's what happened with the 2-disc set of NANA 2, the extras of which include our own Grady Hendrix introducing the film's stars when they made an appearance in New York at a screening of the film last December.)

I agree with pretty much everything you said. It was amazing to me how anonymous Tsui Hark's opening was, and I was really happy to see how strong Ringo Lam's portion played, but Johnnie To erases their previous sections from memory with his finale that had me on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to miss a ball and have the whole thing collapse around his feet like the end of a show with a drunk clown who juggles crystal vases. You can literally spot exactly where he comes on board and it's amazing that he's this stylish compared to Lam and Tsui. What happened? Was it the Jean Claude Van-Damme movies that made them cautious?

I was at the screening of THE MISSION before this one and boy was that depressing. 12 people in the audience, including one old lady who had brought plastic bags, put them inside of plastic bags, put those inside of a big bag with a zipper, and then wrapped the whole thing up with more plastic bags. She spent the entire movie shuffling through her bags. Oddly enough, no one killed her. Even odder was that the print was edited. A few squibs were removed and the shot of Anthony Wong laying the bloody razor blade on the table in the restaurant was missing as well. I wonder if it was a print for Mainland China? Who can't handle seeing a bloody razor blade these days?

I've heard a rumor that IFC First Take has acquired MAD DETECTIVE, although I checked indieWIRE and didn't see a mention of this anywhere. In any case, I'm grateful that US distributors keep picking up To's films, since they never make any money (at least in the theater). I thought EXILED would be his American breakthrough, but I believe it earned even less than TRIAD ELECTION's $55,000 gross.

Wait, Grady, were you at the TRIANGLE screening I was, or am I misunderstanding you? Why didn't I see you? Why didn't you kill that woman? Why the hell can't Lincoln Center Film Society get more people into the place? It's usually mostly empty for almost anything. And just how many damn times have you seen THE MISSION anyway?

Chicken, meet egg. Fight it out between yourselves.

Heh. The new November schedules in the lobby have Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD on the cover. Maybe they thought that was enough bloody razors for one autumn.

Brian - That would kick at least one buttock if that happened. But I fear my comments may have been a little too gloomy/ambivalent to make it into the promotional materials on a DVD set. Still, I'd love it if someone would inform me I'm wrong when the disc comes out. And I actually think it would be worth buying just for the chance to see To's section, which I could watch multiple times, although it would probably be a long time before I'd feel compelled to revisit the rest.

Steve - The vagaries of distribution, advertising and audience response in the "specialty film" field mystify me more all the time. I'm still stuck back on the "DRAGON WARS outgrosses THE HOST by orders of magnitude" thing. What?!

Booking ELECTION & TRIAD ELECTION at Film Forum seems like a bad idea on Tartan Films' part, although the films did better than any previous To film in the U.S. The theater's occasional excursions into Asian genre films - such as SAVE THE GREEN PLANET - have generally bombed. The audience that goes there seems much more interested in documentaries. As for EXILED, I don't know why Magnolia Films didn't book it into Landmark theaters (at least in New York), since the companies share ownership. Maybe they'll do so with TRIANGLE.

As for DRAGON WARS vs. THE HOST, who knows what would have happened if Magnolia had opened THE HOST on several thousand screens? I'm hopeful, but it's not my money.

Dragon Wars is, in essence, a Hollywood film. Host was just enough (superficially) like a Hollywood film to throw ordinary American audiences off (thereby aggravating them). Cheesiness is always preferable to doing something an audience is not prepared to deal with. ;~{