HKAFF

So concludes the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. If I had it my way, I would’ve checked out the schedule earlier and scored tickets to NANA and Survive Style 5+, and the three films that form Park Chan-Wook's trilogy of vengeance would’ve been screened in sequential order so I could’ve seen all three of them instead of none.

Can’t quite complain though. Compared with the HKIFF (archive: April 2005) six months ago, this experience yielded greater enjoyment.

Jump! Boys: I highly recommend this Taiwanese documentary to anyone who’s once been seven years old. As an ex-teacher, I love observing young children (some more than others, I admit). And I was fascinated to see how amazingly these kids coped with the strain of training and the stress of competition and still let their innocence glimmer sans video games or happy meals. Children can do remarkable things on their own if parents would just let them. Sadly, most kids I see here nowadays aren’t able to do much without a domestic helper at the side.

Crying Ladies: Simple black humor, in the absence of a meticulous storyline and exceptional method acting, is almost foolproof. You need not to be a professional mourner, a single mother, or even a Filipino woman for that matter, to be touched by these tears of joy and sorrow, and to identify with these ladies and the reasons behind their wailing, whether it be lost dreams, forbidden love, or helplessness in its simplest form.

Three Times: Three times may just be too much to ask of me. This is the second Hou Hsiao-hsien film I’ve cursed myself for watching. The good news is that the 131 minutes are broken up into three doses. The bad news is that the first dose, with under 30 lines of dialogue, wasn’t strong enough to stir up the audience; the second dose, featuring a poetic love affair depicted in the era of silent films, was so remarkably weak that it drove away part of the audience. Nonetheless, Chang Chen was absolutely delectable.