Word: ia
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...Infernal Affairs - starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Hero, In the Mood for Love) as the good cop and longtime dreamboat Andy Lau as the mobster's mole - became its own cottage industry. It spawned a sequel (IA II), a prequel (IA III) and, in glorious Hong Kong fashion, at least two ripoffs (the burlesque Love Is a Many Stupid Thing and a femme version, Infernal Mission). Nominated for 16 HK Film Awards, IA won seven: for picture, director, script, lead actor (Leung), supporting actor (Anthony Wong as Leung's police boss), cinematography and editing...
...main roles would be catnip for any actor. The roles, after all, are about acting: the risk factors the men face, the bravado required, and the duplicity in their tasks, and thus their personalities, call for the subtlest pretense. And in IA, both actors met the challenge. Lau smartly inverted his famously ingratiating disposition, for in the movie he is fooling everyone but himself, his mob patron - and the audience. While the Leung character gets to agitate privately about his isolation as an undercover agent, the Lau character never agonizes over the lie that is his life. Inside...
...IA got a limited run in the U.S. two years ago (it's available on DVD), and what people remember from it, besides the tightening stress as the antagonists search for each other, are some cool set pieces: the 20min. scene of a drug deal monitored by the cops, as Lau and Leung try to get messages to their contacts without being caught; a couple of tense rooftop meetings that end in death; Leung's pursuit of Lau outside a movie theater; and the moment when a taxicab is abruptly flattened, out of the sky, by the falling body...
...cinema (smart-jerky rhythms, a breathless narrative propulsion, the italicizing of a moment by a few frames of close-up slo-mo) to relate a tale of male bonding and betrayal - all this is so close to the style and substance of Scorsese movies, he could practically play IA on the insides of his eyelids...
...strip appears during the book's best sequence, about a trip to Yellowstone National Park. What could be more American than a road trip to Yellowstone? A month and a half's worth of strips detail the adventures, with each daily location noted in the lower corner, "Cedar Rapids, IA ? Hastings, Neb. ? Yuma, Col.," etc. It may be the first ever cartoon travelogue. King's interest in America's pastoral wilderness would become a recurring theme in the series, especially in the color Sunday strips. (The publisher intends to reprint them separately.) The color Sundays reveal King's extraordinary visual...