Word: yun-fat
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...song in a crowded subway car and recruits unsuspecting commuters into their impromptu revelry. Keith Young’s spirited choreography transforms every inch of the cramped quarters into performance space—the result is a dance sequence as exhilarating as any Steve McQueen car chase or Chow Yun-Fat shoot-out.The film’s acting and singing is uniformly strong, possibly because most of the original Broadway cast reprises their roles: The exceptions are Tracie Thoms as straitlaced lesbian lawyer Joanne and Rosario Dawson as the HIV-positive Latina heroine. Thoms proves herself a true triple threat...
Seven Swords doesn't quite take a place among the classics. Hong Kong action movies once blossomed because talented directors like Tsui were paired with charismatic actors like Chow Yun-fat, who could elevate a genre picture with his mere presence. Sadly, the Hong Kong film industry has suffered a power drain in recent years, as no new performers have proved capable of filling the shoes of fleeing stars like Chow. Yen can knock out 100 bad guys without breaking into a sweat, but as the romantic lead in Swords, he makes the stolid Jet Li look like Cary Grant...
Thank God for Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The best actor working in Asian cinema today can redeem any scene and endow even the most artificial plot with a few degrees of soul. Like Chow Yun-fat before he disappeared into Hollywood, Leung seems able to rise above his material and effortlessly make off with any film. It's no surprise that he plays such an accomplished thief in his latest project, the diverting Seoul Raiders...
...Popular Asian films, like their counterparts in North America, have a crucial movie element that is often lost in Cannes's worship of directors: star quality. Choi had already vaulted to celebrity in the Korean blockbusters Shiri and Failan. Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li were bulwarks of Hong Kong cinema, before they decamped to Hollywood. And in India, actors like Amitabh Bachchan are near-deities. (Alas, the delirious seductions of Bollywood musicals still elude the Cannes programmers?no Indian pop musical has been invited to compete for the Palme d'Or in nearly a half...
...Perhaps the most intelligently romantic of all wartime dramas is Ann Hui's Love in a Fallen City (1984), from the Eileen Chang novel about a lonely Shanghai widow (Cora Miao) courted by a dashing Hong Kong playboy (the young, magnetic Chow Yun-fat at his most Cary Grant-ish) in 1939. The Japanese invade Hong Kong, families and fortunes crumble, yet the glow of their hard-won rapture, of love deferred and love embraced, lights up the screen...