A Little TLC(w): Fantasy Romance (1991)

Another miss for me, although this one is an admitted step up from Come Fly the Dragon.  Whereas that film is sort of aggressively lame, this one is more weird than anything else, albeit not a very good kind of weird.

Shing and his buddy are a pair of comic book artists struggling to get their boss to give their ideas a chance.  When an accident causes a momentary collision between this world and the next, a comely ghost sneaks through who just happens to look like a princess Shing draws in his comic.  The ghost, Ching Ching, latches onto Shing and uses her magical powers to improve his luck.

Okay, so mostly, this movie is busy and random.  There’s a bunch of different stuff going on:  first Shing is afraid of Ching Ching, then he loves her, then she’s using her powers to help him, then she can’t use her powers or bad things will happen to her, then Shing has to stop having good luck or bad things will happen to her, then there’s these other ghosts and a pair of ghost-fighting neighbors and stuff going on with that… There are probably plots for three or four movies crammed together here, but all of them are inattentive and half-done, so it doesn’t come together into a coherent film.

Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Shing.  He’s a different kind of character for Leung, a bit of a nerdy everyman.  It’s funny to see familiar sort of tropes playing out in a movie from a different culture.  Shing is presented as a mostly-decent guy who can’t catch a break, a slight geek who loves his work and watching Japanese cartoons, is continually crapped on by his boss, and scorns the “ugly” young woman from his apartment who’s in love with him.  Then, out of nowhere, he meets this gorgeous supernatural creature who’s immediately taken with him despite there not being anything all that special about him.  (Not that, for the most part, I think Shing is a bad guy or anything – the film just doesn’t really do anything to show why Ching Ching would like him, apart from Leung’s looks, which are only slightly nerded up.)  Everywhere in the world, it seems, movies are full of mediocre guys and the beautiful women who love them.

As such, there’s nothing too demanding about Shing, despite being rather against type for Leung.  There’s some sad-trombone humor, a little slapstick, some freaked out moments, some romance, and a culminating action bit.  Leung is dubbed in the copy I saw, which always makes it a little tougher to access his performance; it doesn’t hold back his talent any in great films like Hero or Red Cliff, but in something like this, which isn’t all that good anyway, it further separates me from his character.

Recommend?

In General – Naw.  Too goofy and random, not enough holding the disparate parts together.

Tony Leung Chiu-wai – Not a must.  There’s nothing too challenging here for Leung to do.

Warnings

Sexual content, language, drinking, and violence.