Movie Review: Dead Slowly

A new benchmark for brevity. I can review this film in one word.

Given the title, you might reasonably ask, "Howslowly?"

Well, dear readers, I'll tell you.Inconceivably.

Inexcusably.Insufferably.

InsultinglyInterminably.Intolerably.Irrationally.And that's just the I's. Take your pick. I try to support Hong Kong film and filmmakers.

I try not to air my opinions simply to offend (or entertain) people.

I know that many of you enjoy watching me re-route my spleen through my prostate gland and pornographically spew invective on the figurative faces of films.

Especially when the film does it to me first.

[cough cough]... Murderer... [cough]

It comes so easily at times (even though I am long past my teenage years), yet I try to rein it in as often as I can because I realize it is always easy to say bad things as opposed to good.

I am fully aware that in this day and (information) age, my virulently caustic (even if well-founded and fully justified) words could very likely be read by people connected with these films.

I don't do it just to be mean or to intentionally, explicitly insult people.

While its easy to be loud, mean, and cruel online I am not, usually, prone to inhuman cruelty in person.

I would never, for example, ask Terence Yin to autograph my DVD o fGold Fingers.That would just be mean.

For that matter, I'd never watch it, either, because then I'd have towrite about it.

But Terence will be the first to admit that not every film he has been involved with is a work of art.

One of the things I admire about many artists in Hong Kong is their thorough humility and self-effacement.

Granted, if you makePTU File - Death Trap, you're probably not practicing award acceptance speeches in the mirror.

I try to be generous, encouraging, and optimistic about Hong Kong films.

I love them so much I movedhere.

I try to find the good in most every film I see. Rebellionwas not Herman Yau's best work, but Jun Kung was very entertaining, as were Conroy Chan and Paul Wong. That made the film work for me.

Hell, I hope they make a prequel about these three characters.

Split Second Murder wasn't the year's best film, but it was so well-directed that I will buy the DVD and watch it again and again.

And not just to hear Chrissie Chau say "I'm a sex worker."Herman Yau can still make good movies, and he still does. I will keep watching them and keep encouraging others to watch them.

Because I lovelocal movies. I am the biggest Wong Jing fan in the world, even knowing he is not always trying really hard. I can lower my expectations right down to On His Majesty's Secret Service and still come up smiling.

But even I have my limits.My supposed (and understandable) obligation to people who are members of Hong Kong's entertainment industry in general and members of this site in particular is not unconditional.In exchange for my not saying 'mean' things about them, they hold a similar obligation to me as a person, a site member, and an audience member not to willfully and callously mistreat me in their professional endeavors.

I am not a doormat to be walked over, spat upon, and abused.

Neither will I be cowed into sanitizing my feelings when they have been so arrogantly provoked.

I do on occasion explicitly insult films and people. But only after they have implicitly insulted me.

Dead Slowly is one of the most excruciatingly bad Hong Kong-produced films I have ever seen.

For some perspective: I've watched (and own) all 5 Raped by an Angel films. I watch Bet to Basic an average of 3 times a year.

Dead Slowly should buy Murderer a saddle for the Golden Horse award for Best Film.It makes Plastic City look wonderful. Dead Slowlywill be much better on DVD. Because you can stopthe DVD.I'd rather admit to taking two hookers on a holiday trip to Taipei in July 2007 than admit that I have seen this movie .

That's just a figure of speech, by the way. Or so my lawyer tells me.

Dead Slowly is so bad, so inept, so awful that it makes me want to fellateWong Jing in abject gratitude for the comparative glory of his films.

I'd swallow.

That's how bad Dead Slowly sucks.

No, Dead Slowly felches.

It shrimps( see definition 2).

And it doesn't swallow. It spits in your mother's face.

If it weren't the opening film of the Hong Kong Independent Asian Film Festival (Asian Independent?), if it weren't a packed screening (packed, I could tell, with students of the 'director'), if I weren't sitting with a friend who can't tolerate any asides or talking during screenings (much less my usual florid commentaries) I could have and would have howled derisively at this film's opening shot and continued apace for the remainder of this farce of cinema.

I know it had pretensions of being an art film. If this film had anything, it had pretension. Incalculable amounts of it. 

For some odd reason, people in Hong Kong, both filmmakers and audiences, seem to think that any movie that lookslike an art movie must by definition bean art movie.

According to these... people, if it's slow, makes little or no sense, has no character development, no discernible narrative, precocious (and bad) camera work, and is sprinkled with obtuse, vapid dialogue and cheap (and tired) grabs at controversy and credibility, it is therefore inherently significant, artistic, and worthy of merit.

Oh yeah? Well, here's my professional, Ph.D-educated, film studies (and now award-winning actor) response:Go f@#$yourself. I said it.I'll say it again.

Louder:GO F@#$ YOURSELF.I understand allegory, symbolism, and 'art.' I also understand garbage, crap, self-delusion, and immaturity of various kinds, be they professional, psychological, and/or artistic.

But I'd rather avoid the use of the word artisticin relation to this film if at all possible.

Not that it matters.

Even  a polite attempt to call into question this so-naked-he-has-never-been-dressed emperor of a film would no doubt be met by the usual patronizing whine and cheese attitude that pervades both the 'art' film crowd and the academic film studies gaggle of fluffers who adore this kind of awful, neurotic, navel-gazing trash.

I love how these snide figpuckers smugly, condescendingly insist that my (and any other) criticism is based in ignorance or an inability to grasp the symbolism, the angst, the... oh, probably some horsesh*t French word or phrase like mise en scene.

Oh yeah? Va te faire foutre.

Although it's not a beret, try this on for size:

Maybe me, and/or my response (and my language) are not inappropriately profane and insulting.

Maybe the movie is just that f@#$ing bad.And it ain't just me, either.This movie is profoundly inane, poorly directed, poorly edited, poorly written, poorly shot, poorly acted(mostly - see below), and can appeal to virtually no one who isn't a horrifically self-absorbed idiot, a film student, the victim of a traumatic head injury, or a quahog.

Dead Slowly isn'twhat it's creators say it is.It is notan art film. It's a sh*t film.Don't piss on my head and tell me its raining. This is not art, it's not important, it's not meaningful, and it's sure as f@#$ not worth the 90 minutes of my life that I will never have back because I allowed myself to get abused by this moronic display of wildly arrogant self-indulgence .And that, dear reader, is what bothers me most about these kinds of celluloid abortions: the obvious, pervasive solipsistic hubris they display.

Why not just run a title card for 90 minutes that says I AM SMARTER, HIPPER,  AND BETTER THAN YOU?

Because all Dead Slowlyproves is the exact opposite.

Who thef@#$do these people think they are?

What on earth makes people think their film is good enough that anyone (not undergoing harsh interrogation at Guantanamo Bay) should watch it?A friend told me an interesting fact. He said that in his experience, whenever he asks these 'art' directors who their intended audience is, they don't have an answer.Obviously, the logical answer is: themselves.Oh, yeah, that's a film I want to see. If you don't know who you're making a film for, then why thef@#$are you making it? If you don't know who would want to watch it, then why are you showing it to (inflicting it on)  anyone but yourself and your (very likely brain-damaged) friends?

The delusions that allow people to think anyone else on earth (outside of their friends) would want to see their films are terrifying to contemplate.

How on earth do these movies get funding?

Bend over, grab the desk and grit your teeth: what you are about to read will cause discomfort.

The HK Arts Development Council helped pay for this film.

So our tax dollars paid for this nightmare.  

I want myf@#$ing money back.

In blood.

This 'art' is developmentally disabled.Dead Slowlystarts with a horrifically bad art-film opening that is so cliched I at first assumed it to be a parody, blunders along like a mongoloid in a Hawaiian shirt for 90 interminable minutes, and ends with an incredibly condescending, flippant and insulting epilogue that essentially ridicules the audience while at the same time categorically and empirically proving that the people behind the camera could make a greater contribution to society in front of a gun.

But it's not all the filmmakers' fault.

We, the audience, deserve to be ridiculed for sitting through this film for 90 minutes, because doing so proves we are irredeemablef@#$wits who should have left during the opening credits, which I was inclined to do.As much as I hate to use trendy net slang, Dead Slowly could alternately have been titled Instant Fail. It was that bad that soon.This film sucked from go, and only occasionally came up for air.

Veryoccasionally: twolines of dialogue that were genuinely funny and entertaining, to be exact.

Both from incidental characters, not principals.

The principals were too busy emotingand being significant.

And failing on both counts.

So, that's a good 10 seconds of bearable cinema in Dead Slowly.

Watching the other 1:29:50 was like flossing your crotch with a string of sea urchins dipped in chili oil.

Angry, syphilitic sea urchins.

There was nothing else worth experiencing in this film. Which I didn't know when I agreed to go with my friends.

They trickedme into it in the first place. I go to art movies a little less often than I have a girlfriend.

That's right, less frequently thannever .

So how did they do rope me into this mess?

They told me Joman Chiang is in the film.

I like watching her.

Let me be uncommonly frank (and make many of you uncomfortable):

I harbor a deep-seated and profoundly inappropriate desire to have sex with Joman Chiang.

Never mind dinner, a movie, etc. Give me two cups of vegetable oil, a yoyo, and a blue wool blanket, I'll manage.

It made it difficult for me to watch Besieged City, such was my piggish lust. It sits in my heart like some kind of foul, festering wart whose roots entangle my vital organs such that removing it would kill me. 

What's worse is that the gross disparity in our age amplifiesthis urge instead of attenuating it. I don't want to respect her youth and innocence, I want to consume and obliterate them.

I am enthralled by the wrongness of it, as if I should be wearing condoms that have SCUMprinted on them and slice my own flesh with broken glass, letting suckling hyena pups drink my bloodas penitencefor my unforgivable, craven urges while I stare at a statue of the Virgin Mary.

A statue with Groucho Marx glasses, the ones with the nose and mustache.

In the background, the sound of a lonesome violin and frying Spam.

Jesus, I ought not say these horrible things out loud, where people can read them. Someone might write a grant and make an art film out of it.

My fixation on Ms. Chiang is so badI won't even allowmyself to watch Butterfly. Do you blame me?Well, not until the fleshlightarrives.

I won't allow myself to meet her, as I could have done yesterday after the screening. She's very pretty in person. She's pretty in the movie.

She even has sex scenes in the film.Unfortunately, the scenes were, like the rest of the film, utter shit.

Whose sole useful dynamic was to make me feel a little less guilty about that whole vegetable oil and hyenas thing. I didn't even get to gaze at her navel. Seeing one of my sexual fantasies played out on screen (minus the hyenas) doesn't keep me from hating this piece of garbage masquerading as a movie.But it did lead to me qualifying that sentence up there about poor acting.This film tries too hard to do everything except not suck.

Among the worst of itswhorish grabs for 'art cred' is the obligatory display of genitalia.Sadly, not Ms. Chiang's.

More sadly, it's not even female genitalia.There's a penisin this film.

Twice.

But the film is such a horrendous mess that I can't be sure if it was the samepenis or two differentones. Neither could anyone else I was watching the movie with.

Of course, as stupefyingly bad and overwrought as this film is, I should be glad that the penis(es?) didn't belong to Joman Chiang's character.

I'm assuming the second penis, given its tumescent turgidity, wasfake.

Still, I'm sure it allowed the filmmakers to tell themselves and any other interested parties (i.e. their three friends and other complete f@#$ing idiots) that they'd managed to make Last Tango in Fanling:

Oooh, we're soedgy andhip andedgy andarty . But enough about us. What doyou think of our film?

I think Dead Slowly should take both penises (or the same one twice), its progenitors' egos, arrogance, and solipsism, three hyenas, and any delusion of a sequel, and shove it all up its ass with a stick of dynamite, set itself on fire, and throw itself off a cliff while it slashes its own throat and rats gnaw its face.

If the film needs help with any of those procedures, I'd be selfless (!) enough to help.And unsurprisingly, Ms. Chiang is exempt from this exhortation and is welcome in my home any time she wishes.

I'm glad I ran away from the theatre before anyone involved with the film could ask me what I thought of it.I assume there's no equivalent Cantonese phrase for   "F@#$you, you f@#$ingf@#$."

As offended, insulted, or grossed out as you may feel by this entry (which, I admit, I intentionally made so), I did it so that you might understand how much, and in what ways, this movie offended, insulted, and annoyed me. Yes,Dead Slowlyis that motherf@#$ing bad, maybe worse.Nothing I have said in this review could offend the filmmakers any more than their godawful epic failure of an attempt at film-making has offended me or any of my other (graduate-level educated) friends who saw it with me. If you'll excuse me, I need to go blow a certain local director.