Movie Review: The Midnight After/《那夜凌晨，我坐上了 旺角開往大埔的紅VAN》

Fruit Chan hasn’t made a full-length feature since 2004’s , a movie so disturbing and twisted that I couldn’t get the smile off my face for days.

He returns with , a story adapted from an internet novel that so popular they published it as a book.

It’s the story of 17 people who find themselves utterly alone in Hong Kong.

Or are they?

Who f@#$ing knows?

Maybe the people who read the book.

This is a movie I can easily concede that I don’t understand, at least partially because I don’t understand enough Cantonese.

Maybe even partly because I’m not ‘Asian.’

 I’m joking.

But I honestly don’t feel like its totally my fault. As is so often the case, this film assumes its audience has some familiarity with the story.

Or who knows? Maybe the books is the same disjointed, overindulgent, tedious pile of horse sh*t.

Early on during the movie, I made my by-now-requisite observation: I was afraid that this very interesting premise was gonna shit the bed in the third act.

I hate to say it, but I was right.

Actually, it happened sooner than the third act.

I don’t feel I should be obligated to do a pre-screening read so I know what’s happening. 

I don’t feel like reading a f@#$ing book just so I can watch a movie.

Especially if it’s written by someone named Pizza.

is like decorating your first apartment with the furniture you could afford.

You can’t put it together if you haven’t read the directions… and the directions are in Chinese.

It’s just a cultural difference, I guess. It’s the same reason local people like having the endings spoiled by the synopses on DVDs. They want to know the whole story before they watch the movie.

I didn’t make that up, I was told, by someone who is in a position to know.

I admit, I am tied to Western narrative convention; I like to be told a story in a movie, not just shown a recreation of a story devoid of the necessary information to know, understand, or care about the story and/or the people in it.

I’m just tired of movies where you have to read the book first.

I read  Silence of the Lambs well before it was made into a film, so when I saw it, I had no interest in the story because I knew what would happen and I knew what was missing. In the novel, when Buffalo Bill lays dying, he asks Clarice “How does it feel to be so beautiful?”, and it explains everything about him.

But it also makes you mildly sympathetic, and of course H’wood can’t do emotional contradiction.

THAT’s why I always read the book after.

I tuned out ofThe Midnight After pretty early on, after about the third plot thread that lednowhere.

Because I got the impression that we were just going to keep getting shown these threads that would then get abandoned, and I was right.

My reaction to a pointless karaoke segment was, as you can imagine, loudly negative.

I admit, part of it is because the person doing it is a musician who is one of the most self-absorbed, egotistical pricks I’ve met in Hong Kong.

You could see he was so proud of himself getting to sing David Bowie.

Badly.

So I was really, really, really glad to watch his character burst into flame.

And if you think that’s harsh, you should hear the joke I to make.

This is NOT the person I’m talking about.

And if you think that’s a spoiler, guess what?

You can’t spoil a story that doesn’t exist.

All of the plot threads end up being pointless, so no harm no foul.

If Fruit Chan wants to make a local film, then don’t send it to Berlin.

I’m fairly certain that novel hasn’t been translated into German. 

If there’s a sequel… I don’t care.

I wanted to like this movie more than it turns out I could.

I’ll leave you with something seemingly random and pointless.

Because I saw so much of it.

I have no idea why Janice Man’s feet got photographed at the premiere.

But here you go.