Movie Review: A Beautiful Life/不再讓你孤單

A shitty film.

I’ve put off writing this review for some time, since I frankly just don’t want to have to think about the film.

Andrew Lau does a Johnnie To and decides to suck the China Market C*ck with this schmaltzy, ham-fisted, overblown melodrama about a coarse woman and her brain-damaged boyfriend.

No, really.

The film opens with a drunk, obnoxious Shu Qi acting like, well, a drunk obnoxious Mainlander.

But the film is set in the Big 6, so it doesn’t seem out of place.

She makes the acquaintance of quiet, dedicated cop Liu Ye, who doesn’t drink, acts righteously, and takes care of his little brother, who is slightly retarded.

I think the brother may have been the scrīptwriter.

The younger brother’s love interest is deaf.

Ohhhh, the huge manatee.

Into this oasis of righteous suffering and working class veriteflounders a tramp whose relationship with a married man tends to founder a lot, and when it does, she uses Liu Ye like emotional toilet paper, and he gladly puts up with it, because apparently this is the status quo these days.

So too is the hackneyed, overwrought plot. Because Liu Ye has brain damage. And he’s forgetting things. And he starts making less and less sense.

I think he may have been the director.

Cue the overacting, bad scrīptwriting, plot machinations (and holes), and a once-respected director whoring his reputation to a nation of chain-smoking expectorators.

Andrew Lau, like Johnnie To, ought to steer well clear of romantic films. Or, should I say, films that attempt romance.

Because this one fails.

The film devolves into a laughable miasma of syrupy overacting and manufactured drama that would make a lovely farce if not for everyone playing it straight.

This movie sucked.

Its only redeeming moment for me was a scene that none too subtly lampoons the rather ambivalent relationship between Hong Kong and its new landlord while making plain the everyday reality of corruption in the Big 6.

This is just another example of lazy HK  pandering to China. God forbid anyone tried to make a film for the rest of the world.

Because that would require effort, grace, and skill, which Andrew Law is at least capable of.

He’s apparently just too lazy to try.

Then again, with the collusion of the media, why should he?

I’d like to have some of the drugs this idiot was on:  http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/movies/a-contemporary-romantic-melodrama.html

I am sure that reviewer and I saw the same movie. But I cannot understand how they arrived at their conclusions.

I realize this review is rather slapdash. But this film doesn’t deserve any better.

Watch it on a plane, where its free and you can stop it.

It’s got some laughs, though they are probably not intended.

I need to get a t-shirt printed up:

停止吸吮"中國市場陰莖"

Although maybe it should be written in Simplified…***** *