Movie Review: Passion Island/熱愛島

A lousy image for a lousy movie.

The Gang of Film (電影人幫) watched Passion Island/熱愛島 at the Dynasty, for reasons obvious to us before the first frame rolled.

We had a more-than-lurking suspicion this was not going to be a Film of the Year contender.

Some people say its wrong to dismiss films you haven’t seen yet. I can empathize, because I always felt it was wrong to say that a drug was bad until you tried it .

Drugs are bad.

Trust me on this one. I’m a trained researcher and I’ve done exhaustive research.

But if you ever, out of a sense of curiosity, wanted to know what it is like to be completely twisted on psychedelic drugs, watch Passion Island/熱愛島.

I can sincerely assure you that it mimics, with frightening accuracy, the things your brain is put through when you carpet-bomb your cortex with pharmaceuticals.

With a cast like Simon Yam, Joan Chen, Francis Ng, Chang Chen and Janice Man, you might think it was reasonable that the movie had potential.

You would be wrong in the most Jeff Spicoli kind of way.

The movie is a story (I think) of three odd couples on a remote island.

I think it’s really the story of a bunch of actors who took on a movie solely because they could get a free tropical vacation out of it. 

At least that’s what it feels like.

Simon Yam and Joan Chen play a separated husband and wife whose son, judging by his paintings, is a budding serial killer.

“He killed 15 people… I’m so proud!”

Simon is a Kurtzian (look it up) figure, the self-appointed king and curator of Passion Island, the home of Passion Weed, which apparently makes people and animals go crazy.

His estranged  wife  (and boy is she estranged) is an animal rights lover who talks to whales and little fat kids.

See?

She is sure that Passion Weed is making sea life go insane.  

Any woman who dresses like that knows about insanity.

Of course, no one ever explains how or why A) The weed gets into the ocean or B) all manner of aquatic life eat the rotten stuff or even C) how Passion Weed makes them crazy.

But nobody ever explainsanything in this movie.

Simon spends a lot of time in a hot air balloon sipping wine while wearing a full length silk robe and incredibly tight underwear.

“Do you like my Lycra?”

Sometimes he skips the skivvies.  

“There are large snakes on Passion Island…”

Try as I might, I couldn’t find an image of Simon in the balloon, or in his tighty whities.  

“Oh thank God.”

Francis Ng and Xiao Song Jia play a married couple.  

Weed makes you stupid.

They have come to Passion Island to see if the mystical Passion Weed can cure Song Jia’s paralysis; she was a dancer before the movie started.  

“Chicks can’t hold the smoke…”

Chang Chen and Janice Man play two people who are supposed to help the film appeal to the teenage demographic.  

Yes, Chang Chen has “THIS IS ART” tattooed over one eye.

Let’s hope it’s not talking about the movie.

In the movie he’s Korean.

And speaks Korean.

Well, ‘Korean.’

Janice hopes that Passion Weed can cure her severe autism so she won’t have to wear a helmet all the time to prevent her from injuring herself.  

Okay, I lied, but it wouldn’t have been out of place in this movie, I assure you.

 You can’t escape the sense that director Kam Kwok Leung was really trying his best to make an artsy film.  

Because being Mickey Rourke’s stunt double wasn’t making the nut.

The film is obviously guilty of attempted art.

There’s a LOT of dialogue.

And little to none of it advances the story or makes any Godd@mned sense.

The film opens with Janice Man in a blond wig, doing an ‘homage’ (the scare quotes are because homages are ostensibly supposed to be flattering and not insulting) to  North by Northwest.

There’s another ‘homage,’ but to be fair to the original film, I won’t mention it.

Not that Kam didn’t put in some of his own effort:

Wow, such artsy framing.

Maybe he figured that blatantly referencing artsy films would have some kind of osmotic effect on his own.

Which may explain the rather… unique choice of framing in some shots.

Gonna vom…

 But it’s not all bad. There are subtle and delicate evocations of religious icons.

諷刺.

The use of religious symbols is a minor theme in the film.

“Please Lord, strike the director dead…”

But even in its slower moments, the cast’s professionalism and dedication shine through.

“I’ve got a 3:00 windsurfing lesson…” 

To return to my long-abandoned point thatPassion Island/熱愛島  was a remarkably accurate evocation of a drug-induced psychosis…

The entire Gang of Film, most of whom have post-graduate degrees, couldn’t make any sense of a story (if indeed there was one) either during or after the movie.

The narrative blithely hops around, abandoning any hope you might have had for linearity or logic.

It literally makes no sense, such that one of the Gang was reduced to exclaiming ”What the f@#$?” at remarkably frequent intervals. And it wasn’t me.

This is the way your brain functions under the influence of psychedelics; your attention span and faculties become absolutely locked into the present moment, and whatever is happening in front of you is all there is. It has no connection to what happened before or what will happen after.

And the ‘story’ of Passion Island/熱愛島 is exactly the same way, and leaves you just as bewildered, lost, and confused.

But it isn’t just the failed artism (!) of  Passion Island/熱愛島 that derails it.

The bottom line is that any and all artistic pretensions get viciously savaged by the lunk-headed direction, acting, and scrīpt.

In the third act there is a  whale.

Well,  two whales.

One is plastic and the other is CGI. But they’re the same whalecharacter .

There is also a new character who never gets introduced, much less explained.

“Who the f@#$ is this b*tch?”

And while the look on Janice’s face in the still above might lead one to believe that Passion Island was next to Lesbos, this was sadly not to be. 

Neither was any rationale, explanation, or even the barest, weed-redolent hint as to this random bimbo’s identity or function.

“No, really, God, who the f@#$ is this???”

There’s a video library with more copies of  Raped by an Angel 3 than even  I own.  

She obviously doesn’t know Simon was in the first film in the series.

There’s a scene that proves conclusively that harvests aren’t the only golden things in Chinese movies.

He looks like he needs to pay the water bill (排尿委婉的說法) because he’s going to pay the water bill.

When even a cent of your budget goes into special effects for a urination shot, you’ve tossed any artistic aspirations under a truckload of stink.

That said, it probably cost a couple of (Hong Kong) dollars at most and turns out to be one of the high points of the film.

The other high point was being surprised by the appearance of Jordie Guzman, one of Hong Kong’s best musicians and one of the funniest people I know.

He doesn’t speak Chinese, but he speaks Dominican. 

Oddly enough, I actually enjoyed this film, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

It is so mind-bogglingly inept and weird that I ended up laughing heartily through most of it.

Or, I guess I should say,at most of it.

I would actually encourage people to watch it.

But for God’s sake, do it sober. 

It’s such a mess that you’ll be wondering why on earth this cast is in it.

That is, when you’re not busy wondering what the f@#$ is going on.

Which, I promise, is a waste of time, because you can’t know what the cast, crew, and even the director obviously didn’t know.

“What the f@#$ am I doing in this movie?” 

If I may take a moment to wax serious…

I’m sure as hell not gonna wax anything else.

I find it rather disturbing that I have ended up laughing at movies. I don’t like the idea of watching movies I know will stink, and watching them not to enjoy them but to enjoy their inevitable crappiness.

And believe me, it’s not a matter of cultural relativism or insensitivity; these moviesstink .

But I don’t like the idea that I end up making fun of them in reviews, because it plays into the Tarantinian pigeonholing of Asian cinema as kitsch.

Oddly enough, it reminds me of something Howard Stern once said when taken to task over making a mentally retarded member of his show the butt of jokes. Stern wondered if in fact it was more equal and inclusive to make fun of the cast member, who was already self-deprecating enough, than to set him aside as somehow too fragile for or incapable of dealing with such humor.

Yes, I realized I just compared Hong Kong cinema to a retarded person. But you didn’t see Passion Island/熱愛島.

My point is that while my vituperative reviews may seem nasty, vicious and cruel (at least I certainly hope so), I feel that writing them that way is more honest, and in some ways more fair than if I become an apologist or minimize my criticisms. 

There are things I will try to explain because they are culturally relative and, I feel, injurious to a film’s broader appeal, such as a common dearth of exposition.

I’m not asking for monologues, but the odd explanatory sentence would go a long way in reducing narrative opacity in a lot of films. 

But outside of a few specific cultural things, a lot of what happens is just lousy film-making, and I’m not going to overlook laziness, sloppiness, hubris, or simple dullardry.

So yeah, I laughed my ass off at  Passion Island/熱愛島.I even enjoyed watching it. 

It’s not a ringing endorsement by any stretch, but it sure beat leaving the cinema angry.