Movie Review: The Midas Touch/超級經理人

The feeling is mutual, I assure you.  Oh boy! A new movie from Emperor Entertainment Group!

Always a mark of quality.

The Midas Touch/超級經理人 is written and directed by Andrew Fung Chi Keung.

He directed The Bounty, but I tried not to hold that against him.

But now with this movie, I can bookend him.

The Midas Touch/超級經理人is about a group of talentless wingnuts trying to break into show business.

I don’t mean the story, I mean the  movie.

These seven (eight?) aspiring starlets are as talentless as they are unattractive.

The image of grace and style.

Most of them are Mainlanders with such remarkable ‘talents’ as being able to bark like sad and happy dogs or belch 100 times.

Obviously they have other talents too; how do you think they got to be in this movie?

The end credits feature what appear to be these actresses’ audition tapes for the film itself.

They put it at the end because putting it at the beginning would make people leave the cinema.

The only real question (and the only interesting aspect of the story) is how do these particular dingbats rise above the rest of the pack?

I’m not sure, but I bet it involves sex.

我们需要吸人？

Chapman To plays a debt collector named Chiu who takes on the challenge of launching these dingbats to stardom.

He’s entertaining, but yet again he’s playing Chapman To.

Which is not to say he isn’t fun to watch.

It’s just that it’s obviously not a challenge for him.

And he’s topless.

Ewww.

 Managing this talent vacuum turns out to be harder than herding wet cats, so Chiu enlists the help of Suen, a talent manager played by Charlene Choi.

“It’ll take 30 seconds and it may save your life…”

You know, the world’s only 30-year-old teenager.

She’s recently lost her job because of an indiscretion (that’s on the frightening side of perverse) involving obsession and a one-way mirror.

I think I know whose apartment this is.

Who else is in this movie?

Every EEG artist on the planet, seems like.

Because movies aren’t stories. They’re promotional opportunities.

You have so much to learn.

Now lose the dress.

It would be easy to say that I am finding fault with this movie simply because I am so far out of the demographic.

This film is obviously aimed at Hong Kong teenagers.

But I refuse to think so poorly of local teens.

They can’t bethis stupid.

A lot of the movie is simply tedious ;‘jokes’ and ‘humorous’ segments drag on forever.

In once scene, a director does a protracted monologue telling an actor what he wants him to do. It seems to last over a minute.

Because the actor can’t speak Cantonese, he asks Charlene to explain it to him.

She repeats the entire motherf@#$ing monologue.

Good way to burn up running time, though, you gotta give ‘em that.

Later in the film, Chapman To looks at a portrait of the seven whackjobs.

He flashes back on a memory of the first one.

And then the second.

And then the third.

And so on, until we have seen seven flashbacks.

Apparently there’s no Chinese word for montage.

But it seems like the filmmakers realize they’ve got a turd and have decided to just shove it in your face.

It’s as if the film is flaunting its awfulness. 

Which for me is amplified by the presence of Wong Cho Lam.

The things you see when you haven’t got your gun.

Maybe the joke is on us; maybe EEG is showing us how crass and shameless their fame machine is, and they’re rubbing our noses in the fact that they can take virtually anyone and force-feed them to us until we acknowledge them as famous.

As I noted in my review of  Diva, EEG producing an ‘exposé’ of the seedy side of HK’s entertainment industry is like having the NSA release a movie about illegal surveillance.

Or the Ku Klux Klan producing a movie about the Freedom Riders.

And as I also said in my  Diva review, if you think these comparisons are harsh, ask  Carina Lau.

Like Diva,  The Midas Touch/超級經理人 attempts to portray the management level of Hong Kong’s entertainment industry as concerned, parental, but basically nice people who would  never take advantage of their talent, financially or otherwise.

In fairness, no one would be allowed to make a real movie about what goes on behind closed doors.

You can’t make a movie called  Inappropriately Touched by an Agent.

But if you did I would watch it.

And not (simply) for prurient reasons. It would be nice to see the truth onscreen for once.

We all know what the truth is.

Everyone knows it, but like a fart in church, everyone pretends it isn’t happening.

To make a movie that blithely glosses it over, making it seem like talent managers are  really just nice people, is actually  more perverse and galling.

We may be dumb but we’re not  that f@#$ing stupid.