Saw Debbie at Backpacker's world about my trip. I got information and will finalize my plans on Monday.
Perhaps Love (2005, Peter Ho-Sun Chan)
Love triangle set in a circus, very Moulin Rouge. I didn't really like that either. A little too clever with the film within a film idea. Memory likened to film and the film brings up ideas of rearranging memory like a film is rearranged in editing.
The film within the film is the main story, leading to confusion between what is reality in the film and what's film in the film that in another place might have been better, but here comes off as trying to be too clever. Some of the CG work was clever in a good way, but a bit overdone. The spectacle was definitely there, but it's perhaps just not my thing.
The director's Q&A afterward was much more rewarding. He talked mostly about the state of the film industry in China.
Problems with cinema attendance in China are due to price (seeing 10 movies per year is easily one month's wages in mainland China), poor quality films, and piracy (enabling people to watch good movies at home rather than pay excessive amounts of money to see bad ones). The choice to make Perhaps Love a musical, and therefore big, was an attempt to use spectacle to bring people into the cinemas.
The top five films in China can make 100 million <Chinese currency>, number six is lucky to get five million. This leads to conflicts within directors similar to the one faced by the film's director character: a lot of pressure to make very big movies to get people in cinema seats.
Pusher II: With Blood on my Hands (2004, Nicolas Winding Refn)
A worthy successor of Pusher. It follows Tonny as he gets out of prison after Frank beat him with a bat in the first film. He gets out owing money, and his dad won't give him any work in his criminal organization because Tonny is notoriously unreliable.
He does some jobs, some poorly (stealing a Ferari without an order), some well (stealing a showroom full of BMWs), finds out he has a kid, fails to kill his father's new wife, and runs off with his kid into the unknown.
More character development than Pusher and less violence. Rather good.
The Bet (2006, Mark Lee)
A fairly standard tale of the pitfalls of greed and gambling, and how rich, upperclass people are evil.
The actors were very good despite the material they had to work with, and Matthew Newton has a potential future in showbusiness if for nothing else than that he looks like a movie star.
The shots of the city were good, but overused. It seemed as if they had gotten money from the city of Sydney to finance the film and were required to put a certain number of shots of the city into the movie in return.
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