SYNOPSIS:
21st century martial arts princess MingMing falls for D, an
irresistible rogue fighter. D challenges any of his female
admirer to give him 5 million dollars and he will run away
with her to Harbin. MingMing loses no time to rob the underworld
boss Cat but meets Nana who bears a splitting image of her.
She discovers that Nana is also one of D's girlfriends. MingMing
makes Nana the scapegoat for her theft and takes off with
the box. However, MingMing's secret admirer Tu mistakes Nana
for her and becomes her guardian angel. Meanwhile, D disappears
from Shanghai and leaves behind a cryptic phone message as
his only clue. As the four lost souls weave in and out of
one another's lives in the maze-like metropolis, the dark
forces of Cat are closing in on them.
At this critical moment, MingMing makes a fateful discovery...
MOVIE REVIEW
Frustratingly
Baffling, Unconvincingly Convoluted and Superfluously Pretentious.
Those
were the words that kept popping out in my mind during the
process of reviewing Ming Ming. There were reviews on how
bad this show was when it was being reviewed for it’s
cinematic release and after reviewing the Dvd format of Ming
Ming, it’s easy to relate to those reviews.
Some of
the elements in this movie are just so far fetch that it’s
hard to swallow. Imagine if you are running away from a mob
and got separated with a girl that you have a crush on. Moments
later, you met up with someone who look like that girl but
she is in a different set of clothing and hair color, would
you mistaken this other girl for the one that you had crush
on?
Or how
about an underworld boss who kept his deepest and darkest
secret in a box that is placed in plain sight? It’s
not even locked in a safe where he placed a certain amount
of money that seem inconsequence to him. It’s just too
frustrating and baffling to see a film maker that naively
constructs such plot elements into a film.
This movie
also had very weak motivation for it’s characters and
it was unnecessarily long-winded in delivering of this tale.
The whole journey was started off with emphasis on the love
triangle between D with Ming Ming and Nana but it veered off
by focusing more on romantic sparks between Nana and Tu. That
derail successfully defeating it’s initially purpose
of setting up the motion of this movie and make this reviewer
question was it even necessary to have and promote such cryptic
love story between this three in the first place?
This film
definitely favors style over substance and does it excessively.
This film is filled with so many quick cuts that it stood
out as a sore thumb. It might have worked in a music video
that had to tell a story within minutes but in a movie which
has a much longer format, the plentiful quick cuts serve as
a major distraction. Sometimes a shot need a bit more time
to cultivate the mood and ambience of that certain scene but
the impatient pacing of this film never allows the audiences
to grow with the characters or story in this film. The excessiveness
of the quick cuts, pause shots and rewinding of sequences
also felt that like a cheap disguise to cover up the hollowness
of the plot.
And how
unnecessary long winded is this movie? Try watching the first
15 minutes of this film and skipped to the last 10 minutes
of the film, chances are that you are still able to get the
gist of the film without missing out much.
"Simplicity
is the ultimate sophistication*". Overwhelming the audience
with excessive fancifully video tactics and baffling them
with uninteresting and convoluted plots will only served as
a form of alienation.
*
Quote from Leonardo da Vinci
SPECIAL FEATURES :
There’s a teaser trailer for Royston Tan’s
local movie 881 that starts up once the Dvd starts spinning.
Viewers could skip it by pressing the menu button and could
watch this trailer again in the trailer section.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The disc’s visual transfer looks almost faultless enough
to maintain the MTV’s style of cinematography in this
film. The audio is presented in Mandarin soundtrack with a
scene that had Daniel Wu conversing in Shanghainese dialect.
Our HKIFF
coverage of Ming Ming reported that Cantonese was also used
by Zhou Xun and Tony Yang but it was not picked up here.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Richard Lim Jr
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