Film review: Dancing Lion (2007; directed by Francis Ng)

The few film reviews which I have read about this fun film -- which is in Cantonese -- complain that it is "incoherent". Well it is! I won't go into what the movie is about because there are some awesome trailers out there somewhere on youtube. What I enjoyed most about this comedy was it's whacky "inside jokes" about life in Hong Kong, which may be hard to appreciate if you don't know that SAR well. Eg. the feckless, incoherent municipal officer made me laugh. Many of the scenes are set in one of the character's "speakeasy" (an illicit micro-restaurant run out of somebody's private home), another very "Hong Kong" thing. The "childcare centre" gags made me laugh too; there's a surreal (but so real!) sequence where a Stunt Toddler spells out "cappucino" to show the parents that the centre teaches Italian in addition to English and German. There is a sly dig at gweilos who watch English Premier League games religiously in Hong Kong. Some background info on HK "speakeasies": http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E0D8113CF936A2575BC0A9629C8B63&scp=21&sq=hong%20kong%20restaurant&st=cse My favourite performance was Anthony Wong in the role of the very loopy Lion Dance expert uncle. Speaking only in Classical-sounding Chinese -- he sounds like Gandalf in the "Lord of the Rings" movies -- this character is not your typical Anthony Wong role, it's almost impossible to shake off the impression that this uncle fried his brains to a crisp on some really good dope sometime in the 1970s. Frances Ng, directing himself, is unrecognisable to anybody who was captivated by his intense, but restrained, performance as the deadly mob boss in "Internal Affairs II". Seeing him as an immature 40something good-for-nothing man who thinks he is a rapper made me cringe, but in sympathy. There are moving scenes -- Eg. the "ghost lion" dance, performed during funeral sequence. And there was something wistful about the lion being drunk in Central and saying hello to the famous Stanchart (?) lions before throwing up and passing out drunk. The lion dance sequences are very exciting. I enjoyed it when the competition arrived on the scene: a genuine "northern" lion, done by a Beijing Mandarin-speaking troupe drawn to HK by the lion dance craze that the main characters accidentally started. Btw, in lion dance tradition, there are two distinct schools: "Southern" lions and "Northern" lions are always the fiercest competitors. The early brawl scene recalls the bad old days in HK in the 1970s, when lion dance troups were controlled by triads and often had bloody fights (for tips) with each other. Hope this helps in some way...

P/s: I loved the zany Hakka song performed by Francis Ng and his sidekick (forget the name). So over the top!