Gu cheng bielian

Having endured this film as a favor, I only wish a Time Machine existed so I could be refunded the wasted duration to this awful picture.

If the screenplay was written with good intentions from heart-felt inspirations, whatever good ideas and "heart" on the script were completely lost in the production and the film's final print.

To start, none of the main characters played by Stephen Fung, Teresa Lee, and Ayako Morino were seasoned actors during the time the film was made, so a little extra "understanding" was already extended in judging their performances.

While Lee was the better of the lot, and seemed to have tried her best to make sense out of the narrative(which seemed to not be able to decide whether this story is supposed to be a biography, or a Bunuel-like take on a biography), Stephen Fung played the lead as a cross between a Stepford wife and a lunatic that reminded me of John Cassavettes' madman character in Robert Aldrich's DIRTY DOZEN... or was he supposed to be a SYBIL like schizophrenic? I can't tell, and more than 5 minutes of it I stopped caring. What caught more attention to most of the audience who wasn't related to the cast and crew, was how soon the film would end! There would be traces in the scattered narrative that tries to mimic moments in Vincente Minnelli's Van Gogh biography LUST FOR LIFE (as the story is about an artist-poet in this case, who lived his life in search of artistic beauty while neglecting everything and everyone around him), but that went only as far as the grassy plains of the exterior visuals in New Zealand.

Stephen Fung has never been thought of as a talented actor. In fact, prior to his acting career, he was even less as a member of a 2-man band that kept much of the pop scene wondering if its existence was a parody to the music scene in itself. Mark Lui, a successful pop music producer and composer in Hong Kong, has not a gifted voice, so you would expect the band would at least consist of one quality voice to accompany the music potential. In any case, the band's career was fortunately short-lived... but for the gift we got with Stephen Fung leaving the music scene, the damage was then extended to the HK film industry, where Stephen Fung would be promoted as an idol of sorts, and of late, even as a film-making talent.

All this reminds me of the classic John Landis role-reversal comedy TRADING PLACES, where Eddie Murphy played a transient given the chance to live the life of a Wall-street bigwig set-up as a wager between the heads of a commodities firm... but as that story successfully shows, a transient can be a star banker only if he knew how to apply common sense at the right time.

Stephen Fung, on the other hand, showed us his lack of talent at the beginning of his career, and after nearly a decade in the business, continues to remind us that things have stayed exactly the same for him.