Review of A World Without Thieves (2004) by Chris D — 05 Jul 2005

Still adjusting to the time difference after the HK trip. I did ok yesterday, but not today. I tried sleeping early, which for me is around 1am, but so far I always end up waking up a couple hours later and not being able to sleep again until a couple hours after that.

Today, I got a call from Stephen. My initial reaction was, "Who the hell is calling me at 8am in the morning?" When I heard it's Stephen, my first reaction was that he should know better not to call me so early in the morning. That bastard. Then I looked at the clock and it's 2:30pm. Would have probably slept through the entire working day if he hadn't called me.

So I went to work and not really had any breakfast until about 8pm. On the positive side, I felt really rested and refreshed :).

[b]Movies.

[/b]A World Without Thieves - Picked this one up from HK. I borrowed a VCD from Stephen a while back, but couldn't get through the first 10 minutes, but I heard it's a good movie. So I finally watched it at my parent's place during 4th of July weekend. It's a pretty damn good movie. I like the premise, the cinematography, and the editing. Some of the "fight" scenes if you can call it that are pretty interestingly edited, like the one involving razor blades - pretty cool. Interestingly, the film was a humougous hit in China, but tanked pretty badly in Hong Kong. It's pretty rare to see a film starring Andy Lau tanking so spectacularly in Hong Kong nowadays. It seems to be a trend during the recent years - HKers just don't like to watch their local stars in films speaking a different language - or in this case, a different dialect.

House of Fury - It's technically an action comedy, but there are very few laughs. They could have used a "comedian" as one of their co-stars. The fight scenes are ok. It's just very obvious that the bad guys are way better martial artists and are losing those fights cuz they're not the stars. They could have used at least one "real" martial artist on the good side to balance things out. When you're watching Bruce, Jackie, Jet, Donnie, or Tony Jaa, you believe they can actually kick ass.