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The 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival I am and have been for most of my life an obsessive purist about watching movies. I am all about the purity of the movie experience, about the lack of outside interference. I am that guy who testily tells loud strangers in cinemas to shut up. I am that asshole who tells his friends to keep it down when they're having a conversation in their own house because he's trying to watch Aliens for the four hundredth time. The truth is that in a world so devoid of appealing edifices of spirituality, the movie theatre has become my church, it's where I worship. So I take my movies very seriously and I resent people trying to distract me from my chosen theology.
As such, I've always loved the cinemas themselves; I love their simple bland objectivity. I love the way that filmmakers can project so many different stories into this generically empty space. In a large expansive rectangular room with red walls and a big, eye-filling screen there is nothing that comes between you and the story. Until recently I couldn't conceive of anything being better than the simplistic purity of this delightfully objective delivery system. I thought that when it came to watching movies the lack of outside distraction was paramount.
Then, on the night of Easter Sunday, as part of the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival I watched Kung-Fu Hustle and Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury in the middle of Hong Kong's Financial District on the biggest outdoor screen ever erected in Asia, a scene that was admittedly heavy on the distraction. Over the next few days the festival is showing outdoor screenings of various movies including some experimental animations by Astro Boy's creator Tezuka Osamu and Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea.
I have to say that all in all, after weighing up the pros and cons, and given due consideration to both options that on the whole, the outdoor screenings of the two movies I saw were better than the cinema. They were much fucking better. In entertainment stakes they made watching movies in the regular cinema look like watching a movie on a melting two-inch screen in the deep-blackness of the bottom of the ocean when you've just had your eyes sewn shut.
Let me set the scene for you. The Tamar site that the screen was erected on is in just in front of the mouth of a vast canyon of beautiful Hong Kong landmarks, each one of them belonging to a huge financial giant. Bank of America, HSBC, The Lippo Building, The China Bank, every one of them architecturally unique and covered in a characteristically Asian light scheme that shines into the night like some kind of constant electronic fireworks display. Neon company names shine out of every surface; Chinese characters that look like they're on fire permeate the night sky. This area of Hong Kong is where Ridley Scott obtained the look of Blade Runner; the Corporate East meets the Corporate West, on Super-Hyper-Techno acid from the future!
I hadn't seen either movie before, Kung-Fu Hustle has had rave reviews and Fists of Fury is by all accounts a Kung Fu Classic so I have to say that I was probably more excited about finally seeing the films than the novelty of the setting. I was somewhat apprehensive that we wouldn't get good seats or that it would rain, two things that were very possible. Although I knew it would be good I wasn't absolutely sure if it was going to be that great.
Driving there in a taxi, the screen emerged on the horizon a good two minutes before we actually approached it. When I arrived at 7:00 there was vast crowd of people, who were mostly Chinese although it was peppered with the occasional Western gwai-lo standing around with a conspiratorial look of mutual recognition on their face gained from having lucked in a bit of an inside-secret. It's not often these days that you see anybody who is really, truly impressed about anything, but on everybody's face and in everybody's eyes you could see the disbelief at the scale of the screen and the magnificence of the background.
The weather was pretty usual for this time of year in Hong Kong, sticky and humid. You could taste the need to rain in the air while helpful festival staff were busy handing out white plastic-macs with a level of foresight that later proved to make the whole evening possible.
The closest I can come to describing the feeling I had when I saw the set-up, the massive screen, the stacks of speakers is that it was like when I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas when I was eight. There were at least a thousand seats, all lit up by floodlights with the massive bulk of the inflated screen fronting the whole endeavour. As soon as we got in, my girlfriend and her brother and I all raced around like the eight-year-old kids we felt like and finally found great seats right at the front just it started raining, which it continued to do for most of the night. Once we had the seats and right through Kung Fu Hustle and Fists of Fury I hardly noticed the gathering wetness down my back.
While I was struggling into my mac the place quickly filled up to absolute capacity and the floods dimmed to a kind of hazy half light, the red and blue neons on the side of the skyscrapers illuminated the mist and rain, giving the whole place a weird glow.
First there was a short and nicely put together montage of film clips celebrating a hundred years of Chinese cinema, which was one of the themes of the festival. At the same time the Hong Kong Symphonette played the music for the short live, it was our first exposure to the screen's sound system, which was immense. I had been so concentrated on my anticipation of the visuals that the quality of the sound didn't really occur to me.
Then Kung Fu Hustle started and it blew me away, almost literally. Thankfully both movies were in Cantonese with Mandarin and English Subtitles but it was in the fighting that the sound and the visuals really showed what you can do with volume if there are no restricting walls to make the crowd deaf. Once the movies actually started and the kung-fu stylee punches were a-flying you could physically feel every blow in your chest. It was like being beaten up by a movie.
You could see people on the street behind the screen stop and stare, cars slow down and pull over, the crowd roar along with the movie. The "Lion's Roar" in Kung-Fu Hustle was so loud that I could see the windows of the cars and the skyscrapers reverberate. As the action in the movies got more and more serious, so did the weather. The rain really started pouring down, but safely ensconced in our macs and bathed in the warm night's air we braved the whole thing with hardly a thought for the conditions. Every couple of seconds we'd look up, see where we were, see the amazing background, the fantastic enthusiasm, and realise that there was nowhere on Earth that would be a better place to show these two films. We'd look at the person beside us in true Oh My Fucking Christ amazement, even though neither of us spoke the same language. It was so eerily beautiful it was like we were in the movie. When Bruce Lee came on there were shouts and cheers. I think it would have made him happy to see himself still looking like a god, projected in the open air of modern Hong Kong.
In terms of the experience, Kung-Fu Hustle was the better of the two movies because it was better able to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that the setting offered. The booming sound, the sharp visuals, the magnificently choreographed fight and CGI sequences, it was like what Tarantino was trying to achieve with Kill Bill but failed to pull off. While Bruce Lee's fighting was extraordinary in
Fists of Fury and the in-story theme of racism towards Japan was hilarious to watch, especially in the company of so many Chinese and Japanese people, the quality of the sound wasn't up to the former because recording standards were obviously much lower back then. Also and with a sad predictability, when it was compared to the CGI enhanced battles of Kung Fu hustle, it looked pretty hokey.
As we left I kept talking about Kung Fu Hustle and the amazing differences it had made to me as a cinema-goer, you could see everyone trying to get to get to grips with seeing the end of four hours of such an amazing experience.
I have to say, after that I'm not sure I can go back to my cinema's treasured bland objectivity. I think I might now need a bit of drama to my backdrop. I realised that the distractions of a locale can definitely contribute to the experience rather than detract from it, like watching Jaws on a lilo floating in the sea or watching Alive in the Andes Mountains. The only problem I foresee is that it might have been too good, that I might now have an unrealistic expectation of what a good cinema-going experience constitutes. Hopefully before I die, just once, I'll be able to sit in a throne on a huge Imperial space station and get to watch Star Wars projected on the surface of the Moon before I have it blown up. Is that too much to ask?
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