Trivial Matters Review

Saturday night I had a last minute opportunity to attend another movie premiere.  It was for Pang Ho-Cheung's new movie 'Trivial Matters' ( 破事兒).

It was an interesting film,  I was a big fan of Pang's previous work ('You Shoot, I Shoot', 'AV', etc) so I knew that this one would be decent, but other than the fact that it has like a million different people in the cast,  I didn't know what to expect.

Here's the trailer:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvqeidqEbt4 It turns out the film is actually a series of unassociated shorts (apparently 7, but I lost count), Each one starring a different set of actors.  They range from the funny to the somewhat serious... a few just confusing, but mostly just  funny of course.

If your Chinese is good, you can check out this preview video:

Some are rather short and some are longer,  one of the longer ones is this one:

Gillian Chung and Stephy Tang, doing a retro 80's story of teenage friends (if nothing else I learned about Danny Chan (陳百強) from this short).  This is definitely one of the more serious ones, but it had some funny moments too.

Watching Pang's previous movies, you should know he's not afraid to include some risque stuff in his movies,  in the case of 'Trivial Matters',  there's quite a LOT of sex... (obvious from that trailer too). Not all of them had sex, but some of them were pretty much JUST about sex... specifically Eason Chen's short with Isabel Chan:

I won't give it away, but its quite... Etchy. :-P

As you can see from the trailer, the other sexually charged one, starred Chapman To (who was also credited as the 'supervisor' for the film.. I guess that means he was like a producer or co-director?)

I liked this one the most I think,  Chapman does a really good job,  its a very minimalist and simplistic story,  but its powerful at the same time.  He plays himself in a (hopefully) fictionalized story...   at one point he gets naked and his rear end is exposed on camera... it was quite funny listening to the crowd's reaction... especially since Chapman himself was there in the audience. :-P

A lot of the humor was somewhat HK-centric,  but even as a non-local, I enjoyed it.

I'll give it a 6/10 as a whole..  where some of those are 2 or 3/10 and some are 8 or 9/10! ;-)

ps - some pictures from the premiere screening:

i think thats Isabel Chan on the left, and thats Chapman To and Pang Ho-Cheung at the start of the screening on the right.