Auspicious Objects

Hey look, Auspicious Objects may have a current movie review for once! But before we get to that…

One of my favorite Hong Kong films is a little-remembered biopic from 1991 starring Andy Lau as the eponymous Lee Rock, a police cadet who joins the force solely for the purpose of being able to buy food. Initially righteous and morally upstanding, he refuses bribes and chastises his colleagues for accepting them. As Lee Rock climbs up the ranks, however, his attitude changes, and by the time the sequel rolls around, he is paying off gang leaders and divising an official system of  dividing bribes up amongst officers and detectives. The end of Lee Rock II sees Andy Lau’s character fleeing to Canada to avoid prosecution at the hands of the ICAC – The Independent Commission Against Corruption. It’s hard to discern how much of the Lee Rock saga is fictionalized (a question we have to take a hard look at with any biopic), but according to Hong Kong gweilo film critic Paul Fonoroff, the films are at least partly rooted in fact, similar to Casino Tycoon, another Andy Lau biopic made in 1992 about Macau gambling tycoon Stanley Ho. Actually, the two film franchises are eerily similar to each other in terms of plot structure, but that’s a discussion for another time. Prolific filmmaker Wong Jing produced Lee Rock (as well as directed Casino Tycoon), and in 2009, he decided to revisit the subject of corrupt policemen – as well as the ICAC, which only gets brief screentime in Lee Rock II – for I Corrupt All Cops, which also crafts a lot of fiction around a little bit of fact.

The film suffers from the same problem many Wong Jing films struggle with: a lack of focus. ICAC spends the first half of it’s 2+ hour running time setting up numerous subplots and developing the characters within them, but it seems readily apparent that Wong Jing is unsure of who to devote screentime to. Anthony Wong’s character is established in the first scene…then he disappears in favor of focusing on corrupt head police officials Lak (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), Gale (Eason Chan), and Gold (Wong Jing himself). By the time Anthony Wong comes back into the fold, it’s hard to remember what he was doing at the beginning and what purpose he serves the story now. Perhaps even more puzzling is the inclusion of an extensive backstory for Alex Fong’s character at the beginning of the film. Bong (Fong) is an upstanding student at the University of Hong Kong who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting the shit beaten out of him by Anthony Wong and other police officers in order to extract a confession for crimes he had no part in. Bong is eventually released rightfully scotch-free, but he warns the officers that “one day, I’m going to put you all behind bars.” Anyone who has seen a film before will realize that this is blatant foreshadowing, and sure enough, in the second act of the film Bong applies as an investigator for the newly-established ICAC. Yet, in this capacity, he only acts as scenery, and his character has no effect on the story whatsoever. He barely even has any lines while investigating corrupt police officers and flashing his ICAC badge. Also, he ends up working with Anthony Wong in the ICAC. What happened to vengeance?

Oh shit, it’s the ICAC!

Thankfully, Wong Jing manages to restrain himself, and avoids putting in odd comic sequences that detract from the film’s serious tone. Still, there is one decidedly major subplot that is patently ridiciulous, even though it isn’t played for laughs. Gale acts as Lak’s right-hand man, and ends up taking the fall for Lak and company’s infidelity on more than one occasion – nine occasions, to be exact. Gale marries all of his colleague’s mistresses once they’ve been exposed, and by the time of the film’s narrative, he has nine wives. It’s an interesting and fun idea, but it’s nonsensical nature is highlighted all-the-more when seen in between plausible segments. At least it leads to someone getting a hammer to the face…

Eight of Gale’s nine wives.

Even though the film derives it’s name from the ICAC (I hope you’ve figured that out by now), there is a disappointingly small amount of screentime devoted to the organization itself. Besides the required montage of the team busting into police official’s houses and flashing their badges, very little of the narrative focuses on the ICAC. Maybe it was too dry for Wong Jing’s a-thrill-a-minute approach? I would have gladly taken more dramatization of the ICAC’s actual history over the painfully unnecessary and overly-drawn-out explanation of the murder of a dog. The problem is that over half of the film is spent on exposition. By the time the “action” of the story hits, it’s already time to wrap things up. Since the ICAC obviously isn’t around for the first part of the film, completing its story arch doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, and thus much of the ICAC story ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s a travesty for those who are interested in the factual background of Hong Kong’s struggle with police corruption. If you are willing to overlook the lack of attention payed to the ICAC, however, I Corrupt All Cops is an engaging and entertaining piece of cinema, especially when compared with much of Wong Jing’s other work. Perhaps we’ll just have to wait another decade or so for another stab at documenting the real story of the ICAC.

At The Movies hong kong, movies

In my last post, I briefly mentioned – in polite and fair terms, I think – that I have a great hatred for student dailies published and distributed on college campuses. Now, before I go any further, I will preface that this is entirely directed at the newspapers made on campuses I’ve studied at; obviously, there are many more student publications out there that I have never read, and, although I certainly could read many of them thanks to the proliferation of the internet, I don’t have that much free time on my hands (but since you’re reading this blog that I waste my free time writing, you already know that’s a total lie). The most I venture outside of my small Wisconsin world is pointing my web browser to IvyGate, and while they certainly do their share of ragging on student publications, I’ve still heard that The Daily Pennsylvanian is quite good.

My discontent with students wasting paper goes all the way back (read: less than four years) to my high school days, when our school’s newly-instituted student paper had an illustrious run amounting to about one school year. I honestly don’t remember anything about the paper (not even it’s name), save that the only column anyone enjoyed reading was Heap of the Month (yes, so little happened at our school that the paper was published monthly), where a student would detail the idiosyncrasies and deficiencies with their car. The writer of the column was not gifted with expressive language (you can’t fault him/her though; this was high school after all), but the humor of the situation nevertheless shined through. The paper ceased production my senior year, although no specific reason was given. It probably had something to do with the general laziness of high school students, our school population’s collected loathing of the teacher who oversaw the paper’s production, and the fact that the paper was terrible in every regard. I’m not saying that we should hold high school newspapers to high journalistic standards, but the very least they could have done was prevent it from being little more than a sheet of biased gossip – which is exactly what it became.

But that’s all in the past. We can’t expect a team of high school students looking to pad their college applications to write Pulitzer Prize material, but isn’t it reasonable to demand that a team of college students – who are, for the most part, majoring in journalism – rise above those high school inclinations towards biased, emotionally charged, and/or narcissistic writing? Apparently that’s asking too much. Here I would normally insert a quip about no one caring about this problem because of no one reading the papers, but I know that’s not true; every college campus I’ve been to is populated with students reading their school’s publication(s), and every college campus I’ve been to also has a problem with students discarding issues of the student newspaper on the ground rather than in proper trash receptacles. Obviously, people are reading the papers, and that’s also part of the problem. If a good portion of the student body is reading the student newspaper and simply shrugging off the numerous flaws on the printed page, they are doing nothing to advocate change. Also, the staff of the paper take notice of how many people around campus are reading their work, and their ego automatically inflates itself.

If student newspapers are so bad, though, why are students reading them? The answer is simple, especially if you are or have ever been a college student: boredom. If you have some time in between classes, reading a newspaper – regardless of it’s quality – is a good way to kill time. When I was a student at Point, I had a small gap of time in between my philosophy class and psychology class, which I would regrettably spend reading The Pointer. Even just hearing that name makes me livid to this day. I’ve already said this publicly, and I don’t mind throwing it out again: The Pointer is an absolute piece of garbage. It was before, and it is now. I know that it still has a chance for redemption, as do all student newspapers; we just have to wait for the paper staff to completely change as current members graduate and move on (hopefully not to a career in journalism). The problem, of course, is that the staff does not completely turnover all at once, and this gives current staff time to corrupt new staff and bully them into conforming to shitty journalistic standards. It’s a vicious cycle.

So, why do I loathe The Pointer as much as I do? The biggest problem they have had for the past few years is a completely obvious bias towards the Student Government Association; the two are practically in bed together. For the entirety of the 2008-2009 school year, every week’s front page was either entirely dominated by a cover story detailing some SGA affair, or at the very least, featured a quote from an SGA official on a topic that had nothing to do with SGA. Why would this be the case? As it turns out, many of the current staff have served on SGA at some point in time or have friends in SGA. Look, you’ve got to at least try to maintain a neutral viewpoint when you’re a journalist. My friend Scott Asbach is now the president of SGA. Hypothetically, if I were a journalist for The Pointer and I had to be critical about something stupid SGA did, I wouldn’t hold back, because it wouldn’t be about Scott and I as friends, it would be about Scott and I as SGA president and journalist, respectively. Save your feelings for the op-ed page, where they belong.

Sadly, The Pointer has proven time and time again that they are very bad at maintaining a neutral viewpoint, and this deficiency can be felt even in the executive editorial decisions of the paper. Last year, UWSP suffered the tragic death of a student on-campus. Instead of doing some actual journalism and writing the in-depth article the situation was worthy of, Pointer staff member Justin Glodowski slapped together some official details sloppily and included a quote that sounds like it came from the first person he found anywhere near Thomson Hall:

“I had only met Andrew a few times during the semester, so I couldn’t really call him a good friend of mine because I barely knew him, but he was a nice guy every time I did see him. I know he had a bright future ahead of him and it’s sad his life was taken so soon,” said Ashley Tabaka.

Thanks for that, Ashley. You really offered some insightful perspective into Andrew’s life. Now just stick that quote in between a few paragraphs poorly rephrasing the official coroner’s report, and Justin is out of the office by five. But wait, let’s not be too harsh on our friend Justin just yet! He is the same guy who wrote this article – which took up the front page of the paper – about a former student at UWSP who went missing in California. It even has pictures! But why would we give so much more attention to an alumni who went missing on the other end of the country from Point’s campus? If you guessed that it was because she had friends in SGA, you are growing wise to the ways of The Pointer. Like most articles in the paper last year, this one starts with a quote from Katie Kloth, then-president of SGA. I’m not saying this shouldn’t warrant press coverage – certainly the disappearance of a person is tragic and important – but the imbalance of coverage between these two events is not only unprofessional, it’s downright insulting.

The Pointer has cleaned up it’s act a little bit this year, revamping it’s front page design and losing some of the SGA love (though I’m not sure if that’s due to a change in writing staff or a change in SGA presidency), but it’s still not as good as it could – nay, should – be. I am not quite sure what is holding it back, but I think it may have something to do with the person who wrote the worst student newspaper article ever now running the paper. Go ahead, click on that link, read that article, and I defy you to not shake your head in the process. There is no substance to it whatsoever. It does not even attempt to masquerade as journalism. It’s simply naval-gazing of the lowest form published in the completely wrong medium (it should be on blogs like this, if anywhere), and nothing more. My favorite quote:

I chose to write with a pen name because of the high profile I hold on campus.

It makes me laugh because this “high profile” is largely self-imagined (as I can tell you from being on campus when this was written), and perfectly sums up the vein, narcissistic nature of many college journalists. I have a lot more to say on this subject – and really, I think I could go on for days – but I’m getting way too angry to continue, so I’ll just leave you with that.

Next time (if there is a next time) on “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Klug!“, we’ll look at sex columnists, Burnellgate, terrible attempts at impersonating The Onion, crappy newspaper comics, and we’ll also take shots at both The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald. Oh boy.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Klug! anger, college, idiocy, wisconsin

As Sean Connery once learned the hard way, you should never say never, no matter how implausible or preposterous a hypothetical situation sounds. My mom, who works at an elementary school, called me on Tuesday night to rub it in my face, like she does every year, that the school district had a snow day called for the next day. Being in college, of course, I was not expecting to have all of my classes canceled merely because of bad weather. When I was a freshman, school ended early one day due to dangerously low temperatures, but by the time the announcement of class cancellation was made, it was already 4 pm. I had never before heard any stories of a college snow day, and I did not believe in their existence anywhere.

But there is a first time for everything.

My esteemed colleague Matt (whom you may know from his acting career in short films or from certain podcasts) asked to borrow my mixing equipment for a school project, so I walked down the street to his apartment, expecting to stay for only an hour or two; after all, I still had homework to finish before the next day. While I was over, another friend texted me, certifying the unthinkable: We were going to have a snow day. Now in a celebratory mood, and with newly extended deadlines to finish that homework by, Matt and I cracked open some beverages from Point Brewery and enjoyed an absolutely terrible film starring Dolph Lundgren (I know, I know, it’s redundant to put the words “Dolph Lundgren” and “terrible film” in the same sentence) entitled Dark Angel (alternatively I Come In Peace). It’s basically an early ’90s action film about an alien from outer space who comes to earth and says “I come in peace” before injecting random innocents with a lethal dose of heroin and then sucking endorphins out of their head. It’s almost as good as Showdown in Little Tokyo, another Dolph Lundgren classic. After the credits rolled on that cinematic masterpiece, we decided to hit the snow-filled streets at midnight on foot.

The weather, although inclement, was unusually comfortable for a Wisconsin winter; it was not too cold outside, and there was almost no wind. Although the streets were eerily quiet and devoid of life (even for midnight on a Tuesday evening), it didn’t take long before we stumbled upon a group of strangers crafting large snowmen in the parking lot across the street from my apartment building. We observed right away that the snow already on the ground was perfect for packing, easily allowing for the creation of perfectly symmetrical snowmen and giant snowballs.

While the atmosphere of camaraderie felt good, we decided to move on, as 1) people were only marveling at the snowmen they had already made, not creating new ones, and 2) no one was talking to us anyway. So we headed up towards the lake and onto Langdon Street, the “Greek row” of the campus. Before we had even gotten close to the epicenter of action, we could already hear the sound of people yelling, cheering, and just making noise in general. As we got closer, we saw large crowds on either side of the street hurling snowballs at each other.

It almost felt like a war zone. People did not seem good-natured about their artillery firing, but instead rather malicious, as though they really wanted to hurt someone on the other side of the street. This impression was confirmed when a guy emerged from the crowd and ran up to Matt and I. He tried to sway us to his cause with this utterance: “Look, I don’t know if you guys hate Sigma Chi or not, but FUCK THEM! Help us hit their flag!” After we feigned interest and told him we would help him, he seemed appeased and quickly ran away, probably to “persuade” more neutral parties. Sigma Chi is best-known on campus for things other than philanthropic work, but I myself am neutral in my opinion of them, because I don’t really care about Greek life – unless, of course, we’re talking about PCU (great movie, by the way). Since the environment was so hostile, we decided to move on and head towards the center of campus. Neither of us had experienced the traditional snow festivities on Bascom Hill, and there was no better night to see what it was all about.

Luckily, Bascom Hill was a lot more fun to be at than Langdon Street, as everyone was just out to have a good time, not pelt a frat house with tightly-packed snow projectiles. All along the hill people were engaged in a light-hearted snowball fight, and thankfully, sticking to the sidewalks on either side of the hill ensured you wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to try that college tradition of tray-sledding for the first time, using an abandoned tray Matt had picked up while we were on Langdon. In spite of Bascom Hill being frighteningly steep, there was too much friction on the sidewalk for the tray to slide effortlessly, and I ended up doing that pathetic motion where you try to give yourself momentum by scooting on the “sled.” But still, I can now at least say that I tried tray-sledding.

My fingers started to get bitterly cold, so we made our way away from campus and back home, but not before stopping for some Silvermine Subs at 1:30 in the morning, which were delicious, as expected. It was especially entertaining to watch people pelt each other with snowballs right outside of the restaurant the entire time we were eating. Matt and I got back to his apartment at 2 AM, and, after watching some episodes of QI and Look Around You, finished a successful evening up with warm apple cider and Christmas music courtesy of Pandora Radio. We also went outside again to help a girl park her car in the snow. Since her car battery was dead, however, there was more pushing than parking going on, and even though the car was still sticking out into the street when we were finished, one of the other good Samaritans who helped pointed out, “if someone manages to hit your car in this weather, they’re just a douchebag.” I can think of no better situation to illustrate human kindness than a couple of dudes helping a damsel-in-distress with her car troubles at 4 AM on a snowy Wisconsin street. Even after witnessing incident after incident that evening of hateful snowball throwing and gratuitous use of homophobic slurs, this philanthropic act left me with hope for the human race. Snow days help bring people together.

Side Note: Although I am often very critical of The Badger Herald (as I am with other student newspapers), writer Carolyn Briggs penned a nice front-page article today about the annual snowball fight on Bascom Hill, which is written as though the fight were an epic military battle. It’s amusing, and worth a read.

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