Word: slapstick
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...jarring to see Eric Tsang angry. The jovial actor, whose ubiquity in Hong Kong films?he's been in nearly 150?has made him a fixture on cable systems throughout Asia, is synonymous with lowbrow high jinks and slapstick physicality. Yet here he is, feet planted defiantly on a Kowloon street, ignoring an imprecating photographer who is losing a race with the setting sun to snap a natural-light portrait. Tsang's full-moon of a face, which is seen onscreen usually deployed in an overwrought double take or wide-eyed surprise, is now reddening as he barks in Cantonese...
...very interesting, since it’s mostly used to establish characters—the spacey blonde, the apologetic wimp, the alcoholic stage veteran—by harping on their idiosyncrasies, which meant that much of the act’s humor was repetitive and rooted in slapstick...
...standard movie-star niches. The saucy girl from Jamestown, N.Y., was pretty (a former model) but not va-va-voom sexy; she was down-home charming but divaishly difficult (she once chucked a coffeepot at a makeup man and missed, dousing Katharine Hepburn); she was funny but in a slapstick way audiences were not used to from women. Nearing 40, she was deep into a well-paid but unspectacular B-movie career when the opportunity came along to star in a TV show. Then, as Stefan Kanfer's entertaining but unreflective biography Ball of Fire (Knopf; 361 pages) details...
...Compared with Hong Kong's usually dimwitted comedy fare, Truth or Dare gets credit for aspiring to be more than slapstick. Wrapped in a fog of self-involvement, the kids drink, smoke, party and feud between working lousy jobs. Life's a bitch in Hong Kong, the movie says, but at least you've got friends. It's no Kids, but Truth or Dare shows that in Hong Kong the kids are still all right...
...There are no bullet ballets, no climactic face-offs in dove-filled churches or exploding fireworks factories. Even if To's comedic ear occasionally goes tone-deaf (I have a hard time laughing at a cop stomping a teenage triad to the brink of death, which To plays for slapstick), PTU is a refreshing subversion of an entire Hong Kong genre of films that seek easy heroism in rogue cops out for justice and sharply dressed gangsters who live by the code. In PTU there is no code?and less justice. A bit like real life...