Sunday 2 April 2017

Movie review



In 1990s, the series of Young and Dangerous is very famous in the whole asian movie industry, because in that period of time, their budget, unique style of filming and the story structure are in very high level. As a same time, the story might somehow discover or reflecting the secrete of Hong Kong underworld which increase more people attention. However, once the series ended, the genre of the major movie industry changed from the mob film to the police procedural.
Therefore, I am going to choose the recent Hong Kong mob film, Mobfathers, as my film review topic.

Mobfathers is directed by Herman Yau and released in Hong Kong on 31 March 2016. It can be listed as the independent film. When compare to the series of Young Dangerous, Mobfathers is very low cost production. The starring is Chapman To who is the actor that always expressing his personal opinion and political philosophy, in 2014 he supports Umbrella Revolution on Facebook which made the China Government upset and designed to block every single movie that he film to released on China. And I believed that, duo to the small budget and the whole production is not related to any China production studio, the director can able to express his own feeling freely, the topic and the meaning behind of the movie can be no restriction.

The story of the Mobfathers is very straight forward. The five leading gangs have to nominate three candidates to elect the Mobfather of the underworld, therefore the three candidates have to maximum their power by any means to gain the trust of the leading gangs, and hope at the end of the election, they can be the elected by the five leading gangs. When I watch the movie, I am focus on the details of the script more than the story line, because I believed that this movie is somehow reflecting the nowadays Hong Kong situation. In Hong Kong, as the candidates of the chief executive have to gain trust by the 150 nominations from the 1200-member Election Committee, in the movie, when the five leading gangs discuss who should be the mobfather, they said, they have the absolute power to control who can be elected, and who are the people to "accompany the run", which is very similar to the Hong Kong situation, normal Hong Kong citizen do not have the right to nominate the them, not to say to vote for the chief executive. and most of the Hong Kong people would believed that the Hong Kong chief executive is controlled by the China government, and they have the absolute power to eject the those they do not like, just like the mobfather in the movie. At the end of the movie, Chapman To gave out a speech to request every single member of the gang have the right to vote for the mobfather. To me, it is a symbolic scene that create a hope for Hong Kong people to have a equal opportunity to vote for the Chief executive  


10557416
Choi Yat Sing

1 comment:

  1. Dear Yat-sing, The main argument about how the film "Mobfathers" represent the election of Chief Executive in Hong Kong is fine. In fact, this is quite common view about the film. To enrich the content, more details like characters in the film, thier practices and dialogues and the plots of the film can be provided. The review now often provides general arguments which are not directly elaborating your argument. This makes the writing a bit weak in terms of content. (Frankie)

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