All About Women (2008)

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This stylish, vividly stunning film is about three women who couldn't be more different: Fanfan (Zhoe Xun) is an x ray technician who has "selective sclerosis", she can't touch a man. Her look reminds me of Josephine Siao, a HK actress from the 80's. The DVD blurb calls her homely. Despite the bowl haircut and big glasses, you know she's actually beautiful. As beautiful CEO Lu (Kitty Zhang)steals men left and right, seemingly unfulfilled in love. Tieling (Kwai Lun-mei) is a rock singer, the youngest of the three at 19 has a boyfriend "X", who is actually her imaginary boyfriend. How do these ladies meet? Fanfan develops pheromones by accident, and the to sexes are drawn to each other. I was reminded somewhat of "Sex And The City", a show I liked (I haven't seen the two films), but this is set in ultra modern Hong Kong and I think guys will like this film. It has some heart, goes a little crazy, and that is okay. Its not a great film and I doubt that was the goal. It does entertain, the characters are fun to watch (especially Zhoe Xun, you can barely take your eyes off her) and its a fun way to spend two hours. Don't expect profundity and I think you'll enjoy it.

This is a comedy about three women trying to find, well deal with, love, and the transformations that take place as a result. One is a scientist who ends up experimenting with pheromones, one is a young rock singer who's best friend is an imaginary version of a big rock star and the third is the head of a huge corporation that is the object of lust for every man she meets, but who herself feels nothing.This is Tsui Hark's first solo directing effort in many a year that isn't bad, actually its pretty funny and something I will recommend to friends. Imagine that. (Honestly I was a good way in to the film when my thought became "Hey this doesn't stink") Hark never the greatest of directors, his recent films like Seven Swords, Missing, and Zu Warriors were for the most parts busts. This isn't a a bust. I really liked this film a great deal. I'm guessing that Hark's success is due to the work of Jae-Young Kwak the writer/director of the original My Sassy Girl. Looking over my review for the earlier Missing I said that Hark's problem has been in his scripts, something that isn't the problem here. An added bonus is the music used. I like the choices and the songs that characters sing. (Bonus points for the DVD company subtitling the lyrics since they do move the plot at time.) A winner. Which is something I haven't been able to say about a current Hark film for a long time.

Yes, Director Tsui has gone chick flick. Trotting down his streak of hits-and-misses, this flamboyant director never shuns from exploring new territories. The new "Mountain Zu" in 2001 was definitely a miss. "Seven Swords" in 2005 was a hit. This year's "Missing" which ventured into the realm of psychological-supernatural thriller, has not been particularly well received. "All about women" starts by looking like another miss but manages to pull everything together as it unfolds, to look quite decent in the end.Those attracted to this movie would probably have watched Sylvia Cheung's "20, 30, 40" (2004). While the similarity is obvious – both are about the stories of 3 women – there is a big difference. In "20, 30, 40" the three stories are entirely independent and the connections are extremely inconsequential. In "All about women", the stories are intertwined, first through the connecting characters but, even more importantly, through a new love potion (not the one you get from you neighbourhood witch, but something that is scientifically invented) which can almost be considered the true star of the movie. It is a study of its effect on each of the 3 women. Ultimately, it's really all about women and, more specifically, their way of looking at love.ZHOU Xun is an actress that one never grows tired of watching. In this movie, she assumes yet another new persona, 27-year-old bespectacled medical technician with a bizarre ailment: whenever touched by a man, she goes absolutely stiff, becoming something like the dummies you see in shop windows for displaying garments. KWAI Lunmei, whose sweet innocence in "Blue gate crossing" (2002) made her the dream idol of many a Taiwanese adolescent boy, is cast here out of type, playing the 19-year-old tempestuous rock singer who gives "My sassy girl" (2001) a run for her money – a good step to take for this talented young actress. Youngest of the trio is ZHANG Yuqi (she's 20), Stephen Chow's latest discovery, in "CJ 7" (2008). She plays the oldest of the 3 women, a 31-year-old CEO who, behind her looks that guarantees to set every hot-blood male in flame, is hard as a nail. She does reasonably well, and I'm all for giving opportunities to new comers.Complementing the principal cast are two men, FONG Chung-sun and FUNG Tak-lun, heartthrobs to the female audience in Hong Kong in their respective age groups. Not exactly Director Tsui's best work, this movie is a lot of fun to watch.

It must have been crazy to brand this as Asia's answer to the wildly popular Sex in the City, because for all the star power in its female cast, whom besides Zhou Xun, I thought the rest had hung to the coattails of their more popular co-stars such as Stephen Chow and Jay Chou in order to give their cinematic career some needed boost. And what must Tsui Hark be thinking if he reckoned that he could get in touch with his inner feminine self to bring to an audience something about the modern women's psyche on relationships?There's nothing fun nor sassy in the characters and the storyline here, and at best, it's a forgettable piece of drama that felt like a typical scatterbrain trying to figure everything, but getting down to achieving nothing. The film was schizophrenic on a lot of fronts, having bitten more than it can chew, and then couldn't decide if it preferred to spit or swallow (pardon the sexual connotations, which the movie is devoid of anyway). While some would have written off Tsui Hark as a has-been, I thought I still wanted to give him a chance even after the rather dismal Missing, and while one can applaud his bravery at attempting something fresh, you're likely to find yourself questioning just what has gotten into him, and whether he has totally lost the plot.You can reminisce his glorious filmography past, but I think those days aren't going to come back anytime soon. There's absolutely nothing to like about this movie, and everything felt rather artificial with little heart. The last straw of course came when a scene toward the end was a blatant copy of The Bachelor, except that the roles were reversed. I felt that was a new low with Hark finding the need to parody others, highlighting a serious lack of ideas.Zhou Xun plays Ou Fan Fan, aged 27 (yes it matters enough to be highlighted in the movie), who with her thick glasses, transforms herself from usual glamour puss to ultimate geek with Calamity Jane tendencies. Her inexplicable nervousness when touched by men, makes her all frigid, and Hark decides to make this condition very slapstick ridiculous. Yearning for a man long gone, and with her inability to attract new ones, she goes on a research experiment to design pheromone patches that can chemically induce the right man to be drawn toward her. Think of it as an airborne Love Potion No 9.Kitty Zhang plays glamour puss Tang Lu, 31, who oozes so much sexuality, that men cower in her presence, and worship even her fart (OK, so I made the last point up, but you get the drift). Having no friends as she inevitably makes their boyfriends/husbands/fiancés ditch them for her, she's the alpha-feminist and successful career woman who's out to prove that she has more talent than the size of her boobs (OK, so I made it up again just to spice up an incredibly boring story). The perennial case of looks not an issue in the corporate world, though she has some really dogged tenacity in fishing out for profit making deals, such as Fan Fan's patches, setting them on a collision course as she blackmails the latter into a contract.And to round up the trio of female lead characters, Kwai Lun Mei stars as a 19 year old internet novelist cum amateur boxer cum indie band lead vocalist wannabe, who has an imaginary Japanese boyfriend to boot. I suppose this is an unorthodox a character as you can get, and of the three, she probably has the least screen time given the distinct lack of know how on what to do with this character, given her hands in so many pies.The trio share limited scenes together, and for the most parts felt like having three different short films glued together as one. Supporting characters such as the rocker played by Stephen Fung provide that degree of separation between the leading ladies, otherwise they only come together at a hospital scene toward the end, and had a lot more to do at a restaurant and a music festival. Between all the three ladies, only Zhou Xun's character undergo some sort of internal and physical transformation thanks to her experiments in getting her out of her shell, otherwise the other two look more like caricatures, especially Kitty Zhang's, though in a way much better than being a flower vase like in CJ7.There isn't much to shout out about the movie, and given its run time of close to two hours, there are numerous moments where it actually could have been trimmed to save the audience from the unintended torture of watching how some supposedly female characters lead their contemporary love lives, but with a man, and Tsui Hark at that, at the helm that well, it becomes a misfire with nothing to show.