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Film studies: All right on the night

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'It's only fitting that you have a jolly film to watch during the Lunar New Year holidays,' says Raymond Wong Pak-ming - and it's hardly a surprise the veteran actor-screenwriter-producer says so. The self-explanatory title of his latest production, All's Well Ends Well 2009, leaves no doubt that Wong (right, with Sandra Ng) intended to make a feel-good family comedy for the festive season, just as he's done with the first three All's Well Ends Well films he wrote, produced and performed in during the 1990s.

With Hong Kong bracing for gloomier times and most of the city's population opting to stay in town for the holidays, Wong's decision to reboot his gags-aplenty franchise seems very much a shrewd move - even if it's going to come up against some stiff competition from fellow Chinese-language filmmakers. Among the competing films are John Woo Yu-sum's historical epic Red Cliff II (which opened to generally positive reviews last week) and Andrew Lau Wai-keung's romantic comedy Look For a Star (starring Andy Lau Tak-wah and Shu Qi), not to mention foreign films such as Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Pixar's animated Bolt, the sentimental Marley & Me, starring Jennifer Aniston, and David Fincher's sprawling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Wong, however, says he is confident All's Well will prevail because audiences prefer light-hearted entertainment featuring familiar actors during tough times. In fact, he's exasperated by the lack of such films in recent years, during which his peers have unearthed box-office gold by releasing grittier material around Lunar New Year. 'Why should we have been watching [2006 martial-arts film] Fearless during the holidays? We could have been watching something like that at any time during the year,' he says. He's also bemused about Derek Yee Tung-shing's Protege leading the charge for Chinese-language films during last year's Lunar New Year: revolving around the narcotics trade in Hong Kong and driven by bleak images of drug factories and junkies, it's not what Wong considers family-friendly festive fare.

'Our films are scripted so that they end on a happy note, with the family reconciling all of their differences,' he says. Asked whether a new generation of cinema-goers might regard his brand of squeaky-clean fun out of touch with the times, he says his film will still find an audience. 'I don't really care about the changes in society. I believe this is what audiences want at this time of the year,' he says. 'Why give them films about people dying and things falling apart? The most important thing is that my film will make them happy.'

His confidence stems from the hugely popular run of festive films he helped bring to fruition from the early 1980s until the late 1990s. It began with the Aces Go Places series, penned by Wong and comprising three action comedies (starring Sam Hui Koon-kit, Karl Mak and Sylvia Chang Ai-chia) released from 1982 to 1984. Having instilled local audiences with a hunger for cinematic fluff they could spend their lai see money on, Wong and his associates tuned their work, eventually arriving at the perfect formula with The Eighth Happiness (1988, directed by Johnnie To Kei-fung). This formula was revisited in the All's Well series, A Chinese Feast (1995, directed by Tsui Hark) and Ninth Happiness (1998). The key to its success lies in a stellar cast, a plot that revolves around a family of eccentrics (usually an elder brother - invariably played by Wong himself - trying to cope with his crabby wife, and younger siblings struggling with relationship issues more comical than heart-rending), and a final scene in which everybody comes together to wish the audience a Happy New Year.

Wong's creation has left its mark on mainland cinema as well. Feng Xiaogang owes his career to the long line of profitable urban comedies he produced nearly every year since 1997, the latest being the more subtle romance If You Are the One starring Ge You and Shu Qi. The irony is that Feng's films now consistently bring in much more than Hong Kong films do - it's now seen as a major upset if a Feng release doesn't generate more than 100 million yuan (HK$114 million) at the box office - and now it's Wong who's seeking to bring his brand of new year comedy up north with the new All's Well film. As a co-production between his studio, Mandarin Films, and mainland production company Beijing Enlight, the film is set partly in Hangzhou and features three mainland actors (Guo Tao, Yao Shen and Miki Shum).

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