71 / BD 2 Mad Detective

[Michael Kerpan]

Mad Detective



Last year’s largest grossing film at the Hong Kong box office – the smash-hit Mad Detective – is one of the freshest and most satisfying films from that country in a decade. The traditional Hong Kong police film is turned on its head: the imaginative twist being our hero – Detective Bun (a role created for Lau Ching Wan) – who has the ability to ‘see’ people’s inner personalities or “hidden ghosts”. Breaking new ground and establishing new cinematic rules, Johnnie To’s latest giddily entertaining collaboration with Wai Ka Fai radically raises the level of storytelling in modern film.

Detective Bun (Lau Ching Wan) was recognised as a talented criminal profiler until he sliced off his right ear to offer as a gift at his chief’s farewell party. Branded as ‘mad’ and discharged from the force, he has lived in seclusion with his beloved wife May (Kelly Lin) ever since. Strangely, Bun has the ability to ‘see’ a person’s inner personality, their subconscious desires, emotions, and mental state. When a missing police gun is linked to several heists and murders, hotshot Inspector Ho (Andy On) calls on the valuable skills of his former mentor Bun to help unlock the killer’s identity. However, Bun’s unorthodox methods point to a fellow detective and take a schizophrenic turn for the worse…

Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice, multiple prizewinner at the Asian Film Awards 2008, and winner of Best Screenplay at the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards 2008, Mad Detective has been simultaneously thrilling multiplexes and cerebrally challenging arthouses in the UK and across the world – The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the UK DVD debut and also our first ever Blu-ray.

DUAL FORMAT RELEASE INCLUDING BLU-RAY AND DVD VERSIONS OF BOTH FILMS

• 2.35:1 original aspect ratio
• Carefully created new English subtitles
• Q&A with Johnnie To at the Cinémathèque Française Johnnie To retrospective (Paris, France, March 2008) – 35 minutes
• Exclusive cast interviews shot during the Far East Film Festival featuring Lau Ching Wan, and Lam Suet (Udine, Italy, April 2008) – 14 minutes
• Interview with Johnnie To for the French theatrical release of Mad Detective (France, 4th March 2008) – 21 minutes
• Original UK theatrical trailer
• 16-page booklet containing specially commissioned essay by David Bordwell (Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Blu-ray only special features:

• 1080p, 24fps, state of the art AVC encode, 2.35:1 original aspect ratio
• DD2.0, DD5.1, DTS-HD Master Audio, and Dolby TrueHD soundtracks
• 480p NTSC extras, playable on all machines

[foggy eyes]

Sun taam / Mad Detective

The Dave Kehr has a mini-review of this recent To film -- and likes it.

I'd say I like it even more. LAU Ching Wan is absolutely superb in this as the title character.

No time to do screen captures yet. But eventually some will show up...

I'm sold - if this is even slightly as visually and rhythmically exciting as Exiled it's got to be worth seeing. Here's the YesAsia link for the HK DVD.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm sold - if this is even slightly as visually and rhythmically exciting as Exiled it's got to be worth seeing. Here's the YesAsia link for the HK DVD.

Well -- it's hard to match Exiled for sheer visual panache. This one makes me think (at least a bit) of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. A bit different from To's other recent work.

[peerpee]

MAD DETECTIVE to be released theatrically in the UK in a few months, and then later this year in the MoC Series.

[Awesome Welles]

Interesting. So MoC is diving into very new territory. Will Eureka be amping up it's theatrical arm or was this a special acquisition?

[colinr0380]

Great news! =D>

EDIT: Twitch review

[Michael Kerpan]

MAD DETECTIVE to be released theatrically in the UK in a few months, and then later this year in the MoC Series.

Good luck on this move into new territory.

[sidehacker]

Very cool news. I'd love to see more modern films from East Asia get more luxurious DVD treatment. Psst...Zhimin Sheng's great debut Fu Sheng (Bliss) doesn't have a R2 (or R1) distributor. At least not to my knowledge. Hey, just throwing it out there.

[zombeaner]

Wow, MoC, I didn't see that coming. I just finished watching this yesterday and I thought it was great. Not as good as Exiled, but, then again, it is a completely different kind of film.

[Michael Kerpan]

The nice looking HK DVD has interviews with To and colleagues -- which might well provide a bit of illumination -- but which are unsubbed. So MOC will have the opprtunity to provide some additional value right off the bat.

[Skritek]

As much as I'm surprised and excited about this, I'm wondering why they don't release "The Mission". It's a classic (and I'd say slightly more important than To's latest) and in dire need of a good release.

[foggy eyes]

How about following the "Asian auteur" line and wrangling Syndromes and a Century and Still Life from the BFI?

How impatient of me. Both are on the way in June and (provisionally) July - Still Life will be paired with Dong.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

As much as I'm surprised and excited about this, I'm wondering why they don't release "The Mission". It's a classic (and I'd say slightly more important than To's latest) and in dire need of a good release.

The French release from HK Video looks great. No English subs out of the box, but custom subs are out there.

I feel sort of churlish for bringing this up and certainly don't want to diminish To, but Wai Ka-fai also has a directing credit on Mad Detective. It has some evident ties to earlier To/Wai collaborations (I'm thinking Running on Karma and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts) -- thematically if not tonally -- but given the way Milkyway seems to operate, I'd guess Wai's fingerprints are on a lot of other films he wasn't credited for. I'll add that Wai's Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 -- maybe the downright loopiest thing to ever come out of Milkyway -- is totally MIA on DVD (the awful HK disc has been OOP for ages) and could use a savior of its own.

[Michael Kerpan]

I feel sort of churlish for bringing this up and certainly don't want to diminish To, but Wai Ka-fai also has a directing credit on Mad Detective. It has some evident ties to earlier To/Wai collaborations (I'm thinking Running on Karma and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts) -- thematically if not tonally -- but given the way Milkyway seems to operate, I'd guess Wai's fingerprints are on a lot of other films he wasn't credited for. I'll add that Wai's Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 -- maybe the downright loopiest thing to ever come out of Milkyway -- is totally MIA on DVD (the awful HK disc has been OOP for ages) and could use a savior of its own.

I wonder does Wai do any directing on these dual credited films -- or does he get credit by virtue of writing the script?

I don't believe any of the To-produced Miky Way films from the era of "too Many Ways" are currently availablem are they?

[Skritek]

I don't believe any of the To-produced Miky Way films from the era of "too Many Ways" are currently availablem are they?

I've been trying to find "The Longest Nite" for some time on DVD, but there only seem to be VCDs for sale. Same goes for "Expect the Unexpected" (which I haven't even seen), "The Odd One Dies" and "Beyond Hypethermia" (it was more or less the debut of Milkyway if I'm not mistaken). The DVDs were pretty bad anyway (or so it seems).

[feihong]

...are the Universe DVDs out of print? I have Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, et al from Universe. They suck. These are some of the worst discs ever. Tons of ghosting. Hideous sound mixes. The only thing they get right is the bright color palette. But I saw Longest Nite in a theater, and after that experience the DVD is horrendously disappointing. The disc image looks flat, the way a Robert Altman movie might look (in fact, seeing these on videotape and early DVD first, I believed that Johnnie To movies on the whole were shot in zoomed telephoto, to compress the depth-of-field). But on the big screen, the movie has so much depth it looks to be nearly 3-d. Compression on the DVD absolutely destroys the depth-of-field - which is a shame because the depth is so important to Johnnie To films. Recent DVDs have doen better at replicating the depth of the theatrical experience. Mei Ah's Mad Detective does it very well to my eyes, as does the Megastar release of Exiled.

Mei Ah's old The Odd One Dies disc suffers from all the defects their other discs from that era also suffer from. Poor color separation, ghosting, scratches and blemishes throughout the print, and a vague kind of waffle-print look to the transfer.

Beyond Hypothermia is the innauguration of the Milkyway logo, but in a recent interview with Stephen Teo Johnnie To says that the movie was filmed before the inception of Milkyway, and that Milkyway is only the distributor and not the originator of this film.

Someone needs to get some new DVDs out from this part of the Milkyway era. Too Many Ways to Be No.1 is in desperate need of a good anamorphic transfer, as is A Hero Never Dies (DVDs of this one make it look as though it was shot 40 years ago). Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected have substandard releases that diminish the viewing experience significantly, and The Mission, French DVD nonwithstanding, is basically AWOL. Now that To is starting to appear in print (Taschen puts him in their CINEMA NOW book; Teo has published a monograph on To) and in theaters around the world, this body of work really needs to be reassessed. The fact is that the older films - Longest Nite, The Mission, A Hero Never Dies, etc. - look just as good as the new films, if they get the right presentation.

BTW, I like the redo of the mirror scene in Mad Detective - Godardian self-reference going on there. Was that Wai Ka Fai's influence?

You can see Wai Ka Fai's hand in Running on Karma, in Fulltime Killer, in Mad Detective. The works are a little more gangling, goofy, and experimental. To left to himself usually keeps the aesthetic elements under tighter control. Also, Wai's credited Milkyway films tend to emphasize differing visual perceptions - the most garish examples being Big's karma-visions in Running on Karma, the different versions of the ending story in Fulltime Killer (as well as the constant subjective pictures in that movie of the different characters actions when they are by themselves), and of course the constant visual dissembling of Bun's perspective in Mad Detective (actually, each character is profoundly imbalanced, and I suspected that the varied perspectives within the movie weren't only belonging to Bun). Johnnie To's solo efforts utilize an entirely subjective viewpoint. We never see within the warped perspective of a character in The Mission, Breaking News, Election 1 or 2, or Exiled. Each of these films totes around a rather objective viewpoint that is focused on observing behaviors of social groups. The Throwdown tries briefly to put us into Louis Koo's perspective - mostly in the drinking scenes - but the experiment is wisely abandoned as the movie pulls its main characters into an improvised social group.

I think Wai is largely concerned with the individual's struggle against their own limitations. A great example of this is Andy Lau's epileptic killer in Fulltime Killer. Tok, the fulltime killer projects his quest for fulfillment onto O and makes him his enemy. Part of the reason Sorimachi doesn't bring off O with a very dynamic personality stems from the reductive treatment of O in the story, paired with the grander pathos of Tok's character. We see Tok's limitations and we empathize with him - in part because that limitation is revealed to us and not to the rest of the characters. In Mad Detective, only we as audience members understand the full scope of Bun's ability and sickness - only we understand how the other characters are able to manipulate him - because again we are allowed into Bun's perspective in an intimate way. This intimate involvement with a principal character originates in Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 and it is present in all of the Milkyway films codirected by Wai. In contrast, To's solo films all focus on groups of people, and no character-based discovery is left only to the audience; rather, each character action is always witnessed and evaluated by another character. Even James' rehearsal of his plea to Mr. Lung in The Mission is witnessed by the unseen taxi driver, and James' witness to Mrs. Lung's execution is shared with two anonymous triad members. James' chagrin is seen by the impassive triad junior, who dismisses James' agony with total indifference. By contrast, Mad Detective shows us several scenes of Bun by himself, talking to phantoms.

[Michael Kerpan]

Nice article by David Bordwell about Mad Detective.

[peerpee]

http://www.maddetective.com/

[HerrSchreck]

Nice and gutsy, releasing a film on an arthouse label like MoC the same year of its theatrical street. Something CC has never seemed to have the cojones to do. They always play it safe and wait a few yrs at least to make sure the film acquires the ex post facto patina of a "modern classic" afforded by the passage of at least some time.

But I like when a label has the guts to step up and commit and declare something worthy of sitting alongside the Renoirs & the Kurosawas & the silent classics. It's one of the things I always admired about Kino-- too bad the transfers of their contemporary films are often as Quality as poop from a rat with a cold... bringing to our R1-land attention contemporary masterworks like Himalaya, The Piano Teacher, The Blue Kite, etc.

More like this Nick. Good-O.

[Michael Kerpan]

If this does well, maybe MOC can release (at long last) a proper (English-subbed) DVD of To's The Mission.

;~}

[fred]

If this does well, maybe MOC can release (at long last) a proper (English-subbed) DVD of To's The Mission.

I for one am hoping for a repeat performance with Sparrow, which looks totally amazing. Not to skip ahead to the next film already (it's hard not to at To's pace). Really nice to see this in the line.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Nice and gutsy, releasing a film on an arthouse label like MoC the same year of its theatrical street. Something CC has never seemed to have the cojones to do. They always play it safe and wait a few yrs at least to make sure the film acquires the ex post facto patina of a "modern classic" afforded by the passage of at least some time.

Never say "never" -- Taste of Cherry, Insomnia, In the Mood for Love, George Washington, the Anderson titles, and (cough) Armageddon were released within 18 months of their U.S. theatrical bows and (more or less) two years of their premieres. Two years is still plenty of time to acquire a reputation (Taste of Cherry and ITMFL were arguably "modern classics" right out of the gate), but I think Insomnia and George Washington were fairly gutsy and Mad Detective is probably a safer bet than, say, Ratcatcher.

So what happened? Beats me -- Brand Upon the Brain! might be a hopeful sign, but that's probably a case (like the Bays and the Andersons) of somebody approaching Criterion rather than the other way 'round. I'd like to imagine CC is watching MoC and taking careful notes, but there's not much reason to believe that so far.

[colinr0380]

Nice and gutsy, releasing a film on an arthouse label like MoC the same year of its theatrical street. Something CC has never seemed to have the cojones to do. They always play it safe and wait a few yrs at least to make sure the film acquires the ex post facto patina of a "modern classic" afforded by the passage of at least some time.

Never say "never" -- Taste of Cherry, Insomnia, In the Mood for Love, George Washington, the Anderson titles, and (cough) Armageddon were released within 18 months of their U.S. theatrical bows and (more or less) two years of their premieres. Two years is still plenty of time to acquire a reputation (Taste of Cherry and ITMFL were arguably "modern classics" right out of the gate), but I think Insomnia and George Washington were fairly gutsy and Mad Detective is probably a safer bet than, say, Ratcatcher.

I'd add to The Fanciful Norwegian's list The Life Aquatic which came out the year after it's theatrical release and The Beales Of Grey Gardens which I think was released in December 2006, the end of the year it played theatres. Granted these are both exceptional cases but Criterion has done a few new releases.

I agree though that I would like to see many more recent films getting the Criterion treatment along with the classics. Luckily Britain has Artificial Eye to release some of the more famous modern arthouse films but it would be wonderful to get more films with Criterion extras and contextual essays - at the very least to show that cinema did not just stop producing great films in the 1990s!

[HerrSchreck]

Granted on Life Aquatic (big revelation of an obscure film.. in fact this release like Armageddon are the exact opposite of what I'm talking here-- bringing to light for R1-ers arthouse gems from here or overseas from under the radar), but like I said the other releases had a bit of space gone by, Insomnia (which I loved), the others, all had a couple years between theatrical and dvd. That's not anywhere near theatrical-closing-to-dvd time parameters.

Beales of Grey Gardens was almost a dvd-supplement that toured for a few minutes to slot into the CC and capitalize on Grey Gardens which simultaneously appeared on Broadway... they were selling the thing in the lobby of the show... this was where they made their money. But we all knew that already.

Anyway, like silents, the point generally is that CC dabble in this sort of affair. May this bode well for more like this from MoC.

[foggy eyes]

I would love to see more To (co-sign for The Mission), and agree that this is a bold and exciting new direction - we really need another good UK distributor alongside AE, Soda, BFI & others to pick up the slack with contemporary cinema, and personally I would love to see MoC start filling the gap.

Even by arthouse standards, opening at the ICA usually signals a rather small-scale release - how many theatres are you hoping to reach here, Nick? I'm crossing my fingers that it'll reach my local Picturehouse - provided that City Screen are interested.