Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is Josef Stalin and this is my review of
Patrick Kong's MR & MRS. SINGLE.
In MR. & MRS. SINGLE, Eason Chan plays an
underachieving but loving husband
who gets a job as an assistant
to a powerful businesswoman.
But in order to get, and keep, the job,
he has to pretend to be unmarried.
Marital tensions and devotional ambiguities ensue.
This is hardly new territory for director Patrick Kong;
his films in general are somewhat crass,
showing Hong Kong's young people
to be cynical, manipulative, and trashy.
I'm not saying it's good for young people to be promiscuous, mean little
freaks.
What I'm saying is that in reality some of them are. It doesn't make 'em bad
people.
So when I heard that Patrick Kong was making a film for the China market,
a part of me wanted to see it, just because I wanted to see what would
happen.
Because in China, you can't have trashy promiscuity.
There's no sex in China film. Family-friendly only!
No vampires, no gambling, no bad cops,
no good criminals, no hookers, and no time travel either.
Which is fine, really, because no movies about any of that stuff
have ever been any good. Especially not in Hong Kong. So it's odd then, really,
that my favorite metaphor for pandering to this
sanitized market Up Above is based on fellatio.
With MR. & MRS. SINGLE, Patrick Kong willfully gets on his knees and
engulfs the China Market C*ck energetically. He tickles the Big Red Bozac
and fights back the gag reflex, deep-throating the mainland
in hopes of a copious money shot right down his eager c*ck-gobbling throat.
Now that allegory is disgusting, and I would apologize if
I wasn't such an awful person. But there's a reason for that. I needed to
use an allegory that was its graphic
and as disgusting as MR. & MRS. SINGLE isn't.
Now, you don't need all that stuff to make a good movie, don't get me wrong.
And until I watched this film, really I'd have said all you need for a good movie is
Rene Liu. I watch her movies because she's in them.
Until I watched this movie. Oh, I wish. In all honesty, I really only watched this
movie because Rene Liu was in it. I really couldn't find any other reason.
Sure I like Patrick Kong movies for their more socially
irredeemable qualities. The problem with Patrick Kong films
is that the lurid stuff is the only thing that makes up for the otherwise tepid and
pedestrian film-making.
So if you take away all the nastiness, you get... sh*t. You get an uninteresting story,
about uninteresting people, doing uninteresting things.
And you get milk, too. No, really. Andy Lau could start
shilling for a laxative, and in every movie he could take a sh*t
on camera, in every scene he does, and it would still be less
intrusive and repugnant than the friggin' milk in MR. & MRS. SINGLE.
The... I dunno what they're called.. Mongolian Milk Cooperative...
and it's not that far off... runs a train on this movie.
The lead character is the f@#$in' milk, because it's in just about every scene.
"Does this smell like milk?" On a business trip, in a nice hotel,
the refrigerators in the room aren't stocked with booze. Not even tea.
Nope. Milk. It's all anybody drinks. Except for the beer that the film is also whoring.
Its wildly obtrusive, shameless, and cheap.
Trust me I know about those things. It was hard to hear the dialogue sometimes
over the constant thrum of this film whoring itself.
This film reminds me a lot of FIT LOVER because it turns the emotional climax of
the film
into a product placement. Well f@#$ you too. At least it's not gambling, time-
traveling hookers,
being chased by a corrupt cop that's actually a vampire.
That would be wrong and harmful to children. Making light of homosexuals
apparently is not considered harmful to children in China.
During the film when Rene asks if Eason is "like Danny,"
another character who appears to be gay, Eason and Rene break into great guffaws
of mirth. In China,
f*ggots are funny. "I heard you and the fish laughing." Oddly,
what is not funny, either in terms of humor or strangeness,
are young wives so paranoid, gullible, and
materialistic, that I found myself wanting to kick
the character in the head. I didn't get the impression that any of these traits
were supposed to be flaws or even make her unlikable.
The film seem to be oddly accepting of her frankly
unbearable behavior. Every time she would get upset,
Eason would just take her shopping, and it always worked. Lucky him.
"I have the best wife money can buy." This film obviously wasn't made for
me. I'm not in Patrick Kong's usual Hong Kong audience demographic.
And I sure as f@#$ am not his China demographic either.
And thank God for that. MR. & MRS. SINGLE sucks.
It's a 90-minute excuse to shill clothing and milk,
and it shows almost everything wrong with China friendly film-making.
The future of film is ninety-minute commercials full of sh*t acting, sh*t
writing and sh*t directing, and sh*t. F@#$ you too, China Market.
Really, you shouldn't watch this movie. I don't even wanna link to it
so you could buy it. If you enjoy this review, please let me know.
If you didn't enjoy, it please let me know If you're really bored, let Patrick Kong
know.
Like I'm worried. If you enjoy my reviews, please subscribe.
As this review makes clear, I got a date with an aneurysm
and there's probably not gonna be any milk involved.