By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Yan Yan Mak
Original language title: Da Zhan
Country: hong_kong
Year: 2013
Running time: 97
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235100/reference
Kyle says: “The World Premiere of THE GREAT WAR at the New York Asian Film Festival was for many of us one of the festival highlights. A documentary on the dozen November 2012 concerts by two major groups from the Hong Kong Canto-pop world of the past, Grasshopper and Softhard, the film records in amazing detail a world of music, performance and fans virtually unknown in the U.S. Prior to the ‘Handover’ of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Canto-pop, which was originally a hybridization of Cantonese opera with Western popular music, was dominated by ‘The Four Heavenly Kings’ — Jackie Cheung, Aaron Kwok, Leon Lai and Andy Lau, who were also famous as film and television stars. I became familiar with their work as actors, but knew their concert work only slightly through listening on CD and watching on laserdisc.
“Grasshopper and Softhard were immensely popular groups but appealed to different fan bases. Grasshopper became popular in the early 1990s, appearing on the New Talents Award Show dancing and singing, and being taken under the wing of major Hong Kong star Anita Mui, who helped them perfect their act and appeal to a vast new audience. Softhard were a popular hip hop duo who started out as radio DJs in the early 1990s and began to release their own hyper hip hop albums, specializing in material with a more political edge. The two groups appeared together at Hong Kong Coliseum in a mock musical face-off to determine which band remained the more popular, and then abandoned that format to perform alternately and ‘share the love.’ Fans of concert documentaries may find some of the music very alien, as well as the glitzy way-over-the-top special effects and costumes, some of which look impossible to sing and dance in all over a vast stage. But there is no mistaking the wild enthusiasm of the massive audiences for these twelve concerts. Director Yan Yan Mak includes interviews with performers and audience members, rehearsal scenes, backstage preparations, crews maneuvering the massive technical performance operations, and of course actual onstage scenes and audiences going wild.
“During interviews, members of both groups speak about each other with obvious affection, occasionally making fun of each other, stressing that they have come to understand each other much better, and love each other all the more because of this project, and that they go through this immense amount of work for their audiences. The elaborate dance moves of Remus Choy form the focus of Grasshopper, with his emphasis on uniting the fans thus: ‘I imagine being a Grasshopper fan as a process of going from ‘I’ to ‘We’.’ The edgier Softhard duo does not avoid political taboos, explaining their using comedy to discuss deadly serious issues’ Battling daily is the Hong Kong style,’ says one. Early on, one of the guys explains his facing the future as, ‘I decided to learn Chinese!’ by which he means transitioning from Cantonese to Mandarin, from the 20th century into the 21st. In the end, THE GREAT WAR is a love letter to a major international city in the throes of dramatic changes, a little bit sad but loudly celebratory of its noisy and colorful heritage. 4.5 cats”