Hu die fei (2008)

User Rating:

4.9/10   

Director:

Johnnie To

Writer:

Ivy Ho (screenplay)

Release Date:

10 January 2008 (Hong Kong)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Tagline:

To Love & Cherish...In Life & Death.

Plot:

A woman is revisited by the ghost of her ex-boyfriend, three years after a car crash took his life. |

Plot Keywords:

Ghost | Car Crash | Beautiful Woman | Lawyer | Butterfly

Cast

Vic Chow	...	Zheng Jing Dong (as Vic Chou)
Bingbing Li	...	Foo Yan Kai (as Li Bing Bing)
Maggie Siu	...	Ms. Chan (as Maggie Shiu)
Suet Lam	...	Yan's Roomate (as Lam Suet)
Roy Cheung	...	Dr. Yuen
Yi-kei Fong		(as Cecilia Fong)
You-Nam Wong	...	Hui Luk Wo (as Wong You Nam)
Mia Yam		(as Mia Yan)
Jimmy Fu
Ronald Yan	...	Doctor
Wai Leung Hung		(as Hung Wai Leung)
Wai Ling Chan		(as Chan Wai Ling)
Rachel Chan
Cody Wong
Queenie Wong

Also Known As:

Flying Butterfly (Hong Kong: English title) (literal title)
Linger (Hong Kong: English title)
Wu dip fei (Hong Kong: Cantonese title)

Country:

Hong Kong

Language:

Mandarin | Cantonese | English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Hong Kong:IIA

Company:

Sundream Motion Pictures

Soundtrack:

ONLY MEMORY

An Effective Alternative to Waterboarding

This film is painfully, offensively bad. I was stunned that this was a Johnny To film, since he's a director of no small talent when it comes to crime dramas and gangster films. But clearly, romance is not his forte.

The script was the kind of amateurish glop you'd expect from a smitten teenage girl. Void of real drama, the attempts at character development were silly and pointless. Most scenes consisted of endless discussions between the leads about what might have been, or emotionally overwrought reactions to events. The dialog was agonizing to experience, and in constant violation of the "show, don't tell" rule of writing by having characters speak aloud lines that should have been subtext.

And then there's the music; the ugly, ugly music. Imagine drowning in sweet green cough syrup, choking on mouthfuls of saccharine while your brain is numbed into a surreal dextromethorphan haze. It's awful beyond description, wielded like a sonic sledgehammer in every single scene as a desperate attempt to manufacture emotion where none exists. Sawing one's ears off with a steak knife is the only appropriate response.

If you see a copy of this film, run screaming in the opposite direction as if it were a shattered vial of the Ebola virus -- exposure WILL cause you to vomit blood.