AFI Fest Report: Initial D Review
Once again, here's Peter Martin at AFI checking in with a look at this year's big box office winner in Hong Kong: the live action adaptation of popular racing anime Initial D.
------------------------------------------
Automotive porn in the finest sense, INITIAL D will please those who have both a racing fetish and a tolerance for broad Hong Kong-style humor. But perhaps never before has the Internet adage "your mileage may vary" applied to a greater degree.
The film is built around its racing sequences, with cars racing down and around Mt. Akina in Japan. What makes their races distinctive is the "drifting," wherein the drivers slide through corners at the highest rate of speed possible. Directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (the team also responsible for the great INFERNAL AFFAIRS trilogy, among others) jam as many visual tricks as possible into these scenes, with split screens, freeze frames, computer animation, on-screen graphics, etc., and dress them up further with a variety of techno and pop music. The approach may be an effort to remind viewers of the film's anime/manga origins (read much more here), or it may be that Lau and Mak got bored and decided to keep themselves amused by seeing how much candy they could squeeze in.
The framing story features two fathers and their sons. Anthony Wong "drifted" in his youth but now owns a tofu shop and spends most of his time drunk; his son Jay Chou has developed amazing abilities as a driver due to post-midnight daily delivery runs over the mountain. Kenny Bee raced with Wong in younger days but now owns a gas station; his son Chapman To wants to be the "Racing God of Mt. Akina" but is spectacularly unqualified for the position. Chou works at the gas station, too, and his hidden prowess as a driver is eventually drawn out by as he duels professional drivers Shawn Yu, Edison Chen, and Jordan Chan.
INITIAL D generates a fair amount of goodwill simply because it wears its heart - and sense of humor - on its sleeve. This is not meant to be anything more than what it is - a silly racing picture that looks and sounds terrific in a cinema with an appreciative audience.
Andrew Lau and Alan Mak were present for a post-screening Q & A, in which they claim they work together like "twins." Mak said he spent three months in Japan trying to arrange location rights. It took a long time to set up because the Japanese are very concerned with being polite to one another, and what could be more impolite than asking someone to wait in their car while a scene is being filmed? Lau, who is about to start shooting his first US film, contrasted the casting process between Hong Kong and Hollywood: in Hong Kong, you decide who you want, pick up the phone, and five seconds later you're done; in Hollywood, it took three months to finish casting.
INITIAL D is already available on DVD from Hong Kong; Tai Seng picked up US rights and is making it available for festival play, though any kind of formal theatrical release in North America appears unlikely.
Review by Peter Martin.
