SFIFF: Heavenly Kings
SFist Mihi goes Cantopop!
The North American debut of Heavenly Kings for the SF Int'l Film Festival premiered at the Castro Theatre Friday night and it must have been a sweet moment for Berkeley-born, Bay Area-raised, local boy Daniel Wu who directed and stars in the movie. After graduating from the University of Oregon, Daniel stumbled into modeling and acting gigs while backpacking through Asia and became a bona fide heart-throb in China.
Heavenly Kings is very reminiscent of the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, only taken to the extreme. Instead of merely spoofing the phenomenon of the incessantly growing boy-band, Cantopop culture in Hong Kong, Wu and his buddies actually formed a boy band (called "Alive") and unleashed their bad vocals and sappy lyrics on the public.
Two of Wu's co-conspirators were also California boys (Terence Yin--a Cal grad, and Andrew Lin who was working in special effects in LA) before both became movie stars in China. The fourth member of the group, the jocular, barrel-chested and slightly tubby Aussie, Conroy Chan, is clearly the Joey Fatone of the group.
The movie is pretty hilarious and even though it seems a stretch to call these men in their 30s "boys" they sure are pretty, so we'll give 'em a pass.
After the jump -- inside the Cantopop music machine, and shrieking Daniel Wu fans!!! Additional bonuses: The word "creamy-dreamylicious" is used, and there's a Tiger Beat-like picture of Daniel Wu.
The making of the boy band, Alive, is interspersed with commentary from real talent from the Hong Kong music industry and the movie is an indictment of corporatization of the music industry. Like Paris Hilton, Wu and his buddies took advantage of their celebrity status and software like Auto-Tune that can turn warbling crooners with delusions of grandeur into pop stars. Until the movie premiered last year, they were put in the uncomfortable position of pretending they were pursing the boy band in earnest for their friends and fans during the year and a half it took to make the film.
Maybe it was just the unseasonably warm weather on Friday, but the funny thing is, the Castro was packed with women and girls tarted-up in short shorts, high-heels and plunging necklines and boys in tight shirts and gelled hair who looked like boy band members themselves. It was hard to tell just who was in on the joke and who just thought the actors were creamy-dreamylicious.
There was an awful lot of squealing and picture taking and at the end of the Q&A there was a crowd of admirers ten deep at the foot of the stage. Were they admiring the masterful yet entertaining indictment of manufactured music or did they just want to genuflect at the altar of celebrity? Who knows and in the end are the two things really so different?
The movie plays again on Friday, May 4 at the Kabuki.