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Set in a suburb of dot com hot San Francisco, Mike (Leon Lai) plays a shallow young computer-head obsessed with gadgets and games (shades of Aaron Kwok in 2000AD) and getting laid (not at all like the virginal cyber-boy Aaron plays). Immature and self-obsessed he picks up single mom cab driver, Maggie, while slumming one night and they shag in the back seat of her cab. The rest of the movie is dedicated to "will she/won't she" sexual vacillation.

Maggie and Leon are at their best, and Richard Ng as Leon's gay foster father brings some salt to this oversweet confection. Andrew Lau serves himself well as his own cinematographer and it's all good, clean fun except for a nagging sense that something's not quite right.

Ethnic identity elided by capitalism, generic world music stapled to the soundtrack, and constantly obsessed with the look of high speed economics, but not their content, the movie is an alarmingly shallow ride, that plays on that very shallowness in an attempt to both criticize and glamorize it at the same time. Inadvertently, this is a pretty accurate picture of the shallow dot com economies currently blossoming like morning glories in New York and San Francisco. The result is a horror movie of late stage capitalism.

Maggie's cab bears an advertisement for StarEast, one of the producers of the movie, and Leon's hip, deconstructed mansion (which the movie spends most of its time idolizing) suddenly gets recast as a stand-in for the big bad corporate world. Wealth liberates these nasty dot commers from morals as they slink in and out of each others' beds, but when it becomes convenient the corporate world they've created becomes a big blue meanie. When they get in trouble, their situation is portrayed as if the world owes them a bailout because they're young and sexy.

As Leon and Maggie lie on his 350 count sheets in a postcoital glow, Maggie tells tales of woe about her lifestyle of photogenic poverty, and Leon let's her know that what's stopping him from being a nice guy is that he just doesn't have enough money. And that's the bottom line in this flick: despite some knee-jerk old schoolisms (money can't buy you love), money is generally regarded as an aphrodisiac and a relationship cure-all.

That said, I actually liked the movie. For all its new economy "rah rah" boosterism, it never once can be accused of taking itself seriously. Everyone knows they're making a lightweight romance, even if the actors (Maggie Cheung, especially) perform with realistic sharp edges on their characters (Leon is a workaholic control freak who never grew up; Maggie is a passive aggressive with a chip on her shoulder). The movie comes across as horror not because it paints an unrealistic picture of its setting, but because it does.

by Grady Hendrix