Needing You (DTS Version) (Remastered Version) DVD Region All

And it's a good romantic comedy, not because of any hidden depths or secret subtleties, but because its working class romance is just the kind of life-affirming summer smooch that the world needs now - just the kind of thing that there's just too little of. Following two middle-class office workers, the klutzy Kinki (Sammi Cheng) and the Type "A" Andy (Andy Lau), as they fall out of love with their respective partners and into love with each other the movie couldn't have a simpler setup if it tried.

But the lead performances are star turns of the highest order. Sammi manages to pull off quirky without lapsing into annoying, a talent that used to be the sole province of American screen stars of the 1930s. Her character isn't well-rounded, she doesn't have a hidden serious side, and she's certainly not very smart, but that which makes her limited makes her human and over the course of the 108 minutes she unfolds as a fully functioning person, and you can see that while she may not be your speed, she may be somebody's. Andy does some of the best work of his career here, and if Where a Good Man Goes was a continuation of All About Ah Long, then Needing You is a parallel universe version of Moment of Romance. Andy carries the movie almost entirely on his own as it's completely wedded to his point of view - the audience is supposed to fall in love with Sammi at the same speed he does. It's hard to play blah as well as Andy does, but here he manages to portray a character both smug and strangled by his own middle class aspirations without making him boring.

While Fiona Leung is mostly wasted with too much screentime for too little character, Lam Suet, Hui Shui-hung and Raymond Wong all give great character (they each play one note, but they play those single notes well). To and Wai throw in just enough spice (the wilderness banquet scene, the race to the dock scene, the gossip traveling through air vents scene) to let you know that they're paying attention, but beyond that the movie cruises through its paces on autopilot, as graceful and aerodynamic as the Concorde.

Effortless and glib, this is the kind of off-the-cuff picture that made me fall in love with Hong Kong movies in the first place, and it's nice to see people with talent pulling off this kind of well-intentioned organic entertainment without a bit of condescension or arrogance. Let's hope the To/Wai team continue to make comedies this good for the rest of their careers. In a world so full of trouble and strife it's the least they can do to ease our sore backs and heads.

by Grady Hendrix