Do all undercover cops like rooftops?
No cinema visits this week.
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Odd that it takes Martin Scorsese 50 more minutes in The Departed (2006) to retell the same story that takes a compact 100 minutes in the Hong Kong original.
Infernal Affairs II (2003)
I’ve only very rarely felt terribly sleepy while in the cinema watching a film. The one that really sticks in my memory is my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) on its re-release around the time of The Sacrifice (1986). For those who don’t know, Stalker, while obviously a classic and a film I both respect and admire tremendously, is awfully slow in pace and it got the better of me to the extent that I drifted off several times during it. If he ever knew how many cinemagoers he sent off into dreamland, I like to think Tarkovsky would have been pissed off in that doomladen Russian way of his. The one other time I succumbed to some five minute naps was during an all night screening at the Brixton Ritzy, but I think I can be forgiven this one as it was an all night quadruple bill. Incidents since then have mostly revolved around other people falling asleep during movies, particularly old, crusty-looking dudes who may have been using the cinema as a noisy motel for some daylight kip time. I really don’t understand how it’s possible to get any sleep at all with the aggressive 5.1 sound of a Hollywood blockbuster banging away at you. And yet it is. What I’m trying to say here is that I was feeling awfully sleepy throughout this viewing of Infernal Affairs II and this is precisely the kind of film that it’s a really bad idea not to be able to give your full attention to.