Movie Review: Microsex Office/潮性辦公室

Written, directed by, and starring Jim Chim.

For those three (and other) reasons, f@#$ him.

Lazy, cheap, slapdash,and just plain annoying,   Microsex Office/潮性辦公室 made me sick.

I don’t like theatre to begin with, so knowing that this was originally a play did nothing for my interest.

I dislike Jim Chim for almost every reason imaginable. His metrosexual, faux-intellectual schtick not only doesn’t make me laugh, it irritates me.

You’re not smart, funny, or hip. You’re a self-centered bore who probably should have been beaten as a child and definitely should be beaten as an adult.

The only funny thing in this film is realizing how out of date most of the jokes are, then realizing they’re funny to an audience whose attitudes themselves are accordingly out of date.

This film might make HKers laugh, but it will definitely make non-locals laugh at HKers.

One of the films cheapest moments relies on the average HKers’ lack of film literacy;   **Microsex Office/潮性辦公室’ s slavish regurgitation of a segment from  Woody Allen’s  Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask)is only funny if you have no idea it’s a shoddy re-enactment of something older and better.*

If you haveseen the Allen film, **Microsex Office/潮性辦公室 is only funny because it shows what a shtty writer, director, actor and comic Jim Chim is.*

Jim Chim makes Wong Jing seem like Wong Kar Wai. And by comparison, he is.

While I certainly champion Hong Kong film, Microsex Office/潮性辦公室‘s solipsistic provincialism is simply too much to bear. No one outside Hong Kong could find this funny, and the only thing that made me laugh was the refreshingly honest and open disdain with which Mainlanders are treated.

I am not saying its okay, I’m saying its at least nice to see a film be truthful about HKers’ attitudes toward their new bosses, many of whom will work harder, longer and cheaper and make HKers’ lack of scruples seem saintly by comparison.

But even this, in concert with everything else about the film, just shows HKers in a very unflattering light.

This film will not play in Hong Kong for any real length of time in cinemas, and the DVD will not be available very widely overseas.

So there is a loving and merciful God after all.

***Microsex Office/潮性辦公室* may eventually get downloaded, but not by many people, I can assure you.**

Maybe that’s a good tag line for the writer/director/star: Fighting piracy with thoroughlysh*tty films.

He’s really trying his hardest, I assure you.