Gorgeous (Bo li zun, Bor lei jun [Glass Bottle])
A romantic action comedy starring Jackie Chan (in his first romantic role). Chan plays Chan, a rich guy who gets some female action every now and then. Shu Qi is Ah Bu, the Taiwanese country bumpkin who arrives in Hong Kong after receiving a message in a bottle from a guy named Albert, hoping to find her true love. Unfortunately, Albert is gay (played hilariously by Tony Leung Chiu-wai). When Chan's life is in danger, Ah Bu shows up in the nick of time with a boat and they speed away. Ah Bu falls in love, Chan is too much of a playboy to fall in love. Then the movie goes into how Ah Bu tries to make him fall in love with her (with some help from her new friend, Albert), interspersed with heavy action scenes and some light romantic moments. The film would've been fine without the action, namely the boxing scenes, but then it wouldn't have been a Jackie Chan film, ne? The last boxing scene just came out of nowhere -- it was bizarre and stupid. And to have found a dude, especially a white dude, smaller than Jackie Chan, is a real find. Anyway, this tiny white dude boxes with Chan, not once, not twice, but two times! (I know what I said.) It finally ends on a happy note, and then I exclaimed in delight that this farce was over.

First of all, the subtitles were barely translations. They hardly exceeded three to five words everytime a line came out, and they were not literal translations. All right, I'm not looking for word-for-word LITERAL translations, but better ones! Example: Chan said in Cantonese, "We have a meeting," or something to that effect, but in the sub, it's just, "we don't have time." But I guess it doesn't matter much if you don't speak Cantonese (after all, only about 10 million do). So I forgive the subtitles, but not the movie itself. Okay, the comedic scenes were humorous, the romantic scenes were sort of mushy and sweet, but to add a third genre, ACTION, makes absolutely no sense. All right, maybe if he was kicking some ass because Ah Bu was slightly in distress or some rabid dog was hounding her (ooh, punny), I understand because it pertains to the love story, but the "action" scenes focus on Chan and his rival, continuing for about 10 minutes, making you forget Ah Bu was in the story. The action scenes were good themselves and at least there were cameos here too, including one with Stephen Chow (AWESOME) and a scene where Ah Bu's friend (Richie Ren) from back home comes to Hong Kong to try to find her but is mistaken to be HK star Chow Yun-fat (with hilarious results). ***
DVD: **** Highlights ~ Making-of featurette (actually a nice long one, not a five minute one), Stars' Files (where I immediately discovered Shu Qi did a "nude photo album" -- not that I was surprised, but I didn't know), Stars' interviews (only Jackie Chan and director), press conference (which I don't think had anything to do with the movie, but rather something to do with the VCD business, I dunno, I wasn't paying much attention and some of the words got too technical for me to understand the first time around), "MTV" (two music videos of the theme song, one in Cantonese and the other in Mandarin), and "Coming Attractions" (trailers, notably for Rush Hour and King of Comedy). A very nice HK release of a DVD, surprise surprise! There is also an American release of this, but I don't know what the deal with that is (above picture). And lastly, Hong Kong's tendency to give Chinese and English titles that don't have anything to do with each other ("Glass Bottle" in Chinese, but "Gorgeous" in English) finally proves to be a shitty idea!!!! In the making-of, they said they decided to name it "Bor Lei Jun" to keep it with the glass bottle theme (a message in a bottle is what sends Ah Bu packing to HK). In the subtitles, it said they decided to name it "Gorgeous," to keep it with the gorgeous theme. Even non-Cantonese speakers watching these subs would know this would not make sense at all!!
Recommended? Hell no. Okay, that was mean, I gave it some points on the good parts, but honestly Jackie, stick to two genres. Action comedy, okay. Action romance, maybe. But a romantic action comedy should be ruled against by the U.N. (unless it's good -- and this wasn't good in the triple-genre sense).