one mile short of perfection

This is one of the few movies that makes you sigh in quiet happiness at its openning credit. Couple of scenary shots, a gloomy but serene suburb, then room in on the after-snow streets, black coats in the otherwise white world, a boy on bicycle, some celtics melody and you are hooked. So you hold a lot of expectation very early on, which is a dangerous thing for the director as well as the audience really. But ten minutes into the movies you are re-assured that no matter what the story line is, there will at least a lot of beautiful moments here and there all the way through. And yes, the first thing you'll say about this movie is it IS beautiful, in a morbid kind of way of course . In certain sense, it is a lot like "Amelie", along the way you kept stumbling on, every time with a nice little surprise, silent,perfectly constructed scenes, perfectly fit to the mood of the story. Even though somehwere in your subconscience there is a constant reminder that all these are cooked scenes, you are all too ready to forgive and forget the unatrualness and indulge urself in this make-believe beauty at least for the moment.

The scene that touches me most is actually not a scene of the movie per se. It is actually a picture supposedly taken by the killer/photographer played by Judy Law. It's a dead body half sit besides a stairway. The compostion is absolutely perfect, and it fill your heart, strangely, not with sadness but kind of strange happiness, to realize pure beauty can be reflect in such a morbid subject.

Unfortunately, with all these endeavours for perfection, the movie kind of lost its context and become just a collection of scenaries. Again i wanna say this is the most elaborated gangster movie i've ever seen, the constant rain, the jazz of the 30s ', the single drop of sweat elegantly, painfully slowly winding down the sideburn of the masculine face in a close-up shot, the perfect light from every angle, even every dead body fell to the ground in a perfectly pre-designed position. Unlike "Amelie", there is almost nothing spontanous about this movie, so u can't really get into the story and root for the good guy seeking a revenge nor root against the bad guys who are largely just a concept anyway. With all the blood smear over the wall and ppl dropping dead all the time, there is not much flesh and bone in this movie.

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