Hacker Cinema
Infernal Affairs
無間道
2002 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Alan Mak Siu-fai, Andrew Lau Wai-keung
Chan Wing Yan, a young police officer, has been sent undercover as a mole in the local mafia. Lau Kin Ming, a young mafia member, infiltrates the police force. Years later, their older counterparts, Chen Wing Yan and Inspector Lau Kin Ming, respectively, race against time to expose the mole within their midst.
6 positive4 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
The Scorsese movie "The Departed" is both a remake of a film made in Hong Kong ("Infernal Affairs") and a semi-realistic depiction of the Boston Winter Hill Gang led by Bulger.
Misleading ads for movies is an age old problem. For the longest time, the poster on IMdb for the movie Infernal Affairs (remade in the US as The Departed) prominently featured a woman holding a gun. She isn’t in the movie and to this day I still don’t know who the hell she is. [0]
[0] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTk5ODc1Nzg2N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDk2Mjg5NA@@._V1_.jpg
The most popular K-Dramas are the formulaic 1 guy and 1 girl, with a 3rd person for a love triangle. Don’t worry though, true love wins and the 3rd wheel finds someone as well. Eg: Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha.
CCP would heartily endorse these brainless plots. Consumers would eat it up.
Not everything needs to be Infernal Affairs. The vast majority of Korean TV isn’t Infernal Affairs. I will admit that China could never make Parasite, but that’s ok. The metric we’ve chosen is popularity, not Oscars.
Side note I’m a bit sad that Hong Kong can’t make Infernal Affairs type of movies anymore. It would show the Party in a bad light.
It's one of the very few movies I chose to sit down and watch but had to stop after just a few minutes.
The others would be The Departed — I loved the original Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, but I couldn't bear to watch more than a few minutes of The Departed. And the David Lynch Dune.
Usually I tough it out, L.A. Confidential, for example, I thought was awful, but saw it through to the end. I couldn't believe that the same director (Curtis Hanson) could have made such an awful (though, stangely, lauded) film and also the absolutely amazing Wonder Boys (and the servicable The Hand That Rocks the Cradle).
This brought memories back for me, years ago there was a small VHS store that stocked a lot of these. Looking at there catalog is like a trip down memory lane. List of there titles I saw many years ago. (Pretty much all great movies) A Tale of Two Sisters Audition Battle Royale 1 + 2 Chaos Dead Or Alive 1 + 2 Gozu Happiness of the Katakuris, The Hard Boiled Infernal Affairs: The Trilogy Lady Vengeance Oldboy R-Point Ring Trilogy Save the Green Planet Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance Tetsuo: The Iron Man Visitor Q
As mentioned in the article a lot of people in the UK were introduced to a certain brand of Asian cinema via 'Tartan Asia Extreme'.
I was no different. As a student I'd venture into the tiny world cinema section of HMV and flick through the titles looking for anything that had the 'TARTAN ASIA EXTREME' branding on it.
So many fantastic movies in the collection [1]. Oldboy, Battle Royale, Dark Water, Hard Boiled, Ring, Infernal Affairs, Audition, etc.
1: https://www.benoakley.co.uk/tartan-asia-extreme
Hmm. I know that propaganda and originality don't go well together, but strangely I've always felt that Chinese cinema got it right. I may be biased as I come from an Asian family. For sure they're different from Western cinema, most notably it's usually less cynical and multifaceted, and more linear and nationalistic. But there's such an adventurous spirit (those martial arts sequences help!) that I can look past all that. Perhaps because I'm Asian too, those anti-colonial sentiments are also more easily related.
But I don't know, maybe their creative machine really is running out of steam. I haven't really watch much recently (currently on a Scandi kick!) But I do recommend you to explore the classics like Once Upon a Time in China and Infernal Affairs.
Thanks for checking it out!
To be fair, Infernal Affairs is available on Amazon and as a disc Netflix will mail you. The optimist in me says this is where a site like this can do some good. Assuming viewers aren't wed to a particular platform, being able to see where a movie is available instead of searching iTunes, Amazon, etc. individually could make things easier.
As for competing with movies.io, my reaction to their site was "that's really cool - it's a shame there isn't anything like that for those of us who don't torrent", so I did my best to build one. I know right now it only works in the US, but hopefully working elsewhere is something I can add down the road. I don't really know enough yet about how to do that.
I disagree!
The Departed was based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. It has a prequel as well as a sequel too. I don't understand Chinese and had to rely on subs.
But, I had watched Infernal Affairs before Departed came. Martin Scorcese was awesome, Walhberg and Damon are my favs, but still, I liked the original more than the Hollywood adaptation.
I think you watched Departed first and then the original, which would have caused the original to look inferior with the Hollywood one.
Great article, though, I take issue with this tangent:
"James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed"
The inspiration for that character is the original movie, Infernal Affairs, which The Departed is a remake of. They may have bleneded some features of Bulger into that character, but that doesn't make him the inspiration.