Rene Liu and Louis Koo Starring in New Movie

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By MICHAEL CHEANG

Happy Birthday is one simple love story that tugs at your heartstrings.

Fed up with the endless stream of police and triad dramas, comic adaptations, martial arts flicks and generic horror movies from Hong Kong?

Well, if you’re looking for something simple and romantic, Happy Birthday is the movie for you.

Having starred in many police, triad and movies with serious themes, Happy Birthday’s lead actor Louis Koo finds the film a breath of fresh air.


Rene Liu and Louis Koo star in Happy Birthday

“I feel that as the industry has so many big productions and similar films, it is good to make a movie as uncomplicated as Happy Birthday,” he said during a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Kuala Lumpur recently. The event was also attended by director Jingle Ma and Koo’s co-star, Rene Liu.

The movie revolves around lovers Mimi (Liu) and Nam (Koo), who have been together since their college days. But they part ways when Nam goes abroad.

Every year, on her birthday, Mimi will receive an e-mail from Nam without fail. Then one day, the e-mail is delayed 42 hours.

Based on a short story of the same title by Liu, with screenplay by Sylvia Chang, Happy Birthday was never meant to be more than a simple love story.

Still, it was special enough to convince Ma to return to the romance genre after eight long years.

Although Ma has been busy these past years, with movies like Goodbye Mr Cool, Para Para Sakura and Tokyo Raiders under his belt, he has not filmed a love story since his smash hit Fly Me to Polaris (starring Cecilia Chung and Ritchie Jen), which won three Hong Kong film awards in 1999.

When asked about the long lapse, Ma said that after the success of Fly Me to Polaris, he lost all confidence in making another romance movie.

“The movie was such a big hit that I didn’t know if I could make another romance movie that would be equally good. I wanted to make sure that the next one I made had a good screenplay, and a good story.”

One thing that Happy Birthday has in common with Fly Me to Polaris is that both are love stories that can make viewers cry.

So does he actually set out to make people cry when he makes these movies?

“I don’t. Both movies reflect the way I regard the subject. I feel that when you’re making a movie, the most important thing is to make sure you actually believe in what you are filming,” Ma said.

Happy Birthday turned out to be such a tearjerker – even Koo was reduced to tears when he first watched it.

“I watched it with a group of friends, and all of us ended up crying. One of my friends even ran out of the room so we wouldn’t see him cry,” he said.

For Taiwanese actress Liu, the movie definitely means a lot more since it is based on her own short story. She wrote the story last year during her birthday, after pondering over the significance of birthdays.

“To me, getting a birthday wish is very special compared to getting wishes on other occasions like Christmas or Valentine’s Day,” Liu said, adding that the story was simple because she did not intend to make it into a movie.

“I never expected it to be made into a movie. However, as we filmed, we managed to develop the characters further and made the story more complete.

“When I wrote it, it was from a girl’s perspective of love, so I really didn’t flesh out the male character, or include a man’s perspective.”

Nevertheless, Koo reckons that when it comes to love, everyone has his or her own way of handling it. “Everyone has his or her own way of loving. However, I think the difference (between the two sexes) is that guys always think they understand the girls very well, but the girls always think that the guys never try to understand them,” he said.

Happy Birthday is currently screening in cinemas nationwide.

Source: StarOnline
Credit: AsianFanatics