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Subject: dark wit - мрачный юмор?? Как в таком контексте лучше перевести dark wit? Заранее спасибо.
Still, A Mob Story's offbeat details, dark tone and casual nihilism are effective. A lot of dialogue in comprised of questionably affecting jiang hu discussion, but at other times, the film displays a satisfying dark wit. One mob boss casually tortures people while a little girl plays hopscotch nearby, and people are violently attacked and killed with almost banal regularity. The attacks hurt too; A Mob Story has violence to spare, resulting in severed heads, chopped off fingers, slashed throats, a knife to the groin, and a few dozen whacks to the head with a brick. Yau serves up the violence in appreciably brutal style, and does his best to work with his HD-video image. Unlike Billy Chung, director of the similarly produced Undercover (both films were produced by Andrew Lau as a part of his Fortune Star HD-video project), Yau uses various techniques to make sure the video image doesn't distract. The effort helps; casual viewers may not notice or care that this is a shot-on-video feature.
However, casual viewers may not care, period. A Mob Story isn't the most crowd-pleasing motion picture, as it seldom does anything seductive with its dark material. Despite Yau's efforts at making this a non-video experience, A Mob Story doesn't possess much cinematic verve, and is weighed down by its unfocused screenplay and sometimes shoddy acting. However, more discerning viewers may enjoy the dark wit and the odd details. Yau packs the film with random ideas and characters, like a mahjong player lacking a limb, or an encounter with a is-he-dead-or-not crime boss. The oddities give the film a color and dimension not seen in more straightforward films, and help make it more than just another Hong Kong gangster film. On the whole, A Mob Story is a nice little surprise, and manages to be much more effective than similar films of its low-budget ilk. The film may not add up to all that much, but given Hong Kong Cinema's recent lack of quality output, A Mob Story is easily better than what we usually get. (Kozo 2007)
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