In view of the poster of 'Ordinary Heroes', you will find it difficult to attract you as it looks like B&S's 'I Shoot Myself'. The main selling point of 'Ordinary Heroes' can be Rachael LEE Lai-chu and Anthony WONG Chau-sang, as well as Ann HUI, the director. The selection of 'Ordinary Heroes' as the opening movie for the current Hong Kong International Film Festival has given it as the main selling point.

The story of 'Ordinary Heroes' is extrated from the real experience of a group who strikes for others' interest by forms of demonstration. The word 'Ordinary' means that these group of people are ordinary, like you and me but they are heroes as we respect them. The plot presents the development ofthese pressure groups from late 70s to 90s from 'Boat Family' to 'Boat People's Wives' and then union strikes to 4th June incident. KAM (Anthony WONG), a father of a church is trying to help others while YAU Yue-foon (TSE Kwan-ho) also does the same thing but in another approach. Rachael LEE and LEE Kan-sang are representating the groups who are introduced in these pressure groups during the interim.

From the beginning of the caption of the movie, it is said that the movie is from the real experience of a guy in pressure group. This tells us that the focus of the movie is to let audience knowin how difficult the pressure groups in fighting for what they want. The approach Ann HUI has used is to present the main incidnets, which is almost the ony way of presentation.

By nature, the movie should be cool to present the scenes if the main incidents to the extent that audience can be impressed even though they are not born in that period. Ann HUI has put efforts in presenting it natural. For example, when describing the days in the subway during typhoon. You can see how these groups react for everything. However, the movie seems not impressive enough to let people from different ages understand the situations at that time. I consider if the plot can have more context on setimental feelings would make the whole movie more concrete and hence be easier to empathise audience

Concerning the topic of union strikes and pressure groups. Ann tried to write in several dimensions. The first dimension is the group by Anthony WONG Chau-sang who would follow his own style and rule for what he wants. In the movie, it seems that the group is hard but not very effective. The second dimension is by YAU (TSE Kwan-ho) who finnaly found the only way to fight is to join the constituition but finally being addicted to power and away from its origin.

In terms of peroformance, I consider Anthony WONG Chau-sang has done a good job. WONG in this film cast as a father from Italian. This character by nature limited the performance of Anthony WONG as he can't use the intonation to present his feelings. However, his facial expressions does supplement his verbal disability in the character.

In short, 'Ordinary Heroes' seems to have what exactly its Chinese Title -- Thousand Words. Thousands words for presentation. However, due to running short of the length, I consider the topic can be better than what we are having now.