All's well, ends well

All's Well, Ends Well is an archetypal Hong Kong movie that inevitably prompts wordplays about archness, archives and stereotypes. It's a classic Chinese New Year movie, designed solely to appeal to local families seeking holiday happiness through shared laughter while watching local movie stars having silly fun together.

Bustling along with deliberately ham acting, slapstick, Cantonese wordplay, and references to contemporary Hong Kong and Hollywood icons, it's an evergreen example of the traditional Hong Kong movie version of the English variety theatre's Christmas tradition, the pantomime. Produced by Raymond Wong, it has been followed by his four sequels (including those for the Chinese New Years of 2009 and 2010). In several ways, it can also be seen as the Hong Kong equivalent of the UK's Carry On comic series, without the ogling crudity.

The 1992 movie's lead actors became even starrier stars during the 90s. Then-handsome young romantic actor Stephen Chow first flaunted his manic comic nonsense in it, and exuberant Maggie Cheung was his ideal sparring partner as a movie buff madly lost in her make-believe world of Ghost and Pretty Woman. Not yet a pop superstar, the late Leslie Cheung camped it up wildly as gay florist entangled with a very butch Teresa Mo. Beating them all at the comic game, Sandra Ng showed the screen-stealing talent showcased so brilliantly later in her Golden Queen triumphs. She returned, less memorably, to the local screen for the 2010 version.

The productivity of its acting talents two decades was prodigious, and clear evidence of the hyper-activity of the Hong Kong movie industry, then the world's third-largest, surpassed globally only by the States and India. In this quickie movie production, there are more than enough funny visual jokes, and clear enough subtitles, to delight non-Cantonese movie-goers.