The first segment begins with a professor enlisting the help of one of his students to help him find out why his love life with his wife is faltering. Then ensuing interviews reveal that each partner has a different interpretation of a night of romance; their own discomfort about talking about the details of their love life causes the student to use an anonymous couple to portray this relationship in bed in trouble. Yet they never talk to each other about it, just to the student filming the interviews. Amusing.

The second segment with recently scandalized Edison Chen takes place in a night club. Edison’s character explains to the young woman beside him, either bragging or hoping to impress his target, that he is a model citizen because his good deed, his contribution to humanity, is that he washes clumps of feces, stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl above the water line, away with his urine. He claims to be the cleaners’ guardian angel because of this service. Odd.

The third segment Eason Chan is horny and he wants his girlfriend? Roommate? [I couldn’t tell] to give him fellatio. He finally convinces her to pleasure him on Christmas day. He then scours calendars for other holidays so he can get his nut off. When he runs out of Chinese holidays he scours the world for more holidays. Events turn humorously tragic and the word ‘gag’ takes on a double meaning as a means to the joke at then end of the segment. It is one of the funnier segments
In the fourth segment is an educational film from another planet. Yes, this film outlines how this planet got its name. A magazine has a contest which will give away 100 rights to stars in the solar system. The owner of those rights gets to name their star. A boy likes a girl in his class but he does not meet the requirements of contest rules. Still, he writes to the editor of the magazine and makes his case. So overwhelmed by this boy’s act of love they award him a star and he gives it to the girl that he loves. She in turn gives it a rather silly name and I don’t know why the planet agreed to call themselves by it. It is a head-scratcher.

The fifth segment tells the story of two high school friends; one deemed popular, the other not. They are partnered up for singing competition and the more popular one sees it as some act of charity. From there the story follows the paths of their lives and the turns they take. Both lives take similar turns and in some sort of object lesson for the viewers the one perceived to become less successful in life achieves just the opposite and vice versa. Nice, but a bit obvious.

Almost there. The sixth segment follows Chapman To, presumably someone high profile or even famous who gets calls when new call girls come to town. He drops everything for his next clandestine meeting with a new girl. They do the deed, it is all very formal and business like, and then this moment of humanity comes as his character tries to program her cell phone to accept a calling card. This unexpected moment of human shortcoming and awkwardness creates a connection between the two. Seeing the nude backside of Chapman is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

And finally, in a segment that really sums up the whole feel of the film in general, Shawn Yue is a junior hitman in training who is hired to carry out a hit. This segment began with a rather clever and amusing exchange between the client and his contact, played by director Feng Xiaogang. His character explains that the client is entitled to a free hit because of his loyal and frequent business. The catch is that this hit is part of their Junior Hitman Training Program and will be carried out by a Hitman In Training. Enter Shawn Yue who shows promise in his career choice but is still inconsistent. He goes to carry out his hit but then takes a hit from the bong of his target. He eventually gets his wits about him and is about to complete the hit when his alarm goes off. His shift has ended. He turns around and walks away.

The End Result? Some vignettes are better than their counterparts. Each one may be well and fine on its own but as a whole they lack a cohesiveness that would have made Trivial Matters a great movie instead of a good one. Perhaps Pang got caught up in his own material as he never quite delivers a film that is accessible to the whole rather than the few. The end result is a good film that is sadly uneven. Some of it is good. Some of it is great. Some of it is just plain bewildering why it is there at all. Technically Pang is as sound as a hound. At the least Trivial Matters looks really good. The lighting is good. His shot composition is also good. But it is the subject material that must ultimately be engaging for the audience and at any moment an audience member can be lost in that uneven flow of content and context. Still, it is one of the better films I have seen come out of Hong Kong in the last year.