China Film Journal

Squat – The Moss via kwout

Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough time to devote to this website. I wrote a review that appeared on Batgwa/Squat, which you can read by clicking on the link above.

moss, shawn yu, violence, hong kong, society, police, cops, China, drama, action

Browsing Eachnet for headlines I came across some news regarding an accidental fire on the set of John Woo’s upcoming historical action film Red Cliff.
One person died and six were injured, all in stable condition and expected to live. I just skimmed the articles but so far there’s been no thorough investigation of the matter (it only happened on June 9), but, according to John Woo, the film will still still premiere in Chengdu on July 3 and hit theaters in the rest of China on July 10, as planned. The person that died was some kind of effects technician. He was only 23 years old.

This self-orientalizing piece of crap has a few good moments. Since they are few and far between, we’ll just tell you what they are.

Li Bing Bing plays the white-haired witch, and has the best lines in the movie, like “all men are liras” (this line rendered in Chinese, as 天下男人都是騙子）, and, as a retort to Liu Yifei’s “I should have killed you, witch” Li Bingbing says something like “I’ll kill you first, bitch!”. We was like “oh shiznit, this movie getting PG-13 all of a sudden!” Li Bingbing also uses her long white hair as a weapon, which is kinda cool.

As for Jackie Chan and Jet Li, well, Jet Li’s English still blows and Jackie Chan’s schtick is amazingly bereft of any originality or inspiration, and we say that because his schtick was actually tolerable back in the 1980s and even through much of the 1990s.

As some might know, his “drunken monk” character is a pale reprisal of his Drunken Master characters. Drunken Master we’ve only seen once, but thought it decent, and Drunken Master II we’ve seen about five times, and would not hesitate to watch again.

But there’s a huge difference when you’re trying to ham it up for the foreign audiences. Take the scene where Jackie meets Jet Li’s character.

Jackie: so where you from? Shandong province? You like the Shandong type. (Jet Li doesn’t reply)
Jackie: so, do you come here often?

You really have to see it to understand how excruciatingly bad this is.

Some other terrible aspects of the movie are the overuse of “jade”, “emperor,” “warlord,” “sparrow,” and other such tropes. The acting sucked across the board, but the fight scenes were ok, even though we, and everyone else on the planet, should really demand that wire-fu be stopped until someone can do something original with it. It’s still a joy watching Jet Li and Jackie Chan move; but that’s something inherent in the aesthetics of kung-fu, which Jet Li and Jackie Chan just happened to “inhabit” at certain times and in certain scenes in this movie.

There were some amusing subtitle botches: when Jackie says “if I don’t drink I will perish,” the Chinese subtitles read “If I cannot get water I will drink my piss,” and the scene, or at least the subtitles, keep playing on the “piss” joke. We wonder if it was an honest mistake, since “perish” cna sound like “piss”, especially to someone that might have failed the Level 4 English exams. On the other hand, maybe the subtitlers were just taking the piss out of exasperation. Who knows.

Your time would be better spent masturbating, that is, if you were willing to masturbate for 94 minutes!

Fans of French film might be interested to know that Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 classic Le Cercle Rouge (starring Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand) is being remade in Hollywood by none other than Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To.

What’s even more weird is that Chow Yun-fat and Orlando Bloom are attached to the project.

Malaysia’s The Star reports that in Chen Shi-Zheng’s Dark Matter the film about the Chinese physics grad student in the US that gets homicidal. The production lost their first actor, which is when Meryl Streep suggested to the director that they get Quinn instead — but the catch was that he was almost too good-looking and charismatic for a physics professor. We guess they were looking for someone more shriveled, perhaps paraplegic?

The Taiwanese film What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?(情非得已之生存之道) (dir. by Doze Niu) originally had a cameo role by Chinese actress and all-around hottie Zhou Xun (周迅). She even donated some of the money she won from the Golden Horse acting prize to the production, but her part was, in the end, deleted from the film. We have not seen the film on DVD here yet, but it seems it was just released in Taiwan on April 11, so might not make it here you know, for another three hours or so.

Ang Lee is coming out with an autobiography this October, and some reports claim that in this book, Lee states that although many women seem to like his films and admire the depictions of women in the films, that he doesn’t really understand or have much interest in women. We’d probably have to read more of the book to know what context this statement occurs in (there’s more in the report itself, but you’d still want to read the entire book), but we’re sure that this will provide more proof for those into the Chinese rumor mill who believe that Lee is a closeted homosexual.

None of the recent wuxia martial art epics can seem to avoid the the endemic schlockiness of the genre, so as a viewer we are just content to find one that isn’t altogether too offensive in this regard. We think that Three Kingdoms manages to do that. There’s some good action, though nothing you haven’t seen before — the hail of spears and arrows, the beheaded enemies, the evil vixen (Maggie Q) playing pipa while men are being slaughtered, and of course, the de rigeur moral message about the evils of war and humanity’s inability to end violence with violence.

The film is based on one of the classics of Chinese literature, The Three Kingdoms> (三国演义), and focuses mostly on the
character of Zhao Zilong (赵子龙), one of the legendary warriors in the book. There’s nothing to deep or particularly memorable about his journey from being a nobody in the army to becoming legendary heartthrob general, but Andy Lau does a competent enough job of it, even though his perfect teeth don’t really jibe with the character.

There are great actors like Ti Lung, and then there are not so great actors, like Maggie Q, Van Ness Wu (he of F4 boy band fame), and Sammo Hung.We’ve been reading some reviews, and most of them seem to say something alone the lines of what we read in Cinema Online:

With “Kingdoms”, you feel that it could have been a five star film if a few things were improved here and there. Before John Woo’s “Red Cliff” hits the screens, it’s still a good bet for almost-there entertainment. One thing though – Vanness Wu should never be in the same picture as Lung Ti. Harshly said, boy band members have no place in war epics, at least not one with Shaw Brothers’ icons in it.

Twitch has a slightly more critical view of the film:

These days with so many period epics on the way or already released, you can literally create a checklist for their requisites. Beautiful costumes: check. Stylish weapons: check. Breathtaking landscapes: check. Armies of thousands: check. Exciting martial arts and action sequences?

This genre has really gone the way of “all style and no substance” which is somewhat ironic, given that the whole reason why the Three Kingdoms is such a classic in the Chinese world is not just because it’s a good yarn, but because it’s moving. The characters are moving. Their relationships, their words, deeds, and actions are memorable. People know so much of these stories by heart. That’s a challenge to any filmmaker, so believe us that we aren’t trying to slag off this director as not worthy of the challenge; few directors could be. However, you’d think that character development would not be as short-shrifted as it regularly is.

Fans of wuxia and Three Kingdoms might like this one, the rest of you should not encounter any existential crisis if you miss it.

So you might have heard that Jackie Chan recently went to Australia to bury his father, who died of cancer at the age of 93.Well, what you might not have known is that Jackie Chan’s father Charlie, aka Fang Daolong, had a whole other family (Jackie’s mother was his second wife) that he lost touch with and then had to leave behind in 1949. There was an article called “Enter the Parents” written a few years ago that gave some of the background. The video above covers some of the same ground, but was made more recently, as it mentions the thorny issue of why Jackie doesn’t want to get in touch with his half-brothers Fang Shisheng and Fang Shide, especially when their father died and there was a funeral to attend. The interviews also broach the question of whether or not they are revealing their identities so openly now in hoping of getting some of Jackie’s (and his father’s) money. To this question they reply that it would be a lie to say that they aren’t hoping for some help (university tuition, jobs for the young uns) but are NOT coveting Jackie’s wealth. The video is in Chinese.