China Film Journal

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!

Think Rocky V, but during the Olympics. Jackie Chan, 54, will engage in some kind of fighting? boxing? kung fu? exhibition against Tszyu, 38, a welterweight boxer from Russia and former Olympian. However, as this is China’s Olympics, we suspect that, like in the movies, Chan will triumph over the white man in the final, climactic scene. If he’s in top form, he might be able to rescue some Ming vases and other priceless artifacts of Chinese culture at the same time! The exhibition has been agreed upon by both parties and would be set for August 22 or 23, depending on whether or not it gets final IOC approval.

Ang Lee’s next film is going to be a film adaptation of the book Taking Woodstock, a autobiography/memoir by Eliot Tiber, one of the guys that organized that world-shaking festival in the summer of 69. It’s also the story of a young, Jewish, and (then) closeted gay kid finding his way in the late 1960s gay scene of Greenwich Village, where he hobnobs with with artists and cultural icons. Lee said that Tiber walked up to him somewhere when he was promoting Lust, Caution in the US and handed him the book. He found it so moving that he decided it would become his next film project.

Last but not least, Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯）is the only Chinese film director to make it into the official competition at Cannes, with his new film The Story of 24 City (24城记）about the changes in the lives of factory women in the 1970s.

• Ang Lee, in a recent trip to Vancouver BC, talks with the mayor and Vancouverites about a proposed bill that would deny tax money to filmmakers whose content does not reflect Canadian values. On a recent trip to LA, Lee was asked about how new “President” Ma Yingjiu (馬英九）of that province which has been, is, and always will be part of China, will affect the movie bidness there, to which he replied that this is just a start and that there’s a long road ahead for the Taiwanese movie industry. To really flourish, Taiwan cannot rely on their market alone, but have to consider the mainland Chinese market.
• The Forbidden Kingdom, that first and but unfortunately not last collaboration between Jet Li and Jackie Chan, has opened in North America. Some people thought it sucked.
• SARFT states that China’s film policy will continue to improve and move forwards. (Sorry, we were feeling link starved).
• A blog post brings up a point that we had heard about months ago regarding Jia Zhangke’s movie The Story of 24 City 《24城记》, which is that the Chinese name of the film is identical to the name of a housing development (24 City), whose developer is also one of the film’s investors.
• Speaking of Jia Zhangke, he’s also been in the news recently because of the upcoming 61st Cannes Film Festival. There are four Chinese films that might make it into the main competition; aside from Jia’s film, there are films from Wang Quanan (王全安),director of Tuya’s Wedding, Ying Liang (应亮), and Liu Fendou. The official selection was delayed and will be announced on April 23.
• While trawling through email alerts we found mention of a movie called An American in China that won some award at the 2008 San Luis Obispo film festival. Here’s a blurb from that report:
  

  Twenty-two year old David is floundering – stuck in that lazy period between college and “what am I going to do with the rest of my life?” Even David’s best friend, Sha (Anthony Montgomery) and his younger sister Kendra (Alice Greczyn) are concerned about his aimless attitude. (Alice Greczyn will be co-starring with James Marsden (X-MEN, THE NOTEBOOK, 27 DRESSES), in the upcoming film SEX DRIVE directed by Sean Anders.) David’s parents (Michael Gross and Priscilla Barnes) pressure him to find a direction. They want him to go to China to source factories for the family’s business, and David eventually does give into his father’s urging to “go east young man.”

Has anyone heard of this film before? Anyone seen it and want to review it?

Wong Kar-wai is celebrating the opening of his shit movie My Blueberry Nights in the US this Friday by selling some merchandise – most notably, $95 t-shirts, $50 posters, and $25 postcards. And if you want to thank him for ripping you off in person, you’ll get your chance in New York at a fashion boutique store called Opening Ceremony, where Wong is going to be on Wednesday afternoon. We hope that someone tells him that the US is facing a recessions and that the real incomes are not increasing for the average American. $25 for a postcard? You can get four lattes in Manhattan for that price! Sheesh!We’ve read a couple of blogs that have mentioned the Hong Kong International Film Festival, but here is yet another one from a blog dedicated to Asian Cinema. There are several movies mentioned in this post that we’re really looking forward to seeing, especially Old Fish, which was mentioned in several other blogs of HKIFF participants as well.From Screen Daily we learned that Summer Palace director Lou Ye’s new film, Bitch, was one of the films selected for the fourth Cannes Atelier. This year’s Atelier features 15 projects from 14 countries and aims to help directors get financing so that they can bring their projects to completion.

Last but not least, some cinematic dessert from YouTube: the top 10 Jackie Chan stunts. Not to be missed.

Cross-posted at Shanghaiist

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.