China Film Journal

A quick post about some earthquake and film related news: first off, Jia Zhangke, at the Cannes Film Festival where his new film 24 City was recently screened, lead a moment of silence for the earthquake victims and dedicated the film to the memory of the victims. The film is actually set in Chengdu, Sichuan.

Jet Li donated one million yuan and his charitable foundation, the One Foundation, has collected 28.05 million yuan and is sending supplies to Sichuan.

And lastly, a 17 member team of filmmakers is making a documentary about the earthquake. The film is provisionally entitled “Wenchuan” and they started filming on May 14, two days after the earthquake happened.

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!

• 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?

As far as war films go, few films stoop as low as The Warlords,Peter Chan’s painfully stupid and unengaging post kung-fu vision starring Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro. In this painful-to-watch dung heap, Li Plays a general who survives a battle that leaves the rest of his army dead. After pulling himself out from under a mound of dead bodies, he stumbles into a crumbling village where he meets up with a band of rogues, which he soon joins. Life as a bandit doesn’t work out well for him or his new comrades however, so the group joins the regular army to begin a legitimate rape and pillage career after Li and his two closest buddies swear a blood oath.

The Warlords was supposed to mark a turning point in Chinese cinema, a step toward gritty realism and away from kung-fu fantasy. And there is no reason why this attempt should’ve failed so miserably. Li had previously sworn off the fantasy pictures that made him a household name. And Chan made numerous comments about wanting to steer clear of exaggerated action.

For whatever reason, decision makers were not able to control themselves. They infuse this film with comical fantasy violence. Sword thrusts pierce bodies as though the bodies were empty plastic cola bottles, and heroes bounce around like trained acrobats. When one of them is run through with a sword, arrow, or blunt pole, the hero shows no sign of pain. Pain is nearly as uncommon for his foe, who drops dead the moment a weapon either touches him or becomes tucked under his arm pit. Thus, the film never escapes its fate as a low-grade kung-fu war film.

Still, far be it for anyone to disparage low-grade kung-fu war films. Such films have a lot of heart, a bit of philosophical insight or some fun at very least. None of these qualities can be found in this time waster. The three new amigos sack one city after another, and the film hardly slows down to explore their friendship or even their characters. Sure the three warlords stick together through thick and thin, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason for them to do so. Their friendships are never believable.

And even less comprehendable is the love interest that is even more underdeveloped and unnecessary to the story.These weaknesses would be bad enough, but The Warlords combines its awful fantasy elements and brain dead story/character development with awful melodrama to create a total offense on anyone unlucky enough to see this film. Li’s character, for example, repeatedly makes a difficult decision to betray a friendship for a greater good. And along with this decision comes a close-up of his tearful eyes. Violins begin playing. Rain falls. Then a mournful voice-over explains the tragic consequences. It’s all so laughable, and so manipulative, that it is as if the filmmakers heard a few Hollywood stereotypes and then decided to copy them.

And just to kick this dead horse one more time, I’ll add that not only is this film stupid, it is also ugly. War is presented as game and theater, a fun adventure that any healthy teenage boy would want a piece of. If the filmmakers wished to convey such a dangerous message, they could’ve at least made the film more interesting to watch.