Random DVD Round-Up 5 - CJ7

I LOVE Stephen Chow's films so much that I declared his previous movie, KUNG FU HUSTLE the greatest film ever made. The reason I made such an outlandish claim is that Chow's movie seem to distill the best of cinema as entertainment - from the slapstick and social engagement of Charlie Chaplin, to the stylish B-movie worship of Tarantino - and everything in between. Stephen Chow makes movies where reality is cartoonish but we still find ourselves crying tears of real emotion. He's a consummate entertainer and a great storyteller.

So it should come as no surprise that I LOVED Stephen Chow's latest movie CJ7. It shares KUNG FU's joyous blurring of the line between reality and fantasy - indeed, it embraces the idea that dreams can come true as its central tenet. And yet, this is a movie that is piercing in its satire of modern Chinese society with its dreams of quick success and big money.

The set-up is simple. Chow plays an honest, hard-working construction worker called Ti. Ti is one of the guys making China an economic super-power but he lives in a cockroach infested one room flat with his son Dicky, lives off plain rice and rotten fruit and works in hazardous conditions. In modern China, Ti recognises that an elite education is necessary for success, and scrimps and saves to send his beloved son Dicky to an elite private school. Of course, as all scholarship kids know, getting entry is not the same as being accepted. Dicky - with his second-hand shoes and grubby uniform - is an immediate target. When Dicky stumbles upon a cute, cool little alien he dreams of defeating bullies and winning school quizzes. It's the same dream of fantastic escape as harboured by the kids in ET and BHOOTNATH.

CJ7 beautifully balances earnest ideology with slapstick comedy and romance. Everyone can sympathise with the kid whose parents can't afford the "must-have" Christmas toy. Only Stephen Chow shows him stamping cockroaches on the kitchen wall in a game with his father as a touching act of familial bonding! Special credit should also go to Jiao Xu - who I am astonished to discover is actually a girl. As Dicky, she matches Chow in any of his roles as hero - showing real comic ability.

CJ7 was released in China, Australia and Hong Kong in January 2008; in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand in February; in the USA in March; in Sweden in April; in Japan in June; and in the UK and South Korea in August.

KING OF BEGGARS - kicking it old school

KING OF BEGGARS is a Hong Kong martial arts film that was released back in 1992 but is now available on a shiny new DVD. The movie stars Stephen Chow of SHAOLIN SOCCER and KUNG FU HUSTLE fame and I suspect that this is why a lot of the back catalogue is making it out of the back drawer and into the sunlight. So, will fans of the more recent Stephen Chow movies get a kick out of KING OF BEGGARS? Maybe. The movie is a period movie set in China. Chow plays the spoiled and illiterate son of a local governor. One day, at his local brothel he manages to simulataneously insult the Emperor and fall in love with a beautiful daughter of a beggar posing as a whore in order to avenge her father. (It's THAT kind of movie.) She is a woman of sense and rejects this ramshackle idiot until he can prove that he is a Kung Fu master. He then enters a tournament, the repurcussions of which involve him becoming a beggar, and fighting his way back to love and fortune. The movie is really well-made - money has been spent on costumes and they have taken the effort to get permission to shoot in China. It is also fairly funny but in a more straightforward slapstick way than the post-modern ironies of KUNG FU. Indeed, the whole film has a kind of old-school charm. It's like one of those old, badly dubbed, kung fu movies, where people have fights using ever more obscure varieties of kung fu: from the usual "animal" variants to the awesome Sleeping Fist style. All in all, this movie may not be a work of innovative genius in the manner of KUNG FU, but it is a bunch of fun if you are already a fan of old-school Kung Fu movies. Perfect for Friday night after the pub with a couple of beers and some take-out.

KUNG FU was released on DVD next week.

KUNG FU HUSTLE - the greatest film ever made

KUNG FU is a movie unlike any I have seen before or since. It combines the lunatic physical comedy of a Buster Keaton film and a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the wi-fu artistry of the best Hong Kong action flicks and a post-modern irony born of two parts Monty Python and one part Tarantino. It is one of the few films where I laughed throughout and wept with tears of joy, not just the first time I watched it but on repeated viewings. The audacity of the movie - the commitment to see through the insane vision to its illogical end - is dazzling.

The plot is simple and unoriginal. 1920s Shanghai is populated by the murderous axe-gang - a bunch of hard-ass criminals who wear slick suits, spats and bow-ties and, naturally, get all the respect and all the girls. Two dumb-asses, one of whom is Hong Kong movie giant, Stephen Chow, want to become members of the gang in the back-water called Pigsty Alley. They even go so far as to imitate gang-members but are soon exposed due to their complete ineptitude. Unlucky for them, the landlord and landlady of Pigsty Alley are retired kung fu masters. And when the Axe gang come to defend the two idiots who have set of alarm signals, these retired masters must go to war. Along the way, the Stephen Chow character has his chi unblocked and discovers that he is a Kung Fu master. Moreover, with the help of cheap pamphlet that he has been scammed for, he learns the amazing Buddhist Palm Kung Fu. This helps him face off to the feared evil master, The Beast.

The genius of the film is to take the classic kung fu plot and take it further and faster than anyone dreamed possible. The action is bigger, louder, and often cartoon-like. And every scene has an allusion to some other pop-culture classic - from TOP HAT to THE BLUES BROTHERS to THE SHINING. Best of all, the stock characters become outrageous comic caricatures of almost grotesque proportions. We are given a rogue's gallery of characters that Charles Dickens would have been proud of. Who will forget the mad Landlady shouting on the verandah, curlers in her hair and cigarette permanently hanging from her lips? Who will forget the old kung fu master, The Beast, flip-flop hanging from his toe, straggly hair scraped across his scalp. Who will forget the little girl who has lost her lollipop?

For all these memories and so much more, KUNG FU remains the best film I have seen, and perhaps, the greatest movie ever made.

KUNG FU HUSTLE showed at Toronto 2004 and Sundance 2005. It has been on release in Europe and hits the UK this week.