"A Monkey that is Inebriated is the Most Funny"

I've just watched two pieces of Hong Kong cinema - one good, one bad. One marks a return to all the things that make classic kung-fu flicks fun. The other is all cynicism and obtuseness, competing to see which will manage to jettison more of that good old stuff to make room for Hollywood cliches, which are neither fully funded nor understood; with the result that the thing looks - and feels - like an expensive commercial for the next generation of mobile phones hallucinating it is an X-Men movie.

The good is Drunken Monkey; the bad is Silverhawk. (Michelle Yeoh can't seem to follow up "Crouching Tiger" with anything. Someone should give her a role.)

I don't know how available these films are in the states. They are major releases out here, and "Monkey" showed at Cannes. Well, anyway - worth getting your paws on. Check out the trailers and galleries via the link above. (This promo trailer is particularly classy.)

The director/star of "Monkey" is Liu Chia Liang, a true veteran of the industry (but I don't really know about these things.) He's over 60, and he's got this great assymetrical sag of a monkey-clown face, but with a steely Clint Eastwood glint. And he's still got the moves. (You see lots of great stills in the galleries.) The movie is sort of a cross between "Drunken Master" and "Unforgiven" - lots of indestructible-old-man-fu and leather duster-fu. (That's the "Unforgiven" part, with fu on top.) But goofy. And everyone is obviously having so much fun making it that they didn't bother to remember they set it in the 30's, so there's a basketball scene that is most anachronistic. And people wearing suits and shirts that obviously just came off the rack at the Gap. But they are having fun, and we like them, so we are having fun.

Comments

[Doctor Memory]

So painfully true re Michelle Yeoh. The woman has screen presence to burn -- why she's not a marquee star in the states yet is beyond me.

...okay, actually it's kinda obvious why she's not (Hollywood has no good parts for an approaching-middle-aged female kung fu expert? Shock, etc.), it's just depressing regardless.

[jholbo]

Yeah, I was going to write on about how these two flicks I saw were oddly similar - two aging kung-fu stars and all (obviously there are different standards for the men and the ladies; I really hope Yeoh gets kung-fu roles when she is over 60 - if she wants them - but I wouldn't count on it.) Yeoh really does seem like an actress who should have a whole new sort of movie written just to suit her peculiar suitability. "Crouching Tiger" was great, of course. Let's do something else new. (Last year's "The Touch" was just so dreadful, dreadful.)

[Russell Arben Fox]

Slumming a bit, let us acknowledge that Yeoh was the first Bond Girl who, when expected to be something other than pure eye candy, wasn't laughable. In fact, she may have been the first actually interesting Bond Girl since Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love. (With Brosnan having worked the kinks out, and Yeoh onboard, Tomorrow Never Dies could have been a Bond film worthy of Connery if the Bond Villian psycho-rut hadn't long since been worn about as deep as the Grand Canyon. Jonathan Pryce should've been given the chance to be the new Blofeld.)

[Walt Pohl]

You guys are too hard on Hollywood. Yeoh was tipped to become a star (she was supposed to be in the Matrix sequels, for example), but she decided she only wanted to be in Chinese-language movies.

[jholbo]

There's good and bad Hollywood, and good and bad Hong Kong. And Yeoh has been in some bad Hong Kong lately. Specifically, she has been in Hong Kong movies doing a bad job of trying to be Hollywood movies.

But I see your point, Walt. This is a problem of her own making if she's been offered good roles and turned them down. No point in staying true to her roots if her roots are leaping out of the ground and trying to crawl to California in the most pathetic fashion.

[Doctor Memory]

Russell: quite agreed. Yeoh completely stole that movie, and if the Brocolli family had had any sense whatsoever, they would have kept the character around for the next few movies like they were mooting doing at the time.

Instead, we got Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

Oh well, no one goes to Bond movies for the acting.