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New Iranian President is hard-line religious fuck-wit.
Nuclear war beckons.
George, nuke them!
Nuclear war beckons.
George, nuke them!
EnglishMuffin
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jackie!
Kung Fu Hustle
(99 mins, 15)
Directed by Stephen Chow; starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung, Dong Zhi Hua
While acclaimed Asian film-makers Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou have elevated martial-arts movies to the status of high art with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers, others, like writer-director-performer-producer Stephen Chow, prefer to play the high kicks for laughs. Chow's irrepressibly wacky Shaolin Soccer recently tested the worldwide market for weirdo, wisecracking kung fu, knocking one joke (football + Zen = humour) back and forth between surreal slapstick goalposts and scoring a record-breaking action-comedy hit.
Now comes Chow's mental-as-anything magnum opus, Kung Fu Hustle, in which he throws everything into the mix, with very peculiar results indeed. Waving its flying fists and feet in the air in 50 directions at once, this is an all-dancing, all-fighting Chinese western, replete with rubber-faced punch-ups, computer graphic monsters, gratuitous bum jokes, and bizarre bodily bendings aplenty.
Alongside affectionate homages to its Hong Kong heritage, lent nostalgic charm by the presence of 'retired' performers such as Leung Siu Lung and Yuen Qiu, Kung Fu Hustle brandishes not-very-sly nods to a baffling array of movies and TV shows, from the Fred and Ginger romance of Top Hat to the tidal wave of blood from Kubrick's The Shining. En route, we get crowd-pleasing nods to the Matrix trilogy, Cagney, Chaplin and Keaton, even Chuck Jones's kinetic Road Runner cartoons.
What there is of a plot concerns an ongoing hustle between the ruthless mobsters of the Axe Gang (seemingly dressed by the same tailors who kitted out Scorsese's Gangs of New York) and the poor folk of Pig Sty Alley who unknowingly harbour a pair of ageing martial-arts masters. Stuck in the middle is Chow's wretched, two-bit loser, Sing, whose feeble impersonation of an Axe Gang member incurs the wrath of both sides. He's patently unable to rob, kill, pillage and maim in a manner befitting a true gangster, the result of having been sold a duff kung fu booklet as a kid.
Sing is forced to face up to his own heroic destiny - sort of. That's pretty much it as far as narrative goes, except for some nonsensical childhood flashbacks involving a mute girl, a lollipop, and a boy being peed upon by bullies. The rest is a riotously incoherent ragbag of cross-generic setpieces, in which pear-shaped crones turn out to be whizzo kung fu queens, snappy gangsters break into dance routines and every man, woman and child gets smacked in the face at least once and then merrily bounces back for more.
The central gag about geriatric oddballs being far more deadly than their youthful counterparts may not be original, but it is consistently funny, and occasionally rather charming. When Leung Siu Lung's balding Beast tells Yuen Qiu's fag-and-curlers Landlady and Yuen Wah's spindly Landlord that: 'All I want is to kill you or be killed by you', there is a hint of genuine tenderness and respect amid the overbearing lunacy.
Elsewhere, things are less reliably engaging, as the movie lurches parodically from one relentlessly zany episode to the next. At its worst, Kung Fu Hustle plays like Carry on Kung Fu, with 'fatties' and 'fairies' wobbling and preening in the wings, unfunny jokes about men in red underpants and occasional moments of discomforting spite.
At its best, it's The Sound of Music meets The Evil Dead, with mysterious harpists casting melodic flying daggers which mutate midair into huge, screaming monsters, stoppable only by a supernatural 'Lion's Roar'. For the most part, however, this plays like a lavish Busby Berkeley pastiche, with head-cracks standing in for toe-taps, punches for pirouettes, axes for ostrich feathers. Despite the mezzo-forte madness of the limb-lopping, the violence remains painlessly pianissimo throughout, closer to the knockabout spectacle of Donald O'Connor's 'Make 'em Laugh' routine than to the balletic brutality of Malcolm McDowell's sadistic rendition of 'Singin' in the Rain'.
Occasionally, the graceful wire-work of choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (who effortlessly elevated Crouching Tiger, The Matrix and Kill Bill) is overshadowed by the computer graphics that rob Kung Fu Hustle of a sense of physical endangerment. Despite his gung-ho chop-socky enthusiasm, comedian Chow himself is no Jackie Chan, which perhaps explains why his central role sometimes lacks a killer punch. When Sing is asked if he has ever killed anyone, he is embarrassingly forced to admit that he hasn't, but adds eagerly: 'I've always thought about it'.
None of this, however, has hobbled the film's ability to punch the international box-office squarely on the nose. In the wake of Quentin Tarantino's thuddingly postmodern Kill Bill movies, the wide-eyed exuberance of Chow's carefree celebration comes as a breath of fresh air. It may not be art, it's anything but arch, and, at times, it all seems a bit aimless, but at least this wilfully uneven romp offers head-smacking entertainment for its own sake. And if you don't like (or get) the in-jokes, don't worry - there'll be another 10 along in a minute.
Kung Fu Hustle
(99 mins, 15)
Directed by Stephen Chow; starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung, Dong Zhi Hua
While acclaimed Asian film-makers Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou have elevated martial-arts movies to the status of high art with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers, others, like writer-director-performer-producer Stephen Chow, prefer to play the high kicks for laughs. Chow's irrepressibly wacky Shaolin Soccer recently tested the worldwide market for weirdo, wisecracking kung fu, knocking one joke (football + Zen = humour) back and forth between surreal slapstick goalposts and scoring a record-breaking action-comedy hit.
Now comes Chow's mental-as-anything magnum opus, Kung Fu Hustle, in which he throws everything into the mix, with very peculiar results indeed. Waving its flying fists and feet in the air in 50 directions at once, this is an all-dancing, all-fighting Chinese western, replete with rubber-faced punch-ups, computer graphic monsters, gratuitous bum jokes, and bizarre bodily bendings aplenty.
Alongside affectionate homages to its Hong Kong heritage, lent nostalgic charm by the presence of 'retired' performers such as Leung Siu Lung and Yuen Qiu, Kung Fu Hustle brandishes not-very-sly nods to a baffling array of movies and TV shows, from the Fred and Ginger romance of Top Hat to the tidal wave of blood from Kubrick's The Shining. En route, we get crowd-pleasing nods to the Matrix trilogy, Cagney, Chaplin and Keaton, even Chuck Jones's kinetic Road Runner cartoons.
What there is of a plot concerns an ongoing hustle between the ruthless mobsters of the Axe Gang (seemingly dressed by the same tailors who kitted out Scorsese's Gangs of New York) and the poor folk of Pig Sty Alley who unknowingly harbour a pair of ageing martial-arts masters. Stuck in the middle is Chow's wretched, two-bit loser, Sing, whose feeble impersonation of an Axe Gang member incurs the wrath of both sides. He's patently unable to rob, kill, pillage and maim in a manner befitting a true gangster, the result of having been sold a duff kung fu booklet as a kid.
Sing is forced to face up to his own heroic destiny - sort of. That's pretty much it as far as narrative goes, except for some nonsensical childhood flashbacks involving a mute girl, a lollipop, and a boy being peed upon by bullies. The rest is a riotously incoherent ragbag of cross-generic setpieces, in which pear-shaped crones turn out to be whizzo kung fu queens, snappy gangsters break into dance routines and every man, woman and child gets smacked in the face at least once and then merrily bounces back for more.
The central gag about geriatric oddballs being far more deadly than their youthful counterparts may not be original, but it is consistently funny, and occasionally rather charming. When Leung Siu Lung's balding Beast tells Yuen Qiu's fag-and-curlers Landlady and Yuen Wah's spindly Landlord that: 'All I want is to kill you or be killed by you', there is a hint of genuine tenderness and respect amid the overbearing lunacy.
Elsewhere, things are less reliably engaging, as the movie lurches parodically from one relentlessly zany episode to the next. At its worst, Kung Fu Hustle plays like Carry on Kung Fu, with 'fatties' and 'fairies' wobbling and preening in the wings, unfunny jokes about men in red underpants and occasional moments of discomforting spite.
At its best, it's The Sound of Music meets The Evil Dead, with mysterious harpists casting melodic flying daggers which mutate midair into huge, screaming monsters, stoppable only by a supernatural 'Lion's Roar'. For the most part, however, this plays like a lavish Busby Berkeley pastiche, with head-cracks standing in for toe-taps, punches for pirouettes, axes for ostrich feathers. Despite the mezzo-forte madness of the limb-lopping, the violence remains painlessly pianissimo throughout, closer to the knockabout spectacle of Donald O'Connor's 'Make 'em Laugh' routine than to the balletic brutality of Malcolm McDowell's sadistic rendition of 'Singin' in the Rain'.
Occasionally, the graceful wire-work of choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (who effortlessly elevated Crouching Tiger, The Matrix and Kill Bill) is overshadowed by the computer graphics that rob Kung Fu Hustle of a sense of physical endangerment. Despite his gung-ho chop-socky enthusiasm, comedian Chow himself is no Jackie Chan, which perhaps explains why his central role sometimes lacks a killer punch. When Sing is asked if he has ever killed anyone, he is embarrassingly forced to admit that he hasn't, but adds eagerly: 'I've always thought about it'.
None of this, however, has hobbled the film's ability to punch the international box-office squarely on the nose. In the wake of Quentin Tarantino's thuddingly postmodern Kill Bill movies, the wide-eyed exuberance of Chow's carefree celebration comes as a breath of fresh air. It may not be art, it's anything but arch, and, at times, it all seems a bit aimless, but at least this wilfully uneven romp offers head-smacking entertainment for its own sake. And if you don't like (or get) the in-jokes, don't worry - there'll be another 10 along in a minute.
