Let the bullets fly

Great film comedies demand at least two screenings. The second is needed to check if one missed a visual joke or cinematic reference while still giggling over and/or trying to fully comprehend an engrossing sight gag, farcical set-piece, non-sequitor or wild slapstick scene. I suspect Let The Bullets Fly may need a third viewing, because it's one of modern China's cleverest send-ups of, and salutations to, a host of film comventions. It's also devilishly complex.

An honest bandit chief has six lieutenants, two of whom are gay and one a virgin. A fake provincial governor pretends to be his own dead counsellor, thus obliging his wife to sleep with the bandit. Both the men gang up to outwit Goose Town's master criminal, who employs a retarded double as his stand-in and lives in one of the southern China's landmark multi-storied Western-style citadels.

Those bare bones of an early 20th Century dimsum Western (that's also a black comedy and morality tale) are fleshed out with visual delights, such as the governor's deluxe railway train being driven along its tracks by a team of white horses; fifty geese and no townsfolk following the heroes to confront the gangster; a dozen gunmen enduring a mass stand-off because they're all wearing the same mask; a gunman accused of eating two jellies cutting open his stomach to prove that he only ate one.

There are quotations from and tributes to a host of other Western films, in both meanings of the term from oaters and Eastwood to Patton and crime noir. Asian films get nods too, from kung fu epics to Kurosawa and Kitano. Very visibly, but not pretentiously, writer-director Wen Jiang clearly had enormous fun adapting a Sichuanese writer's original story and giving himself the role of the honourable bandit. His co-stars clearly shared his gleeful mood, with Ge You (the conniving pseudo-governor) and Chow Yun-fat (the evil grinning gangster and his idiot double) twisting their cheeks and laughing maniacally while still portraying credible dramatic personae.

The supporting cast is excellent too, and it's tempting to rave about another commercial success from the multi-talented Jiang (including In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, and The Sun Also Rises as writer-director, Red Sorghum, Black Snow and The Soong Sisters for acting). Shrewdly issuing his movie in Sichuanese as well as Putonghua, he produced an all-time box-office triumph in China in 2010 (grossing more than US$100 million).

Movie industry insiders usually preferring art-house fare, the only Asian Films award it won was for costume design (Hong Kong designer and director William Chang). The grand big-screen cinematography wasn't even nominated, but veteran Zhao Fei, who's worked with top Chinese New Wave directors (and three times with Woody Allen) doesn't need recognition.

Most admirably, a Chinese movie seen by millions can also be seen as a quilt of sly anti-governmental anti-sloganese humanity that slipped past Beijing's censors.

This is another movie whose top rating may be reviewed downward after a second viewing, when unalloyed admiration for its audacity and flair have mellowed. I hope not.

Last train home

Chinese-Canadian cinematographer Lixin Fan traveled with a couple of migrant workers on annual return trips from a Guangzhou garment factory to their home village in Sichuan, 2,100 km away via train, buses and ferries, visiting their two children for Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) holidays. He edited his carefully-framed fly-on-the-wall cinema verite into an emotionally exhausting overview of modern China, peasant life and family tension, in Last Train Home.

The lightly-bearded father represses his emotions silently throughout the film, until a scene when his teenage daughter reveals the "real" self she says the director wanted her to show. She curses her parents for their year-long absences, using foul language that prompts her father to slap and hit her repeatedly. When his mother-in-law also upbraids the girl, the man pushes the woman aside, almost as if to ensure that the cameraman can focus on his daughter.

It's the movie's one scene in which the family openly acknowledge their awareness of the camera intruding quietly in their lives. The rest of the time, their awareness can only be sensed oblique expressions and careful choice of words (often clearly tackling a pre-agreed topic such as the girl's education and religious rituals). Amazingly, for a Chinese rural family, they do not try to mask or make light of the hardships of their dour lives and painful annual treks, the children's bad temperaments, and the maternal grandmother's burden of raising the two children. Life, they note once, is lived for one's children and parents, or else it's pointless.

Scenes in horrifyingly crowded railway stations, on luggage-crammed trains, and in cramped garment factories and poorly-curtained sleeping bunks, are discreet indictments of a socio-economic system that exploits peasants and stunts their lives and family feelings. A similar film could be made in any industrialised country, and tiring travel nightmares (albeit at a lesser scale of discomfort, with lesser levels of tolerance) could be photographed at Western seasons of family gathering, and the movie tacitly portrays the universal dehumanising effects of polluted cities. Nevertheless, the movie doesn't naively laud its contrasting panoramas of the harsh beauty of China's hinterland or the stifling emptiness and toughness of rural communities. As the parents frequently comment, there's little choice for them, and none is desirable.

The Zhang family's daughter abandons schooling in her grandmother's village, accompanies her upset parents back to Guangdong to work in a factory, and ends up fleeing that environment to become a trainee waitress in a Shenzhen nightclub. Her mother returns to the village, to ensure her son continues his schooling, leaving the husband alone in Guangzhou.

An optimist would sense that one or more of them may find more happiness. A pessimist would guess that they can never be happy. The movie's viewer cannot be either: one can only admire the documentary, and the workers who have to accept such fates.

Detective Dee

One of modern Hong Kong cinema's first and foremost action-adventure directors has roared back into commercial favour with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It could become a major franchise for Tsui Hark, who has directed close to 50 movies (since The Butterfly Murders in 1979), and produced many more for both the cinema and TV.

Detective Dee is a fictional character based on a real 7th-Century magistrate in the court of Tang Dynasty ruler Wu Zetian, China's first and only female emperor. Under the name of Judge Dee, he's the hero of a series of 17 novels written by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch scholar in Oriental languages and diplomat (serving as ambassador to Japan and Korea when he died in 1967).

Tsui's film credits a novel about Detective Dee by Lin Qianyu. The screenplay was written by Jialu Zhang, working with Taiwanese veteran Kuo-fu Chen; they'd also collaborated on the adaptation of The Message, a 20th-Century Sino-Japanese espionage thriller that gained high ratings the previous year (2009)

Andy Lau plays the outcast magistrate brought back to court to solve the deadly self-combustions of two courtiers helping to prepare the coronation of Empress Wu. Tsui's trademark style of quick cuts, overlapping dialogue and fast action ensures that Lau's usual brooding glare and over-acted facial reactions provide minimal distraction. By contrast, Carina Lau (back on screen after a four-year break) is credibly dead-panned and imposing as the Empress.

There's the usual cast of hundreds of extras, palatial settings and martial artistry (designed and directed inventively by Sammo Hung, with tributes to tree-hopping, pole-leaping, high-flying and other classic movie acrobatics) in this grandly old-fashioned historical romp. The key supporting roles of a female warrior (Bingbing Li, The Message) and an albino courtier (Chao Deng, award-winning lead in Assembly) are well played, and Tony Leung (the tall one) turns in a customary screen-stealing growling performance as the one-handed supervisor of construction for a giant Buddhist statue. That's the movie's major scenic attraction, reminiscent of massive big-screen stages from Indy Jones or Lara Croft sagas (and Tsui's own past spectacular epics).

Secret of the magic gourd

The Disney company joined up with a Hong Kong animation company (Centro) and a China film group to create a CGI/animation studio producing films for the PRC. First off the SFX artists' assembly lines, in 2007 after two years' work, was The Secret of the Magic Gourd.

Designed for children rather than adults, and obliged to present government-approved images of ethical behaviour (and official disbelief in supernatural agents of happiness), it tells the tale of a work-shy lad who learns that a magic gourd brings more troubles than delights when it tries to do its master's bidding. It's a Chinese children's story with various Western equivalents: be careful what you wish for.

Somewhere in a Chinese city (Hangzhou locations), a lazy primary schoolboy who's slightly plump and comparatively big-eyed has handsome well-off middle-class parents, a cute sister and a granny and they all live in a pretty big house. The boy likes fishing, which is an ideal sport for lazy souls, wishes life could be easier, and catches a magic gourd. It's small and chatty, fits in his pocket, and is a below-par CGI animation with a pair of beady eyes and an emotional mouth.

This genie (called Bailey in the movie's dubbed English version) interprets the new master's wishes literally. The boy wants to capture a chess piece, so it helps him swallow them all; he likes a toy shop's products, so they all fly and march to his home. He needs help in a math text, so it lifts all the characters off a class-mate's paper, including her name, which gives him another black mark in the eyes of his pretty wise teacher (Hong Kong's Gigi Leung wasted). No one knows the secret of the grumpy boy's failed tricks, but his teacher and audience know that he must and will learn to study hard and do his own thing, which is winning the school's relay swimming race and thereby gaining self-confidence and Bailey's disappearance.

Standard Disney family fare translated into a modern Chinese context, the story has little to amuse adults (and a few typical bogus bloopers by Bailey in a DVD extra). Bailey remains too small a character physically and figuratively in the live-action movie, and his only animated sidekick is a little frog who croaks. The CGI effects are occasionally cute, but the movie over-focuses on the boy and his pals, to no dramatic effect.

This movie felt like a trial run, a Disney taster meant to reassure mainland censors and educators. Sales returns may have justified the dubbed version for the English-speaking DVD market; Disney's Buena Vista probably didn't even try to distribute it to cinemas.

Ocean heaven

When a debut feature is almost too tearfully good to be true, a movie-goer can only sit, watch, and cry cheerfully. Literally. Ocean Heaven is a small movie that warrants a cascade of cheers.

A simple docudrama of a single father with an autistic son, the movie would never have been made without the support of martial arts superstar Jet Li. He has invested much money and time in China for his charity, The One Foundation, and reportedly took a one-dollar fee to star in this debut project of a Beijing Film Academy teacher, Xue Xiaolu, whose only other IMDb credit is for writing the 2002 Chen Kaige movie, Together (another tale of a father's love, for a violin prodigy).

Well acquainted with the problems of autistic children herself, Xue this time wrote a documentary-style tale of an oceanarium cleaner (Li) who learns he has terminal cancer. In his last months of life, the single father must try to teach his 22-year-old autistic son how to cope with life and learn to support himself. He's supported by his bosses and workmates (at Qingdao oceanarium), and the young man's platonic girlfriend in a circus.

The potential for sloppy sentimentality is obvious, and constantly avoided. This is no US-TV weepie of the week larded with sobbing violin strings, wistful close-ups and emotic acting. It's a finely-calibrated depiction of ordinary people and a father's love. A film that opens with a failed double-suicide and ends with an allegory featuring a fake tortoise takes the great risk of not being taken seriously.

Credit goes not only to Li and Xue, but to TV actor Wen Zhang as the autistic man-child. His detailed mannerisms are thoroughly convincing, from one hand's fluttery fingers to his gait and barely-focused limpid eyes. The leading behind-the-scenes character was Hong Kong producer Bill Kong. His support helped recruit a stellar crew of creative talents (cinematographer Chris Doyle, composer Joe Hisaishi, editor William Chang, production designer Yee Cheung-man, Taiwanese singer/songwriter Jay Chou).

Their movie should win a handful of awards, a big handful.

Aftershock

The PRC's movie industry has produced many art-house favourites; its mass-market spectaculars haven't earned similar international attention. Aftershock might have done so. Let's see, after January 2011, whether China's official Oscar nominee makes it to the shortlist (in competition, among around 80 others, with Hong Kong's Echoes of the Rainbow and Taiwan's Monga). [None of them reached the longlist.]

Aftershock is the first major commercial IMAX movie made outside the US. The 2010 PRC-IMAX co-production (the first of a contracted three) dramatises the aftermath of the disastrous 1976 Tangshan earthquake and adds a contemporary reference to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's the top Chinese box-office grosser, quickly leaping ahead of The Founding of a Republic.

240,000 people died in Tangshan. If Hollywood had recreated the mass tragedy, the movie would have innumerable sub-plots catering to all major demographic groups, age ranges, races and sexual interests. In China, director Feng Xiaogang focuses exclusively on one mother and her young twin children, and there are moments when a viewer aches for a sub-plot or two to lighten the mood and present a few fresh faces.

This movie is a champion exploitative tear-jerker. It's a 10,000-tissue weepie in which the children's father dies in the earthquake, the distraught mother is faced with a Sophie's Choice, the son loses an arm, the daughter survives unknowingly and is adopted by married PLA soldiers in the earthquake rescue teams. The mother cannot forgive herself for having made her choice, neither can the daughter, and the audience is frequently given emotional dialogue, heart-rending situations and musical prompts all designed to squeeze its tear ducts, mercilessly.

The mother and daughter are played wonderfully well (by Xu Fan, the director' wife, and the very busy Zhang Jingchu respectively), considering that a forgivable reaction to each of their stiffly self-absorbed characters would be to scream and demand that they stop being somewhat tedious self-sacrificing egocentrics. But if they did, the screenplay would be a lot shorter and more rational.

The rest of the cast is admirable (especially Chen Diaoming as the adoptive father), as are the cinematography, special effects (directed by ubiquitous Phil Jones), costumes and subtle government propaganda (on behalf of the PLA, Tangshan and China's modernisation). Director Feng has a successful track record, progressing from Chinese TV series in the 90s to writing and directing many mainstream movie hits (Happy Funeral, World Without Thieves, If You Are the One). He also directed Banquet, produced and directed Assembly, produced Cellphone and has been a movie actor.

IMAX and his co-owned Chinese production company will be happy with him; his epic had a reported budget of less than US$25 million. Its earnings in China and international markets will more than compensate for its likely inability to obtain any wide distribution in the USA. A few scenes in Vancouver, where the bitter daughter somehow (unexplained) ends up married to a Caucasian lawyer, were probably designed to help its entry to the Canadian market, both on IMAX and regular screens.

[The excellent review by Kevin Ma in lovehkfilm.com is fiercely critical of Feng's commercial and political considerations.]

Blind mountain

The cultural overlords of China do not want to be seen as mere propagandists protecting the Communist Party's image. They seem aware that some flowers, albeit never 10,000, should be allowed to blossom even if they do not emit healthy communist aromas. An occasional movie with gritty reality is very acceptable for showing at overseas film festivals, showing the make-believe world it can believe that China's artists operate free of censorship.

Movie-makers can portray something wrong in the Chinese garden if the wrong is caused by pre-Communist weeds such as feudal traditions and evil human exploitation. Blind Mountain (aka Road Home) is a depressingly bitter depiction of the widespread traffic in young women. They are kidnapped and sold to rural peasant families in need of hard-working, obedient and fertile bride-servants for their unmarried sons.

Babies and children have long been traded too by traffickers, and the implementation of the one-child policy in China created even more demand for an ancient practice. Writer-director Li Yang looks at the issue through the case of a naive young university graduate tricked into taking a work trip into a rural mountain boondocks in Shaanxi Province. Drugged and sold to a village farmer with a very lumpen prole of a son, the city girl tries resistance, flight and guiles to get out of her captivity. Her unsympathetic mother-in-law urges patient acceptance, and so do the village's other kidnapped brides.

The only educated man in the village, the schoolteacher, dare not help, nor can the isolated area's pair of impotent policemen. The girl is doomed to drudgery, rape, child-bearing and abuse. One of her pleas does get out of the village, and her father arrives from the city, but he too cannot beat the system. The old village ways seem amorally all-powerful until the girl accidentally takes the law into her own hands, in the only way the old world can understand. The movie depends on its only professional actor, Huang Lu, to make the girl's plight credible, and she does. The Taiwanese cinematographer, Jong Lin, endows her and the setting with a sad, harsh beauty.

I'm glad I saw the dvd made for the international market. Li made various closing scenes. It was depressing to find out the state-approved one, for the domestic market, gave the useless policemen an unreal success.

Li is creating a good track record for making documentary dramas, which he also produces and edits. In Blind Shaft, China's privately-owned coal mines are the setting for institutional and human horror shows, when a cheerfully gullible village boy is the next chosen victim for a pair of murderous blackmailers gaining compensation for miners killed in engineered pit accidents.

Gripping stories, good scripts and acting, bleak rural life -- Li's works could be set in Russia or post-War Italy, South America or India. Anywhere. And his movies would be recognised everywhere for their unsentimental, horrifying credibility.