The Yellow Sea (**3/4)

I made a point of seeing this at the Philadelphia Film Festival because it was South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s follow-up to The Chaser, one of the best action films of the last decade.

In this case, Chaser star Jung-Woo Ha plays a hapless Chinese taxi driver and gambler offered a contract killing job to pay off his debts. Both the driver and his intended victim are ethnic Koreans, but the driver lives in a Korean enclave just north of the Korean peninsula, while the man he plans to kill is in South Korea.


I strongly preferred the first half, which shows the driver’s being perilous transported into South Korea, stalking his prey, and making inquiries about his wife, who had already left China in search of work. Although only background to the story, it’s an interesting parallel with American immigration issues. The driver has to work so as not to appear like a rube, as immigrants everywhere sometimes do to those more assimilated.

The second half will no doubt appeal to real action junkies. With less time given to sentimental concerns, it ups the violence quotient significantly. One thing different about many Asian action films—versus Hollywood ones—is that films like this don’t mind making the hero unsavory, or the violence seem as brutal as it is. Here, not only are guns a rarity, so you get a lot of murders with knives and other implements (and lots of blood), but even the car crashes feel louder and crunchier, frightening like a real car crash, if you’ve been in one. Technically, the movie seemed pretty flawless, but way too brutal for my taste. Once the main character’s transformation from meek cabbie to fearless killer is complete, I lost some interest, although there are twists and turns as he becomes the target of a slew of Korean and Chinese mafioso. Too bad, because the final sequence is very well done.

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viewed 10/28/11 9:15 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/3/11

The Warriors of Qiugang (**3/4)

This is one of the five Oscar-nominated short films of 2010, the story of a Chinese village battling a chemical company whose waste water has contaminated the water and food supply. The details of the village, the company (which had been purchased from the government in 2003), or the pollution is less interesting than what the fight shows about modern China. There are laws on the books and a court system that provide a mechanism for change. There is even a national government that does not oppose them, and may even lend them support, if they can get any attention. The impediments are familiar, local officials in cahoots with private industry, although the details are sketchy. The picture I got is not of an ideological battle, but a battle of ordinary citizens against powerful interests, a story not altogether different from the time when the United States first recognized pollution as a serious danger.

The film can be viewed here.

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viewed online and reviewed 2/2/11

True Legend (**1/2)

This is one of those mythic Chinese films set in the past with warriors, martial arts, revenge and so forth. The director is Woo-ping Yuen, who directed Jackie Chan in Drunken Master. “Drunken” kung fu eventually finds its way into the story here too, and Yuen directs the action scenes well. There’s a lot of swordplay toward the beginning and more hand-to-hand combat, some fairly brutal, later on. There’s some of the gravity-defying Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style leaps, and the hero (Man Cheuk Chiu), Su, survives blows that would fell WWF wrestlers, but you expect that sort of stylized action in this kind of movie.

So that’s all pretty good. If you don’t mind the pedestrian dialogue and general hokiness of the whole thing, it should entertain. (The acting is a mixed bag, though Crouching Tiger’s Michelle Yeoh makes an appearance.) By way of example, in a very early scene we see Su embraced by his “blood brother,” who offers only gratitude as they part. Five years pass, and though nothing else happens in the meantime, we next see him trying to kill Su—to whom this comes as a complete surprise. (Su’s new archenemy stays in madman mode for the rest of the movie.) Superior movies of this type, especially those of Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), have almost an elegance to them, with stories that seem like fables. This seems more like a yarn. I will give it points for having a completely unexpected and different (though still corny) third act when it had seemed like the movie would end with Su’s inevitable revenge.

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viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/19/10

Mao’s Last Dancer (***)

So many American films view foreign culture through an American lens, but this one (actually Australian) is about America viewed through the lens of a young Chinese man. Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) was doubly sheltered, having not only been raised in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, but also having spent his teen years in the cloistered environment of an elite ballet school. The movie begins with his arrival in Texas in 1979 for a summer stint with the Houston Ballet, an exchange arranged by Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), the Ballet’s artistic director. Director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) follows a conventional flashback structure in showing Li’s early life, and these scenes are compelling. However, they’re brief and only extend back to the day Li is plucked from his classroom to audition for a chance to train as a ballet dancer. Li’s excellent memoir, on which the film is based, includes multiple chapters about his life in a small village as a boy.

Understandably for a film made for an English-speaking audience, Beresford and screenwriter Jan Sardi focus on Li’s time in America. They certainly capture the ideological and cultural gulf between Maoist China and 1980s Texas, but de-emphasize the abject poverty that was the salient feature of everyday life in rural China. It’s the kind of poverty that is alien to the vast majority of Americans, and the passages in the memoir describing the enormity of that hunger and privation are not merely sad but also among the most fascinating.

In what it does portray, the movie commendably sticks very close to the facts, including in portraying the international incident that occurred when Li decided not to return to China. However, what is moving on the page can be mildly clichéed when telescoped into a two-hour film. On the other hand, getting to see the ballet sequences, so beautifully performed and filmed, is something the memoir couldn’t provide. Cao was clearly chosen for his dancing skills, not his acting, but Greenwood is quite good as the English-born Stevenson. These things and the novelty of Li’s story make the drama enjoyable to watch. Indeed, it has much of the appeal of Shine, another inspirational biopic with a screenplay by Sardi.

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viewed 8/12/10 at International House and reviewed 8/13 and 8/28/10

The Karate Kid (***1/4)

I suppose the title will irritate some, given that Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han teaches the kid (Jaden Smith) kung fu, not karate. The kid’s mom (Taraji P. Henson) confuses the two, and even after watching this movie I’m not sure of the differences myself, but Chan is Chinese and the movie takes place in China, where kung fu is the reigning martial art. Even so, there’s an unmistakable fidelity to the 1984 film of which this is a remake.

Both characters feature handymen who employ repetitive tasks as ways to build strength and discipline. And both save the boy from a bully trained by a cruel master, only to train him for an inevitable showdown. In the 1984 version, Pat Morita’s Miyagi says: “Karate for defense only.” Han says that kung fu is for “making peace with your enemy.” As Han, Chan displays far less of the physicality than in his straight action (or action-comedy) roles, but is extremely likable. In the title role, Jaden Smith has very much the cocky-yet-charming persona of his dad, Will Smith. The only other prominent role, a quasi-love interest for the boy, is charmingly played by Chinese newcomer Wenwen Han.

There’s no getting around that the storyline is still completely formulaic, though that won’t bother the target audience. The message of nonviolence is nice, even if the kids will probably forget about it as the movie builds up to the inevitable revenge ass-kicking. But the novel element that most justifies the remake is the transplanted setting. While the Americans attend an English-language school, and most of the dialogue is in English, you can, more than in most Hollywood films set abroad, surmise that there are interesting places different from the United States, people who don’t speak English, and faraway places worth visiting. (The locations include both Beijing’s Forbidden City and the Great Wall.) Perhaps Chan’s participation—or the Chinese government’s—ensured that the Chinese come off as neither quaintly charming nor wisely exotic, excepting that Han seems to have magic healing powers.

Silly title or not, the new Kid’s all right.

(My rating is kind of from the point of view of a younger person, but the movie was still fairly enjoyable as an adult.)

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viewed at UA Riverview [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2/2010

Up the Yangtze (**3/4)

The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, and a visit to the land of his grandfather, was the impetus for Canadian Yung Chang’s documentary. An unrealized dream of Mao Zedong, this largest of hydroelectric power generators was realized in a China the communist leader might scarcely recognize. Yet some people still live in ways barely touched by modernity, and it was these people who were most represented among some two million Chinese displaced by waters that would rise 175 meters.

Sumptuously depicting the mighty river and the massive construction project in the early going, the film seems to promise a more-encompassing journey than what follows. The history of the project, the particulars of its construction, and discussion of both environmental and economic issues connected to it, are largely absent. A tantalizing time-lapse shot of the river rising to cover a ramshackle hut, then trees, is more along the lines of what I expected. But mostly, Chang primarily follows one soon-to-be-displaced family as they make the agonizing decision to send their daughter off to work on a cruise ship rather than go off to high school. By way of contrast is a rich boy who also gets a job, but the girl is the focus. We watch her struggle with homesickness, learn how to please the American and European tourists (never use the word “fat” is one edict), and get her first taste of a different kind of life. It’s unfortunate that Chang didn’t extend the time scale of the movie so we could find out how she and her family fare in the new China. Presenting China’s wrenching changes in microcosm, the film’s a decent time-passer, but would benefit from a wider perspective. With only sparse narration by Chang, it has more the feel of an unusual TV reality show than a feature film. (In fact, the movie will air on PBS’s P.O.V. series.)

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viewed 7/24/08 at Ritz Bourse; reviewed 7/26/08

Kung Fu Panda (***1/4)

Yet another animated animal movie with a you-can-do-anything message, this is nonetheless fairly entertaining, with well-executed action sequences. The title character is infused with the persona—and, roughly, the physique—of the actor who voices him, Jack Black. A little bit paunchy, he mixes hapless bravado with a deeper insecurity. Being raised by a humble Chinese noodle maker who is also a bird, he fantasizes himself the venerated “dragon warrior” with enemies who “were no match for his bodacity.” But when an accident of fate—the juxtaposed emphasis on both fate and controlling one’s destiny makes no sense, but never mind—actually gives him his wish, he thinks there is a mistake. The aid of a reluctant kung fu master (Dustin Hoffman) and a multi-species posse called the Furious Five, perhaps in tribute to early rapper Grandmaster Flash, gives him the courage to face the excellently voiced villain, Ian McShane’s leopard.

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viewed 6/7/08 and 6/21/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 6/27/08

The Forbidden Kingdom (**3/4)

The big deal here is that martial arts stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li appear together for the first time. Chan has shifted between Chinese-language and American fare, but his best-known movies, like the Rush Hour series, emphasize comic elements as much as action. Li has also split his career between Chinese films, like the mythical Fearless and Hero, and mainstream Hollywood action films such as War and Cradle 2 the Grave, but isn’t at all known for comedy. So I was curious to what approach a movie with both would take, and the answer seems to be a little of everything.

Presumably helping to sell the movie to a younger audience is the presence of Michael Angarano as a kid who, in a remarkably cheesy opening segment, is magically transported from present-day Boston to long-ago China. I liked Angarano in Snow Angels, but here I kept thinking he was Shia LaBeouf. Maybe that was because his character was so petulant, though. At first he wanders around confused, with everybody speaking English. Encountering Chan’s character, he goes, “I can’t understand you,” like everyone’s being rude by not speaking modern American. But then Chan says, “That’s because you’re not listening,” and magically everyone now speaks English. And so the rude teen learns about the mythical Monkey King (Li) and his battle against an evil warlord, and becomes the student of the old master (Chan). There’s practically a Karate Kid homage, although luckily no one is forced to catch flies with chopsticks. The movie also vaguely recalls Chan’s old role as the drunken master; his character is supposed to be eternal, but only so long as he drinks.

Li has a double role as a fighting monk, and the fourth member of the anti-evil team is Sparrow, a revenge-seeking, lute-playing lass, because you always need an attractive girl. Oddly, although she has learned English like all of the other Chinese, she has sadly failed to learn first-person pronouns and so refers to herself as “she” or “her.” Li’s monk is philosophical in that he warns Sparrow about how her desire for vengeance can backfire, and that’s about as deep as the movie gets. She ignores the monk’s counsel, and when Chan mockingly calls him “master of sensitivity,” that’s almost as funny as it gets. The plot is a very simple good-versus-evil one. Chan does about three times as much kung fu as in his last three Hollywood films. Every significant character gets to fight, including an evil Jade Warrior who uses her long hair to lasso her opponents. The action scenes include realistic ones and also fantasies with flying effects. (Immortal characters know magic.) They’re fine, but none is as outstanding as the best ones in Fearless or Hero. But then, director Rob Minkoff’s best-known previous work was directing the Stuart Little movies and the Lion King. This makes sense, as the movie is simple enough to be enjoyed by children. (The violence is mostly mild, but there are bloodless stabbings.) The Forbidden Kingdom seems composed of parts of other movies and isn’t more than the sum of those parts, but is better than Chan’s lame Rush Hour 3 or Li’s turgid War, the stars’ most recent US releases.

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viewed 4/20/08; reviewed 4/21/08

Nanking (***1/4)

If you know anything about the Chinese city of Nanking, you probably mentally precede its name with “rape of.” In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China, and by November its army had overrun Shanghai and began marching toward the then Chinese capital city, 150 miles away. Already the thriving city had been heavily bombed, but when the soldiers arrived, the real devastation began. This American-made documentary uses the recollections of elderly survivors as well as actors reading letters and testimony from the post-World War II war crimes trial. Surprisingly, there are several former Japanese soldiers on camera, at least one of whom seems rather nonchalant as he explains how married women made better rape victims. They tended to resist less, and the experience wasn’t much good unless there were two participants, he says. A Chinese man, on the other hand, weeps 70 years after the fact as he recounts watching his mother and baby brother get bayoneted and die slowly. There’s a good deal of period footage evidencing the cruelty inflicted, although most of it is in short clips. The bright side of the story, if one can say that, is the efforts of the few remaining westerners, most prominently American nurse Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), to protect the poor people who had not been able to flee the city prior to the occupation. Nanking doesn’t try to explain why the Japanese decided to invade China, or what made the Japanese commanders encourage such inhumanity, but it provides an easy-to-follow summary of one of the several great horrors of the 20th century.

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viewed and reviewed 1/31/08

Curse of the Golden Flower (***3/4)

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? Despite a title that sounds like an old Charlie Chan movie, this is actually the latest from China’s most prominent director, Zhang Yimou. Like his recent Hero and House of Flying Daggers, it’s a period film that emphasizes China’s imperial culture and features some large-scale action sequences. It also reunites Zhang with his early 1990s leading lady, Gong Li. The emperor is played by Chow Yun-Fat. As with Flying Daggers, it’s set during the Tang Dynasty (in 928 A.D.), but the plot is less mythical.

+ Palace scenes of stunning color and beauty dominate the movie’s first half, which depicts the veneer of formality that surrounds the royal family and sets up the violent confrontations that dominate the later scenes. The cinematography emphasizes patterns that are symbolic of a highly ceremonial, hierarchical culture. The story hinges on the ambitions and loyalties of the emperor’s three sons and the revelations of family secrets. There’s little of the stylized swordplay of Hero and Daggers, but the climactic battle scene near the end, which involves thousands of fighters, arrows, shields, and spears, is remarkable.

- The story is presented as a classic tragedy, yet the thousands of soldiers who die merely as a by-product of family squabbles by the royals are altogether anonymous. (Though perhaps that’s the message of the film.) Rather, it’s the queen who caused all the trouble with whom we are supposed to empathize.

= ***3/4 Zhang seems to shift effortlessly from historical epics like this one and smaller contemporary movies like Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, released in the US a few months ago. If you’re at all a fan of this kind of movie, it’s a must-see.

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Jet Li’s Fearless (***3/4)

? In 1910, the best fighter in the Chinese province of Tianjin (Li) is matched against four international opponents in Shanghai. The story then flashes back to tell a fictionalized version of the life of Huo Yuan Jia, beginning with his childhood humiliation by a rival. Although there are many fight scenes, the story contains a strong dramatic component. Not what you’d expect from the guy (Ronny Yu) who directed Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky.

+  The many imaginative fight scenes, which incorporate the martial art called wushu, are far from the only reason to watch. Thematically, the Shanghai-shot movie is more about Yuan Jia’s struggle against his own arrogance than his quest to become the top fighter in his province. The violence is rarely lethal, and only then to make a point against brutality. (The fighters are shown signing a “death waiver” before each contest.) The story also takes in a little bit of Chinese history, as the period portrayed was one in which China was beginning to be threatened with cultural and military domination. Circling back to the opening scene, the conclusion is a moving surprise.

- This isn’t really a mark against the movie, but some people may prefer the fantasy action and mythical storyline of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers. Both the fighting and the plot are basically realistic here.

= ***3/4 Sure to be one of the year’s top movies, this transcends the martial-arts genre.

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