Once Again I Am Completely Behind The Times

In the ongoing name of one of the Wife’s jobs, there has been a sudden increase not only in the number of DVDs watched, but the fact that they are largely martial arts films. I’ve already written that we purchased Enter The Dragon a few weeks ago, but a couple of days ago we hit the local renter, known as Video-EZY, and picked up a slew of other chop socky films, so that she could look at the poses and use them as reference material. Among the old gems like Way of the Dragon (Which, amazingly, the Wife pointed out something I’d missed all these years where Bruce Lee with nunchaku and no special effects at all, knocks a knife out of mid-air as the guy is throwing is throwing it from one freakin’ hand to the other!) we picked up a few other things that we’d heard about, but until now had remained blissfully spoiler-free about, with little to no expectations about what we were in for, which is something that I am increasingly starting to become a much, much bigger believer in. Somehow when you don’t know about something and it turns out to be good, that makes the experience that much cooler. Unlike a trilogy of science fantasy movies that lived on the massive expectation its legendary previous trilogy created…

Anyway, the film in question is Stephen Chow’s Kung-Fu Hustle. It’s kind of a super-duper, steroid induced version of the kind of martial arts whackiness that Hong Kong used to pump out in the 90′s. It’s a strange, hybrid martial arts film like The Heroic Trio from that period that still had the requisite chop socky, but transformed it into something more than just historical action films or cop/gangster conflicts. Having only heard a few mentions here and there that this was a pretty good martial arts film, I was in no way prepared for just how insane and funny the actual film is. Drawing liberally both from Hong Kong cinematic history as well as Western, I was stunned into happy disbelief at references to everything from Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, to The Shining, to The Matrix.

Of course the other thing that’s really cool about the film is how it has its own consistent, internal logic at work. What you see on screen is completely crazy in our reality, but in this parallel universe a couple of photon streams down from Universe-616, Newtonian physics turns a blind eye to Kung-Fu masters, and the action here is exactly the kind of thing that geeks have seen rendered only in the low frame count world of Japanese anime, or the super swirly lines of Chinese comics and Japanese manga. It’s pretty obvious that in his own way, Stephen Chow was junkie of his particular pop culture, inhaling all the usual Hollywood influences while keeping a steady eye on what his own side of the Pacific pond was putting out. All of which results in a film that is stupefyingly, wonderfully crazy. It lacks the technical polish of Hollywood films, but I’ll put this movie and its action sequences over the last two Matrix movies any day of the week.