What we talk about when we talk about kung fu movies.

Shaolin and Wu-Tang: Two great tastes that taste great together.

I. Something You Should Know About Me

I notice that, to the extent that I write about anything here, I've scarcely mentioned martial arts films - I think they've only been glancingly alluded to in the context of my Tsui Hark binge a couple years ago, although I'd have to check through more thoroughly to be sure.

Let me correct this unfortunate oversight: I really love martial arts films.

The other China, Part Deux

(Image: Hong Kong Movie Database)

It occurs to me that I never finished commenting on last month's "Taiwan Stories" series at Lincoln Center, and I know you're all tearing your hair out over it.  Fear not!  I return!  This time, two older classics (one of which is only one year older than I, a fact I'm just not going to think about).  I don't seem to have taken notes, so at this remove, I can't comment in as much detail as I'd like.  Bad blogger, bad!  


Both, unlike the previous two I reviewed, are full-blown studio melodramas.  What's more, interestingly, and perhaps queasily, each prominently features a woman who sacrifices herself emotionally and sexually for others.


Autumn Execution (1971) - Li Xing's film, apparently a revered classic, took some work for me to warm to (this reviewer was less able to than I), as it's a would-be heart-tugger whose two most prominent characters are quite repellent.  

The other China

A Time to Live, A Time to Die
(Image: Central Motion Pictures Corporation and Lincoln Center)

"Taiwan Stories" might be the most unimaginative title ever for a film series (how about "Straits from the Heart"?  - I kid, I kid!).  But I was still excited about the Film Society of Lincoln Center's long-promised showcase of "classic and contemporary" selections from a cinema that's been pretty neglected in the West (it didn't help that the Taiwanese industry was brought to its knees by imported Hong Kong blockbusters in the early '90s, just as Western appreciation of Chinese-language film was really catching on).  Partly because the planet's oldest civilization spent the 20th century undergoing change at an ears-pinned-back, nose-squashed, eyelids-flapping rate, Chinese-language film is, for me, one of the most fascinating, so any chance to fill gaps a little is cherished.  Below, pontifications upon two of the movies I saw (comments on two older '60s classics to come later in the week).

Mad Pigs and Chinamen

(Image: dGenerate Films)

If you had access to many hours of footage shot on the streets of any major city, you could cull from it quite an assortment of weirdos, scuzzbags and bizarre or disturbing incidents.  I doubt, however, that my own lovely berg of NYC would, in any given year, be likely to yield the image of dozens of escaped pigs galloping and strolling around on a highway and disrupting traffic.


That's just one of the many indelible scenes in Huang Weikai's Disorder (2009).  This astonishing experimental documentary/collage piece is the only one of the features I managed to see in the Museum of the Moving Image's recent, all-too-brief series "Tales from the New Chinese Cinema," focused on the wave of independent filmmakers emerging in the People's Republic.  Huang's 58-minute work is distilled from something like 1,000 hours of journalistic and amateur video footage shot in Guangzhou, the southern city that's one of the ground zeros for China's volcanic economic and social upheaval.


If that sounds dry and academic, be assured that the screening was accompanied by almost as much audience gasping as you'd expect in a decent horror movie, and more than a few bone-dry chuckles as well.  Disorder is the unruly, chained-in-the-attic relative of classic "city symphony" collage films like The Man with a Movie Camera or Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.  In her introduction, film scholar and series co-curator Cheng Sim-lim said that the original Chinese title translates roughly as The Present is the Future of the Past, which she interpreted as referring to the way in which the strange or even unthinkable becomes "the new normal" in a rapidly changing world.  No doubt even Chinese viewers would feel like much of the movie comes from another planet, and not one you'd necessarily want to visit (funny enough, I've been considering a side-trip to Guangzhou when I visit Hong Kong this coming fall).

Mad Dogs and Chinamen

Chow Yun-fat and hosts (Image: Emperor Motion Pictures and Kong-Cast)

I always feel guilty about not attending much of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I always vow that next year it will be different - but there's so much stuff!  I just get overwhelmed and kind of give up, seeing only one or two movies.  The must-see this year that cut through my option-induced paralysis was Let the Bullets Fly, which recently broke the record for China's highest-grossing domestic film ever, and, more to the point, was reputed to be very good and, perhaps even more to the point, marks the now-sadly-rare occasion of a major vehicle for Hong Kong supernova Chow Yun-fat, still quite possibly the coolest man alive.