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02/14/2008
Stephen Chow
Probably most people with any interest in the martial art genre wil know of Chow. BUT. This is one guy who's worth watching if you have any interest in film, especially action/comedy.
I bought Kung Fu Hustle a while ago last year. A superb film that has so much comedy in it that genuinely appeals to a wider audiance than just the original Asian.
From Amazon:
Stephen Chow's follow-up to SHAOLIN SOCCER ups the over-the-top action quotient by about three zillion percent. The story is set in 1930s Hong Kong, with Chow as a shaggy-haired, would-be bad guy named Sing, who gets caught up in the middle of a war between the top-hat-wearing Axe gang and the hard scrabble inhabitants of Pig Sty Alley. Chow who wrote, produced, and directed doesn't step in as the star here for quite a while, letting the comic duties fly in a myriad of directions: a landlady in curlers (Yuen Qiu) has a yell that can flatten buildings; people get kicked across courtyards and through walls; musician assassins whip ghost sabres from lyre strings, and a mental patient in pink flip-flops named 'the Beast' (Leung Siu Lung) catches bullets in his fingers. Buoyed by SOCCER's box office success, HUSTLE uses bigger production values and a dizzying amount of CGI-enhanced martial arts (imagine Bruce Lee vs. Bugs Bunny in THE MATRIX). It's full of references to other films and filmmakers, revering spaghetti westerns and '70s Shaw brothers movies a la Tarantino's KILL BILL (fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping worked on both films). It also pays sly homage to the works of Wong Kar Wai, D.W. Griffith, Sam Raimi, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Akira Kurosawa. Raymond Wong's inspired score matches each cinematic reference with the appropriate cue as the camera circles and swoops around the sprawling sets. This is a real treat, more than a great action film or comedy, it's a great film period, and one that set box office records in the East.
I recently bought Shaloin Soccer, I'd heard it was a poorer film than Hustle but, instead found it even funnier as Chow takes his particular type of OTT action effects into the world of football.
Again, from Amazon:
Computer generated special effects have seldom been so giddy as in Shaolin Soccer, a gleeful fusion of kung fu and a classic Bad News Bears sports story. A former soccer star--whose "golden leg" was broken by a hired mob--assembles a team of former students of Shaolin martial arts, whose assorted skills (indicated by their nicknames, like Mighty Steel Leg and Iron Head) lend themselves to the swift interplay of the world's most popular game. Along the way, the team's leader (Hong Kong comic superstar Stephen Chow) meets a sticky bun baker (Vicki Zhao) whose kung fu is the equal of any of his teammates. Shaolin Soccer is supremely silly--in the final match, their opponents are called Team Evil--but that's part of the fun. American movies rarely achieve this perfect balance of the absurd and the sincere. A delight. --Bret Fetzer
Both films are well worth a look, more so, they need to be watched, these are great comedies full of action and wonderful characters. they easily stand up to repeat watching, SS has been watched in our house 3 times in the 2 days since I bought it!
And if you get the bug for Chow's work, then your in luck, as he has a brand new film coming soon: CJ7
12:08 Posted in Home Cinema | Permalink | Email this