Two Chinese Movies

Watched not one, but two, Chinese movies last night. Almost subtitled out.

The first, Little Big Soldier, was one I picked up from the library, and stars the inimitable Jackie Chan, who was still performing his own stunts (he was 56 at the time), and continues - if the out-takes are anything to go by - to notch up endless injuries, minor and major. Over the years, apparently, Chan has dislocated his pelvis and also broken numerous parts of body including his fingers, toes, nose, both cheekbones, hips, sternum, neck, ankle, and ribs. He almost died during the filming of The Armour of God, when he fell from a tree and fractured his skull.

The story is supposed to take place around 50 BC (if I read the subtitles rightly) at a time when half a dozen major tribal forces in China had dominated all other smaller groups and were fighting each other for ultimate control. Chan stars in this film with Leehom Wang. Wang plays the General of one vast army, the only man left after an incredible slaughter in which not only is his army annihilated but the opposing one is too.Chan plays a farmer conscripted into the opposing army some twenty years before; he's been trying to desert and get back home ever since because he is the only one of his family line left.

Somewhat to his surprise, Chan captures Wang and intends taking him back to his homeland as a hostage in order to receive a reward that will fund his life as a farmer. The journey back to Liang is fraught with perils, of course, most nastily from Wang's brother who wants him dead so that he can take over leadership. The brother is a somewhat effete character who has a scary habit of shooting people with a small crossbow he uses with just one hand. His lieutenant is an ugly character whose face would give children nightmares. But besides these two and their cohorts, there is a girl who occasionally causes problems, a rag-tag group who try to capture the duo, a grizzly bear, a brutal gang of slavers and possibly some others I've forgotten.

The story has a serious undertone, and ends tragically (this is a bit of a surprise, but it fits to the underlying theme). Being a Jackie Chan movie it also has plenty of harum-scarum fights with all sorts of legitimate and not-so-legitimate weaponry, and plenty of humour between the serious-minded Wang and the optimistic Chan. The scenery is magnificent (China has some remarkable landscapes) and the story zips along at a rollicking pace.

The other movie is a different kettle of fish altogether. It's operatic in tone - or maybe that should be soap-operatic. The actors play up the intensity for all its worth, and until about two-thirds of the way through this intensity serves a reasonable story. Then suddenly it goes off the rails and becomes total nonsense. The film is The Curse of the Golden Flower, directed by Yimou Zhang who comes with some pretty good credentials in regard to earlier films.

The story concerns the Emperor (of China? - or just some part of it; I'm not sure). He has returned home after some sortie, and seems to know what everybody's been doing while he's away.  His second wife has been having an affair with her stepson, though the latter prefers the daughter of the Palace doctor - who, incidentally, is slowly poisoning the Empress at the Emperor's behest. The Crown Prince has also come home (there's a major celebration in the offing), and is plotting something sinister, and the third son, who seems a pleasant and somewhat innocent young man, also has hidden depths. With a family like this you can barely win. And then the first wife turns up, even though she's supposed to be dead, and is discovered to be the mother of...Oh, for goodness sake! About this point it gets absurd.

You'd never watch it for the story, which has more than its fair share of flaws that the director slides quickly over. But by way of compensation he offers us one of the most visually-stunning films ever made. Remember the visual richness of The King and I, way back in the 50s? Well, notch that up a dozen times and you have the feast for the eye that is Golden Flower. From the moment it opens with a hundred or so servant women dressing in unison in the morning, it shows just what money can buy when it comes to filmmaking. This film was the most expensive movie ever made in China at the time, and it's obvious in every shot. Not only are there excesses of extras, all sumptuously dressed, but the major players all wear fantastic garments over the top of other garments, all of which are embroidered and bejewelled and dazzling in their colours. (It must have taken them half the working day to get dressed.) Then there is the scenery: this palace is startlingly beautiful in its colourings. The walls shimmer translucently, carpets abound in detailed patterns, furniture is carved to the max, lighting is full of colour and contrast. The main Palace set was the biggest ever built in China, and it shows, with its terraces and stairs and immense courtyards (the main one - the size of several football fields - is literally covered with yellow chrysanthemums not once, but twice in the final three-quarters of an hour).

As a Bollywood film must have its song and dance sequences, so a Chinese film must have its martial arts, and these are abundant, from the power-struggle between the Emperor and the Crown Prince at the beginning to later large-scale battles. One superb moment has Ninja-type characters descending on wires from enormous cliffs above a small settlement and landing on the roofs. At the end we have an extraordinary battle between three or four different armies (I got a bit muddled after midnight), each of them in full battle armour, and in such close formation that their weaponry seems as likely to cause friendly fire as to dispose of the enemy. Unfortunately this battle

arrives after things have got very silly, and itself seems rather daft. You've lost any idea of which army belongs to which character by this stage, apart from the one the Crown Prince is leading.

It's a pity such a film should totter on its weak story.  Otherwise this would be a classic piece of better-than-Hollywood filmmaking.

Old and new

I can't remember if I've ever seen The Seven Samurai before; if I have it didn't leave any visual impressions.  However, it's been on my 'would-be-good-to-see' list of movies for decades, and the other night I discovered by chance that it was available free online at something called liketelevision.com.  The quality of the video wasn't ideal - in some sections it almost became like watching a bunch of pixels without being able to discern what they were showing, but in general the film's impact remained.  This is sometimes a problem with these films that are free online: the quality can be very poor, though usually only in sections rather than as a whole.

Anyway, I watched all 200 plus minutes of the movie, with a couple of tea breaks.  It hasn't lost any of its power to engage the viewer, and the performances haven't dated in any way.   Toshirô Mifune plays Kikuchyiyo, the last one of the samurai to join the group, and he plays him as the ultimate wild man, sometimes verging on the crazy, completely careless of his life.  He's both a child and a man, the source of much amusement to the more serious samurai, but also a man of bravery.   


We first meet Kanbei, played by Takashi Shimura, who is quickly acknowledged as the leader of the samurai, when he's cutting off his hair (including the distinctive samurai knot at the back) in order to disguise himself as a priest, so that he can unman a thief who has taken a child as hostage.  His wonderful priest-like serenity, even throughout the battle between the farmers and the bandits that takes up much of the second half of the movie, is a total contrast to Mifune's character.  Isao Kimura is the young 'disciple' who is accepted as one of the samurai, and even though he was 31 when he played the role, he comes across easily as a naive youth in his late teenage years.  


The cast is full of wonderfully-played characters, every one of them distinctive (at least once you get to grips with who's who).   The story, which is basically a matter of a battle to the death between the farmers trying to protect their village (aided in due course by the samurai), and the bandits who come every year and carry off food (and women, apparently), is simple enough, but the scriptwriters weave a number of other elements into the tale so that complications arise from the personalities of the characters as well as the plot.  


Not surprisingly, it's a violent film, and there are a number of deaths on both sides.  It shows the awfulness of battle, particularly when you're not experienced, and shows how easy it is to move from cowardice to heroism, from fear to fighting mode.  The last section of the battle, which takes place in pouring rain, has the actors and horses struggling in ever-increasing mud, with swords and spears and arrows flying everywhere - as well as the gun that causes ultimate havoc.

For a more detailed review, check out Roger Ebert's one here.

Onto the new: How to Train Your Dragon is a fairly straightforward rendering of the ancient plot in which a (Viking) father doesn't understand his son (or read daughter, in the case of the even more recent, Brave), and the son has qualities that are at odds with the community.   Of course the father will continue to misunderstand his son until the latter proves his worth.  In fact there are a lot of similarities between this movie and Brave, not least the Scottish accents (Vikings with Scottish accents?).  In both cases the father is very capable in his own compartment; he just doesn't realise there are other compartments.

Hiccup, the hero of this film, is that sort of age that you can't quite pin down: according to Roger Ebert he's ten, but if that's the case he's a very competent ten-year-old (when he's doing what he does well).  However, the dialogue he's given is rather too smart for a ten-year-old, and sometimes so undercuts the warmth of the character that he doesn't become particularly endearing.   His female counterpart is feisty, as you'd expect in the 21st century, although she does have a brief moment when she succumbs to the boy's charms (her usual response to him is to thump him on the arm).

The story is about a Viking village, which at first appears to have a tiny population; our view is significantly altered towards the end when it's plain that it's a much bigger place, with a lot more people, than the filmmakers first implied.  Dragons continually carry off the sheep (they're the equivalent of the bandits in Seven Samurai, perhaps), and the Vikings, including Hiccup, continually devise ways to kill them, because that's what Vikings do.  However, Hiccup inadvertently captures one, tries to kill it and can't.  This leads to a delightful friendship, and the big showdown when it's discovered that the dragons themselves aren't actually the problem.

There are some good comedy moments, and the main characters are fairly sharply drawn - the lesser characters quickly lapse into 'flat' characters - although the overweight boy who seems to have no brains is the one who's actually read the manual on dragons, unlike the others in his group.  The film would be better on the big screen: as a DVD it seemed too busy at times.   Perhaps a second viewing would improve that, as it often does.   (Is it me, or do animated movies tend to include far too much detail?)

Cards, Grimhilda!, Children of Men

Once upon a time I used to send out Christmas cards...quite a lot of them.   I haven't done this for years.  Instead I write a Christmas 'update' which brings the recipients up to date on what's been happening in the Crowl household - and email it.   It's always a bit of a challenge at the end of the year, but at least keeping a journal throughout the twelve months prior to that helps to remind me of what's happened.

In the last few years I've even added in photos of the various family members - which has only served to make the letter longer for those willing to endure reading it right through.   This is actually a bit of a step forward for me, since we never sent those custom photo holiday cards in the past that some people are wont (or were wont to do).  So we've actually gone from sending boring Christmas cards with barely an individual note on each one, to a major letter and photos.

Anyway, apropos of that in no way at all, Grimhilda! enters her final week of rehearsals tomorrow.   Sunday's rehearsal, in fact, will be the last time I actually play for the rehearsals.  After that, it'll be the orchestra.  I might not only be out of a job, but bereft!  Time will tell.

Last night I caught up with the version of Children of Men that I recorded some weeks back.  I'd once seen - on its own and out of context - the extraordinary long take that occurs towards the end of the movie, when Clive Owen stumbles and crashes and trips and climbs and eventually rescues the woman with the baby in the midst of a full-scale battle going on around him.  The set-up for this must have taken days, with an exhausted cast trying to deal with all the bombs going off and bullets flying and people dropping dead.  (Owen, in one of his best roles, looks exhausted through most of the movie.)  It's intriguing that directors seem to like doing long takes when it comes to battle scenes.  There's a famous one in the Russian version of War and Peace that travels across line after line of soldiers in various formations, but the most famous recent one (at least that I've seen) occurs in Atonement.  James McAvoy walks through hundreds of extras (as soldiers) doing all manner of things to while away their time before their rescued from wherever it is they are, and there are horses racing past, and things going on in the distance and in the foreground and stuff happening everywhere.  It's brilliant.  I'm not sure what it adds to the movie, but it's wonderful.

The long take in Children of Men has more point perhaps because it heightens the danger that Owen is in; we're with him all the way as he ducks and dives, briefly encounters the nasty character (Owen claimed earlier that he has bad breath) who seems to delight in shooting anyone and everyone, whatever side they're on, and finally finds the mother with the new-born baby.  But following that scene is the counterpoint: not another long take (although the camera still moves with the actors a great deal) but a marvellous quiet section in contrast to all the noise that's been going on: under Owen's protecting arm, the mother takes her crying baby out through the dozens of foreign refugees caught up in the battle and the soldiers who are struggling to keep the uprising at bay, and every one of them is reaching out to the child, quietly wanting to touch it, praising God for the miracle (the baby is the first in eighteen years in the known world).  The soldiers, whose faces all have that grittiness that comes with being battle-weary, are suddenly charmed into humanity by this tiny creature: men reflecting their potential fatherhood.  The women are like a thousand aunts all wanting to croon and chuckle over the infant.

I don't know whether I missed the point of some of the scenes in this film, but I never quite figured out how the clearance of foreigners from British soil connected with the loss of fertility amongst women worldwide. The two intersected a great deal, but in hindsight don't seem to have a connection.   Still it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking: wonderful performances, extraordinary sense of place (rubbish everywhere and detritus and a general air of things breaking down), a huge suspense in terms of how it's all going to work out, some extreme but believable action scenes, brilliant photography.   Stephanie Zacharek calls it the 'bleakest movie you'll ever want to see twice' and that's exactly right: it is bleak, but it's so superbly done from beginning to end that seeing it twice is virtually a must, if only to catch up on all the hundreds of details that aren't shoved into our faces but are there if we're quick enough to see them.

And apart from the wonderful moment when the child is paraded through the battling crowd, there's the delightful way in which the animals react in this movie, in particular to Owen: it's as if they trust him, see him as the one honest character amongst the rest.  Noisy farm dogs nestle towards him; a kitten climbs up his trouser leg.

In Which We Serve

In Which We Serve is one of those famous British movies with a reputation that transcends the actual movie.  It was made in the middle of the 2nd World War, and includes many of the top British actors of the day. All the officers have posh accents; the lower classes talk in a variety of dialects. Noel Coward did practically everything on the movie: wrote the script, produced it, co-directed it with David Lean, and wrote the music. Oh, and acted in it. I've only just caught up with the film for the first time.

Ronald Neame was the cinematographer, and the only shots that don't stand out are those drawn from stock footage of battles. Otherwise, each shot is wonderfully clear and clean, beautifully lit and framed. The opening, with its documentary style of the building of the ship that is the feature of the story, has taken lessons from Eisenstein, perhaps.

It's a little difficult now to feel so emotional about the ship, but the actors - in particular, Coward - give us every reason to do so. Coward is a very upper middle-class Captain, humane and generous: the very model of a proper Naval Captain. Celia Johnson plays his wife and they have some warm scenes together in the various flashbacks that fill up most of the film's centre (Daniel Massey, aged nine, appears as Coward's young son. He would later play Coward himself in Star). Bernard Miles is the Chief Petty Officer, and we get to see some of his home life too; Joyce Carey plays his wife and Kathleen Harrison his mother-in-law.

Production shot from the movie

Coward has given all his characters some decent scenes to play; some of the 'moments' might seem unoriginal to us now, but it's mostly because they've been copied over and again by later writers and directors. A fairly young John Mills is the lowest ranking seaman; he falls in love quickly with a young girl on a train (Kay Walsh) and marries her (their baby is played by Mills' own daughter, Juliet). Their brief time together is sharply drawn without excessive sentimentality. Michael Wilding also gets a girl, but his scenes are very short and not built up in the same way as the other three.

There are many other familiar names: Richard Attenborough (as a young seaman who deserts his post), Derek Elphinstone, Philip Friend, Hubert Gregg, James Donald, Lionel Grose, Lesley Dwyer, to name just a few.

The film's shape is a little odd: it begins with a superb sea battle, moves to the loss of the ship that's so important to the film, and to the drifting of a dozen or so seamen on a raft. From this point, we shift back and forth between the raft and the characters' back stories: these are developed to a degree, but they don't contribute to a unified whole. Nor does the ship itself really make us feel it's the centre of the story, which means there's a kind of lack in the structure. For all that, the film moves along at a good pace, and the direction and acting keep us from noticing too much about how it's all put together.

It's also perhaps difficult in hindsight to feel comfortable with Coward in such an authoritarian role, but when the film was first shown there would have been little difficulty for the audiences in accepting him as shown. We've long since moved past the point when Coward was such a star in both the theatre and the movies.

Not so sharpe, these soldiers

Dark circles under eyes is an odd way of saying something - the lack of 'the' before the 'eyes' gives it a kind of person speaking English as a second language feel. So I'm not sure why a company would advertise themselves with such a link. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die, to paraphrase Charge of Light Brigade. (This removal of the the definite article is catching.)

Talking of soldiers charging into battle, I've been spasmodically watching the Sean Bean series, Sharpe, on Prime television over the last few weeks - it's on Friday night, so it tends to come at that time of the week when making an effort to do anything else is wearying. I'm not up with the story enough to keep track of who's who, and quite honestly, only Sharpe and one other character, an Irishman - played by Daragh O'Malley), seem to consistently appear (although I'm no doubt wrong about this).

In last night's episode, as far as I could make out, they were trying to conquer some walled city (in Spain?) by first creating a breech with cannon fire, and then sending in men to scale the broken wall. How anyone was ever supposed to survive these absurd break-ins is beyond me, especially when they had no protection from the gunfire coming from the city walls above them. This type of warfare was still in play in the First World War, when sending thousands of men into battle with no armour was the norm. Even the Romans, way back in the year dot, were far more canny. They used shields against the arrows and spears and other weapons, and had some armour. These guys in Sharpe just run straight into the gunfire, and fall over like ninepins in a bowling alley. Absurd.

Of course Sharpe and his core cast of characters survive everything going - which is just as silly as the way in which the warfare is conducted in the first place. (As was the survival of Pete Postlethwaite in this episode: he played a Sergeant with several screws loose, and managed to get away with nothing more than a leg wound - and that was given to him by that arch sharp(e)-shooter, the Irishman who'd such a marksman normally he should have been able to pinpoint a spot on his head and actually hit it. No doubt Postlethwaite lives to chew the scenery another day and eventually come off worst.

Bean was in the Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan, which we caught up with the other night. It proved to be better than expected, though hung on a fairly thin premise. Nevertheless it made the most of its surroundings, with lots of sinister Hitchcock-like moments, and a bunch of people who seemed perversely inattentive to the problem at hand. The two baddies were suspicious from early on; we just couldn't see why they were suspicious.

Incidentally, the imdb.com has had a facelift. There are plusses and minuses: it looks better, but you have to dig a bit further to find stuff that came up much quicker previously.

Good Grief, Good Knight!

I caught some of an old film yesterday on tv: Knights of the Round Table. When I say ‘some’, I have to admit that I was watching it between doing other things, and in the end actually gave up when there was an awful death scene where humour was bandied around as though it wasn’t manly to be real at such a time.

The actors did their best with the material, and the actors were a fairly sterling bunch: Robert Taylor, Mel Ferrer, Ava Gardner, Stanley Baker, Felix Aymler to name just the A-list lot. The smaller roles were all played by stock actors familiar from many films of the period.

But it was the battle scenes that made it a laughable piece from today’s perspective. The big battle between Arthur and Mordred was so firmly based on Laurence Olivier’s wonderful battle sequence in Henry V that they might as well have used the same footage. Until it came to the two sides meeting. At that point, things fell apart badly. Nobody was really doing any fighting. Swords flashed, but they seldom hit anyone. There was quite a bit of noise, but it was all noise. And the extras. They had to be seen to be believed. Blokes dressed up in silly outfits pretending to fight, and unfortunately being caught on camera pretending – and ambling along without any real effort.

One guy’s ‘fighting’ consisted of jumping up and down in the saddle. There was no passion, no guts to the thing. When Arthur’s backup group of archers got into the story, they shot their arrows off towards the passing knights on horses, and most of the arrows fell visibly within a few yards onto the ground. One or two knights fell down dutifully off their horses, but certainly nobody was actually hit with an arrow.

And later on, Lancelot and his troop walked into a trap set by the Picts. Lancelot basically carried on talking to those around him while the extras in the background did their pretend fighting. Because he was a main character he knew he had no problem with getting hit with anything, so he didn’t really need to take care of himself. And I’m sure the guy who did all the bobbing up and down in the saddle was there in the background again, jumping up and down while fighting nobody. Incredibly one knight even thrust his sword into a passing Pict and the sword very obviously went in under the Pict’s arm and out behind him: no one has ever died of having a sword thrust under his armpit as far as I’m aware, but this Pict did.

There's a review on a site called Monster Hunter which says pretty everything else I haven't said here.