A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 2, 2018

The Legend of Drunken Master (Chia-Liang Liu, 1994)

Jackie Chan in The Legend of Drunken Master
Wong Fei-hung: Jackie Chan
Wong Kei-ying: Lung Ti
Ling: Anita Mui
Tsang: Felix Wong
Master Fu Wen-Chi: Chia-Liang Liu
John: Ken Lo
Fo Sang: Kar Lok Chin
Henry: Ho-Sung Pak
Tso: Chi-Kwong Chung
Uncle Hing: Yi-Sheng Han
Counterintelligence Officer: Andy Lau

Director: Chia-Liang Liu
Screenplay: Edward Tang, Man-Ming Tong, Kai-Chi Yuen
Cinematography: Tony Cheung, Yiu-Tsou Cheung, Wen Yung Huang, Jingle Ma
Production design: Chong-Sing Ho, Eddie Ma
Film editing: Peter Cheung
Music: Michael Wandmacher, Wei Lap Wu

Jackie Chan is his usual charming whirligig self in Chia-Liang Liu's The Legend of Drunken Master, a movie that kung fu film aficionados take a good deal more seriously than I'm able to do. In 2010 Time critic Richard Corliss placed it on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest movies made since 1923. There are certainly some breathtaking moments of action in it, along with a hilarious performance by Anita Mui as Chan's stepmother -- she was actually almost a decade younger. And I go along with Roger Ebert's comparison of Chan to Buster Keaton, though where Keaton was mostly stillness punctuated by moments of action, Chan is hyperactivity distilled to its essence. Unfortunately, the version of the film shown on Starz is dubbed into English and shorn to fit a different aspect ratio than the original. It also lacks a concluding scene in which Chan's character, Wong Fei-hung, exhibits the effects of drinking methanol, which he does in the climactic fight scene. Apparently it was played for comedy, which the American distributors (perhaps rightly) thought distasteful. If a version of the film closer to the original ever comes around, I'd be happy to give Drunken Master II, which is what its hardcore fans call it, another look.
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