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

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Thursday, August 28, 2025

Pedicab Driver (Sammo Hung, 1989)

Sammo Hung in Pedicab Driver

Cast: Sammo Hung, Max Mok Siu-chung, Lau Kar-leung, Nina Li Chi, Sun Yueh, Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying, Liu Chia-Liang, Billy Lau, Lung Chan, Hoi Mang, Cory Yuen, Manfred Wong. Screenplay: Barry Wong, Yuen Kai-Chi, Sammo Hung, Kin Lo. Cinematography: Leung Chi-Ming. Art direction: Chin Yiu-Hang. Film editing: Peter Cheung, Keung Chuen-Tak. Music: David Lautrec. 

Martial arts movies are like musicals: You don't watch them expecting plausibility. Just as people don't break into song and dance in the street in real life, they don't enter a room and start kicking and punching and somersaulting through the air. And as I learned from watching Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, which many admirers of martial arts films consider a masterpiece, you also don't watch them expecting consistency of tone. At one point the film is full of raunchy humor and fart jokes, at the next it's a romance, and then there's a duel using fluorescent light tubes as light sabers, and then it's a message movie about the desperation that drives women into prostitution, then there's a wedding followed by bloody deaths, followed by fights in which the villain gets what's coming to him, and finally a happy ending in which everyone seems to have forgotten how much pain they've been through. Which is all to say that I'm not the ideal audience for a movie like Pedicab Driver, just as many people are the wrong ones to watch, say, Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952), but I managed to accommodate myself to it. 

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