NO LESSON HERE

Watched a very strange old kung fu film last night, Shaolin Drunken Monk, from 1982, with Gordon Liu when he was young and wiry. It turned up in my Netflix DVD queue, which I don't pay too much attention to except to keep it full. The deliveries are always surprises. And sometimes disappointments. SDM was disappointing because it was dubbed in English, and very poorly, with no option for Mandarin, or even Cantonese, with subtitles. So no pre-trip Chinese lessons. Not that "drunken kung fu" is something I really expect to talk about.

On the other hand, it was enjoyable in the old kung fu style, no wire fu, just lots of well choreographed fights holding together a typical but hard to follow revenge plot full of flashbacks. Most of the cast, despite period dynastic costumes, sported late '70s-early '80s hairstyles that looked permed, kind of like that former Japanese prime minister with the funky hair. Except of course Gordon Liu's trademark Shaolin-style shaved head (despite the title, he did not play a Shaolin monk, and there wasn't really that much drunken kung fu).

Notable scenes, with fortunately little dialogue, were a protracted sequence with Gordon making rice wine, and a pretty vivid sexy moment in which Gordon reconnects, literally, with his childhood girlfriend, whose father killed his family. Hence the revenge plot. In the end, Gordon completes his baochou, (a concept I have learned from other Mandarin films) and the girlfriend is torn between filial piety and lust. The film ends when she plunges a dagger into her heart; it's a long freeze-frame and doesn't even feature the faintest expected trickle of blood from her mouth. Well, what would you do if your lover killed your father because your father killed his father. If a son was conceived in that one hot moment in the film, how would you explain it later?