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?

CAPSULE REVIEWS

A little under the weather with a late winter cold, enjoying a few capsules of Alka Seltzer Plus, I turn to the Chinese medicine of videos. Finished Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, the wuxia fantasy set in part in Wudangshan, nearly as familiar to me as my own neighborhood. The double-edged plot swirls around the acquisition of two important magical weapons in the Yuan Dynasty, and the plight of Zhang Wuji (or Chang Mo Kei, for the Cantonese speakers), the ultra-cute top-knotted orphan, who has a bad habit of promising to marry any woman he meets along the way. He has extraordinary kung fu and leadership skills, but is a little blind in the relationship area. (He has over-committment issues, and celibacy seemed not to be an option.) Of the four fiancees, one returns in self-exile to lead her monastic sect in the jianghu; another conveniently, but poignantly, dies (or so everyone thought); the third carries out some revenge missions that both help and hinder Wuji/Mo Kei, and the fourth, the most unlikely, but perkiest, a Yuan princess, disowns her Mongol heritage to become his life-partner. This all suggests that arranged marriages may have been a good idea. But who speaks for an orphan?

Or maybe not, as seen in In the Wild Mountains (Ye Shan), another hilly escape, this time to the Shaanxi countryside, where the lifestyle is undergoing Deng Xiaoping's economic transition. Here, the setting also looked familiar to me; in 1988, the Wizard and I took a train for a weekend in a remote area three hours out of Beijing in a peasant's guest house to wander about the mountains, eat noodles and ride horses. Last spring, I mentioned to my guide in Beijing that I had been to Ye Shan Po, but I was never quite sure where it was...west, north, south? "How do you know about Ye Shan Po," he asked, as if I had discovered a state secret. He told me it has become much more developed as a tourist destination. I feel partly responsible. (I was part of the rising of the Chinese middle class?) It only occurs to me at this moment that the movie's Chinese name is the same as the area I visited: Ye Shan. Wild Mountain. Don't know what the "Po" might be, a yin, earth spirit maybe?

In the movie, two brothers, one traditional and lazy, the other, fired up by the idea of money-making schemes, are married to the wrong women. In an effectively legal wife swap, they manage to live the lives they were supposed to. If you're an entrepreneur, probably a supportive equally driven spouse is a good match; if you just want to kick back and smoke the tobacco and make babies, a quiet domestic partner is probably more suited for happiness. The movie explores the changes in social and economic structures that were (and still are) happening as a result of economic reforms in rural China, but the landscape was what really grabbed me.

I picked up My Son, a more recent Korean film, at the going-out-of-business sale at my neighborhood Blockbuster (everything must go...no one seemed to want this one but me). The tale of a father, imprisoned for life for robbery and murder, gets a day's leave to meet the son he hasn't seen since the boy was an infant. That leaves a lot of room for emotional drama and some comic moments too (mostly rendered by the guard who accompanies the prisoner on his visit home). Compassion in the face of great tragedy is the theme of this, and if you liked Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, you will enjoy this one as well. Pay close attention the first time around; it has a completely surprising twist that you will only be able to experience once.

Lightening the mood with some martial arts, The Prodigal Son, not a Biblical epic, but a 30-year-old and fabulous kick flick by Sammo Hung (rendered as Samo in the credits) with his buddy Yuen Biao in his first big break...all these actors who were younger then, but still kicking. I especially like a scene, Chapter 12 on the DVD, the "Drunken Calligraphy" demonstration: Sammo Hung performing with a huge inky brush, not quite the way my Chinese painting teacher delivers her lessons. This is hard to find to buy (even Netflix had to get it from another location), but in a simple search I found it for you to watch here. (For a calligraphy lesson from a master, start at about 56:50 in the video.)

LANGUAGE LAB

I've been busy with the 9-to-5 work duties I must fulfill in order to finance the China trip I have planned in less than two months (all I need now is visa and travel insurance) but I still have found time to watch Chinese movies--for their language support. (Yeah right. New heart-throb -- Kun Chen, here from Hua Mulan. Yes, he's reviving her with blood from his own wrist vein. Sort of a yin take on yang vampire flicks.)

I never was much good at foreign language study, particularly German, chosen in my academic youth (for those of us planning, if not actually achieving, careers in science, or possibly, in my case, philosophy). After the requisite two years of Latin, as dry and dreadful as the teacher who taught us, I endured four of Deutsch in high school and college, and while I could now probably translate a passage with a dictionary at hand, or make sense of simple instructions, I have no fluency and can't say I much like to hear it spoken. The pre-Rosetta Stone "language lab" exercises were boring (sitting in a cubicle with earphones when I would rather be out and about, doing and talking about interesting things like intoxication or sex).  I never watched German movies -- not sure there were any available (this was pre-Blockbuster and Netflix) and if they were, they were probably dreary. The only REAL exposure I got to the language was listening to my Swiss great-uncles when they lapsed into German while smoking their pipes and drinking beer.  I had some German Christmas carols on a record I once sang along with my Swiss grandfather; tears came to his eyes. My father, like most immigrants' children, had not been encouraged to use the native language, although he had a few quirky pronounciations that clearly reflected his heritage.

I think the way we approached language studies in the U.S. was all wrong (maybe it's different now); either you should get exposure in some depth--immersion--at a young age, or there should be a kind of survey approach like the Wizard had when he was doing his master's in library science: six languages in twelve weeks, in order to translate title pages to catalog foreign materials. After the survey (replacing that old pre-req Latin) then one might pick a language that appealed or was useful.  Just a few years ago, as a middle-aged adult, I took some conversational French classes, for no reason except that I wanted to be able to understand wine and perfume labeling, to pronounce these things with some degree of grace.  I met the teacher at a party and enrolled as a whimsical challenge to myself. It was the most satisfying learning experience I had had in years, and I came away with some proficiency.  No grades, no pressure (except to not waste the considerable money I invested), no drilling (except when we had a Parisian guest teacher who complained about my teacher's Spanish accent.  My teacher was from Biarritz. The Parisian taught me how to count.)

In addition to a subscription to French Vogue and reading Le Monde on-line (although I understood Le Figaro better, maybe a lower reading level), my teacher also encouraged watching movies--the French love cinema.  I still need subtitles for French films, but it is more and more comprehensible.  So it is to film I turn to tune my ear for Chinese.

Where I have learned some likely useless phrases. If someone kowtows to me, I know how to tell them to get up. I can salute the emperor. (Wan sui, wan sui, wan wan sui!) I can say "Weishenme ni bu sha wo?" (Why you not kill me?) I have "come" and "go" down pretty well, but not quite sure if I'm urging horses on or telling my people to get out of a dangerous situation. I watch the movies with two dictionaries, three phrase books, and a guide to characters. No popcorn. I humbly refer difficult questions to my Chinese painting teacher and Mandarin-speaking classmates. (My teacher has actually offered to teach me Mandarin, but I think it's because she wants to improve her English.)

But with film, there's the problem of WHICH Chinese. Since my most recent travels are in Putonghua-speaking China, I am trying to grasp Mandarin, but a lot of the movies I watch are originally in Cantonese--Mandarin dubs just don't quite work aesthetically.  No quite as bad as the disappointment in my copy of Brigitte Lin's The Bride with White Hair, dubbed in English, with no Chinese audio track. It's a lovely movie but loses some of its charm in English. Dubbing is unnatural and awkward in any language.

So over the past week or so, not quite ready for another multi-episode wuxia fantasy epic (The Sword and the Fairy is still unopened), I brought several Asian-themed films out of their retreat in my DVD library, forgetting they were in Japanese, Korean and French.  No language lab here, but I highly recommend these:

• Zhang Yimou and Yasuo Furuhata's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (in Japanese and Mandarin, sort of a Chinese-Japanese Love Story).
• Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (in Japanese, and some Mandarin, extraordinary funny  sad beautiful magical realism).
• Kim Ki Duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (in Korean, nothing Howdy Doody here, a Buddhist story by a Catholic director, emotional and gorgeous, hardly any dialog).
• Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover (in French  (L'Amant), tres sexy, with Tall Tony Leung (no slouch), a period piece in early Colonial Saigon).

Not much Chinese learned to speak of, so to speak, but still lots of beautiful scenery, heart-rending emotion, some sex (in French and Korean), and ... very pretty actors. Although I should say in this recent home film fest I also watched Donnie Yen's Painted Skin, (the 2008 remake of King Hu's 1993 comeback film) and 2009's Chinese-produced Hua Mulan, (hardly Disney, see above), also featuring Painted Skin's Vickie Zhao (no particular relation to my muse Vincent, I think) and Kun Chen, (in which movie a human-heart-eating fox fairy drives them apart, in contrast to the scene above).  Perhaps he was cast because who would ever think that Ms. Zhao was actually a man unless playing opposite this ultra-attractive prince!

LAW & ORDER --SDU

I thought I'd kicked my addiction to the Dick Wolf franchise several years ago and then I discovered another drug of choice (administered as DVDs on my laptop) in Hong Kong TVB, most recently The Four, a detective series set in 12th century imperial China, for all practical purposes, "Law and Order--Song Dynasty Unit."

No Dick Wolf here, but one feral character in the series, played by Ron Ng (who was the common sense guy opposite Raymond Lam's impulsive partner in Lethal Weapons of Love and Passion), now ultra attractive, surly, sullen, silent and very sexy, named Cold Blood, perhaps because he was raised by wolves.  There's a theme that has shelf-life!

I settled into this thoughtful Christmas present after finishing a Shang/Zhou (~1100 BCE) series called The Legend and the Hero, full of historical references and mythology, fox fairies and the usual imperial coup, this one successful in taking down the cruel and mad Shang emperor to be replaced by the Zhou ruler.  The Chinese are fascinated by the chaotic transition periods between dynasties.  This series drove me to the history books again (justification for watching), and was quite memorable for one remarkable subtitle:

The Shang emperor (played operatically by Steve Ma) is advised by his court to rescind some ridiculous edict.  He refuses because he would lose face.  "I'll become a laughing stork!" he shouts with incredible flourishes of his long sleeves. Indeed.  Perhaps this is a Chinese idiom with which I am unfamiliar.  I love it.

Moving ahead a couple of millennia brings me to The Four, young constables in the last days of the Northern Song Dynasty.  (*SPOILER ALERTS**) They investigate thefts of swords, medical travesties, exploitation of peasants by landlords and imperial enterprises, and of course are involved in preventing an imperial coup (though in the final end, the Jin overcome the Song), and providing one rather lyrical subtitle: "How could a big guy like him be fooled by a fool like Fook?" All fooked up?

Raymond Lam's character, Heartless, is particularly interesting; he had been crippled as a baby in a family feud, unknowingly by the brother of his colleague, Iron Fist, a powerful martial artist played by Kenneth Ma, who was the goofy but loyal halfwit ("kidault" in the subtitles) friend of Vincent Zhao in  The Master of Tai Chi. No bowl haircut here, Kenneth looks pretty good in the Song half-topknot, long-naped style that the men of this period sport. (You can usually tell the dynasty from the hair.) Not sure exactly who this is here, looks like Ron in another role, but you get the idea.

The crippled Heartless, orphaned scion of a weapons manufacturing family (though he doesn't know it at first) zips around the countryside in a bamboo wheelchair, like Raymond Burr's "Ironside," outfitted with arm rests that shoot darts and with easy accessibility to lots of clever concealed weapons. What Heartless lacks in footwork, he makes up for with hands and fingers, accurately tossing small blades all over the place. The wheeled contraption is agile too; with a push of a button he can flip himself out of the way of oncoming attacks.  Forget that annoying scooter chair--if I'm ever in such need I want Medicare to pay for this bamboo model!

Raymond's family was responsible for developing something called the Invincible Arms; locating the design and producing the weapon provides a subplot.  The weapon is bizarre, the RPG of its day: a large sword-like WMD that, with a twist of the hilt, shoots hundreds of darts at the enemy before launching a bronze frisbee that sprouts a huge Cusinart chopping blade, making salsa of everyone who missed a dart, before finally exploding in a fireball over the whole mess. The plot ends in a kind of mutual assured destruction detente; the bad guys have produced the thing, but so has the wheelchair-bound Heartless (who of course isn't really completely).

In the end, the constables win their battles, but lose in other ways.  As is typical in these series, pretty much everybody dies in the end (well, that goes for real life too) and no one manages to hook up on any kind of permanent basis with their soulmate.  Alas, the wolfish Cold Blood, experiencing a glimmer of emotion at last, about to pledge his love to the daughter of the dead master of the martial Federation, arrives just in time at the monastery to find her taking Buddhist vows, trimming her own gorgeous hairstyle to the scalp. Iron Fist's love postpones his marriage proposal to run her father's martial arts "gang." (They really did belong together.) There is some hope for the fourth constable, Chaser, a potential philanderer whose beloved (Iron Fist's sister through his own adoption) just goes off to another province, with the implication that they will unite eventually--except death intervenes.  Heartless's lover, actually a spy for the bad guys who in the end sucks the poison out of the victims imprisoned by her master, runs away after Heartless plays his flute for her as she succumbs to her own poison. She doesn't die, being full of strong magic and qi, but the poison has so disfigured her face (another common theme) that she cannot bear to burden Heartless with her scars. He discovers this, she rides off into the sunset, beautifully veiled, and death intervenes again, in this case, coming for Heartless.  Since I seriously doubt any of my readers are actually going to watch these things, I do not apologize for spoilers.

So "Law & Order--SDU" has everything wu xia dramas always have -- orphans with fateful origins, ambiguous leaders (good or bad?), revenge missions, a martial arts culture, intense father-daughter relationships, unrequited love, magical power and swords, horses, great scenery, extremely beautiful and beautifully costumed women, and of course, buckets of blood spurting from mouths.

It beats today's news and the usual crimes in that other wolf's New York.

I LOVE CHINA

And its weirdness. If anyone gets the impression from my yang posts (the yang TAO 61) that I don't like China, please let me correct that misunderstanding. I love China -- but I hasten to add, am NOT NOT NOT sympathetic with its government, although I think I understand it. (If Sarah Palin can be VP, can I be the Chinese ambassador? Pick me, pick me!) A Chinese librarian once told me, in Idaho in ~1971, "There is always chaos between dynasties." China is in chaos, the yin-yang of development, and some new dynasty is probably forming itself. The Walton dynasty? (The biggest Wal-Mart I have ever seen was last year in Beijing. As big as the Forbidden City maybe.)

The food, the culture, the arts, the people, the geography, the tai chao (the strange blended religion of Lao Tzu, Buddha and Confucius, and perhaps now, some Jesus thrown in--it started with Jesuits and continues with Baptists), the foibles and the triumphs...China is just intriguing.

Giant live grubs for sale in Xian (qv,yang TAO 61) just a five-minute walk from a perfect caramel macchiato at Starbucks. How about that "da grande" on the street?  

And Tony Leung Chiu-wai, but that's a whole 'nother topic, explored in Hong Kong. He is the star of Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, and Lust,Caution (and some others, DVDs of which I didn't have enough time to find). All fabulous Wong Kar Wai movies. As well as his Ashes of Time, an artistic kung fu film, although that movie has two Tony Leungs -- Chui-wai (Tiny Tony) and Ka-fai (Tall Tony) -- only in Hong Kong would you have two terrific actors with the same (English) name. TIny Tony is like a Chinese Clark Gable or Pierce Brosnan or Johnny Depp. I put my hands in both Tonys' paw prints on the Hong Kong Walk of Stars, but TIny ("Tiny" just because he's shorter than Ka-fai...) Tony is my favorite. Here he is, Tiny Tony...