A Horrible Movie

This week I watched A Beautiful Life (no, the Chinese one) by director Andrew Lau. This is the guy that did cinematography for City on Fire? What HAPPENED?

Basically a cop (you just can't write a movie that's NOT about cops, can you, Hong Kong?) named Fang Zhengdong (played by Ye Liu) runs into a drunk, Li Peiru (infamous porn star Shu Qi returns to the screen for another shitty role) who attaches herself to him until he is brow-beaten into liking her. Legend Anthony Wong is also in this movie, randomly becoming blind like halfway through with no explanation, but it doesn't make anything better.

I have been talking a lot lately about how Taiwanese and Chinese movies seem to fulfill certain gender roles, and one ideal of manhood is the caring, artistic guy who has a good job and saves the girl gone astray. This movie absolutely shattered my expectations with how EXACTLY FUCKING RIGHT I WAS. Shu Qi basically spends all her time annoying the fuck out of this poor guy who is just trying to prove his sensitivity by taking care of his slightly ret- I mean... really unique brother while all his cop friends bother him about not being married. About the time I was saying dryly to the screen, "This is the part where he saves her from being a worthless alcoholic by using love," the words actually poured out of every actors' mouth, in a row. "My grandma says I can save people." "You have to save me." And Anthony Wong's unbelievable line which he actually said with his mouth, "You always said you could save people, well here's a damsel in distress." Back the fuck off, movie, I get it!

But before he saves her, there is some other random crap thrown in to lengthen the movie to the Chinese standard of for fucking ever. Fang's demonstrate-how-great-a-guy-I-am slightly ret- err... retrospectively not that stupid brother falls in love with a mute girl and her mother lets her marry him despite his ret- uh, retelling of stories not being so good. Awww are you crying yet? Are the ratings going up? Shu Qi is crying for sure, which kicks off the longest drunk girl crying scene in a movie or even in real life, ever. There's probably a youtube video for this *clickety clack* yep.

So after some more drinking (I finish off a whole fifth of Johnnie Walker when I get home from work too, what?) They finally get together--but oh nooooo he has a brain condition. He had been dropping and forgetting shit up until now and finally he sees the doctor about it. Bad news.

I didn't really see what happened for a while because I swear to you I laughed out loud for like a minute and a half when he asked, "What does this mean?" and the doctor said, "You could be fine. Or...you could forget everything."

Yep. Well he does start to forget shit and she waits for him one day like a loyal saved little girl while he rides the bus around and suddenly is like, "FUCK that was my stop--HOURS AGO." He runs to her and apologizes because she has been waiting out in the cold but then...but THEN she says, "Don't worry, you gave me an angel. You gave me a little hand warmer...
...
...
...
...
You're going to be a father!" The end.












Wait, what? How much more time? MORE THAN HALF A FUCKING HOUR TO THIS MOVIE!?

Ratings:

Pointlessly Dragging On: 5 out of 5. This movie had all the symptoms of a writer that had absolutely no clue how to end it. Finally he chases a robber, getting flashbacks of that time he was a cop that led to him getting amnesia, and when he looks around the guy nails him with a brick. No, he's not dead, and you have to wait like ten more minutes for the absolutely expected "That hit to the head cured his amnesia!" thing. But he just sort of wakes up and the movie is over. Fuck that, I want the super predictable explanation at this point, because otherwise I waited though all that for NOTHING!

Anthony Wong Saving It: 0 out of 5. To put this into perspective, I like to see him as the Morgan Freeman of Asian cinema. But it didn't happen. He said some sage stuff or whatever but mostly sat there looking like, "What the hell is happening to my career?" For shame.

Catering to Gender Stereotypes: 5 out of 5. I just want to see a movie where Shu Qi doesn't play the immoral, sex-crazed lady that has to be saved by the good guy. But then again, single women are whooores, amirite?

Overall: 2 out of 5. Still better than most the shit I read. OH YEAH and the whole time I was like, "This Fang guy really reminds me of someone. What movie has he been in?" Turns out he's the Asian version of Ted from HIMYM. Bonus pointsss!


If you want to read about the Asian version of YOU visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

(His brother is retarded)

Movie Night: I'm not crying, YOU'RE crying!

I had to write an analysis of a movie anyway and I thought, "Hey, why not be lazy and kill two birds with one stone?" and the movie turned out to be ABOUT birds. Fate. It's called Stilt (horrible translation) by director Yin-chuan Tsai.

I have to apologize in advance if this post isn't very funny. I picked out a movie with a couple on the front hoping it would be a horrible love story and I could point and laugh, but if there's anything I've noticed about Taiwanese movies that look like they will be an amateur mangling of love, it's that they always seem to be the opposite.

Is it a love story? No, not in the sense you're thinking. It is about love and sexuality, but again, not in the way you're thinking you fucking facebook relationship status-looking high school girl! (My largest group of readers by far). This movie attacks what it is to be a man in Taiwan, and what it is to be a woman in Taiwan without the plot really being about either of those things.

The main character (never caught his name, I'm terrible at Chinese names, but he's played by Sheng-hao Wen so we'll call him Wen) and his brother Xiong represent two ideal tropes of manhood in Taiwan that fall short. Wen is the sensitive artist type with a wife and he provides for his family but he is shown to be impotent when it comes to actually caring for them or conceiving a child with his wife. The dots are fully (and skillfully) connected when he goes to the sperm bank and fails to produce more than a few drops, apologizing to the nurse when he hands it over. She clinically replies, "That will do" (fucking brilliant). His job is bird watching and that metaphor turns out to be clever in several ways because he cares more about the fucking birds and their families in order to avoid his own inability to have a child. He only confronts it when his bird family epic fails at not killing their chicks with a dash of "nature will figure itself out" commentary.

Xiong is the rough Taiwanese guy that doesn't use Mandarin and lives with his mother to support her while drinking and smoking and generally being manly. He drinks too much though because it turns out their dad died of liver disease and he has handled it by giving it to himself as well. He is impotent because he is too uneducated and can't manage to make money for his family. Wen pays for his doctor bills, his mother, and even his marriage to a Vietnamese girl. His wife also represents his impotency because as hopeless as her chances of success are, she becomes their source of income through busing tables.

Their mother is the complaining Taiwanese mother trope that highlights all of their inadequacies. She points out in one dinner conversation that Wen doesn't give a shit about them, his wife can't bear a child, Xiong can't make any money, and his own wife is worthless because she can't even speak Chinese. BOOM. She does it more subtly of course, but she highlights the struggle of the two types of Taiwanese women: The wife that can't have a child (because of infertility or work) and the wife that is a mail order bride.

The Vietnamese wife is a great character too because she doesn't even have any dialogue (portraying the submissive but utterly useless other than to look at import wife [the mother also rails about her not being able to cook because they didn't have electricity in her village]) until she reads aloud the letter from her unresolved ex-lover in Vietnam after half the movie.

I won't spoil it but lets just say shit hits the fan. I was a little scared because Asian drama tends to be over the top. "Your wife has cancer. And your daughter got hit by a car. But she's alive. But she's a paraplegic. And the bus was full of AIDS. And the AIDS vaporized into the air and your father breathed it in while he was trying to rescue her." OR it tends to end too perfectly "But luckily the oncoming car she was sandwiched between had a doctor who was going to commit suicide but he feels so guilty that he couldn't do it until he did everything he could for your daughter and he's immune to AIDS so he used his spinal fluid to cure her which also cured her paralysis unexpectedly and cancer ended yesterday."

But this movie struck a balance between bad things happening and things working out. It demonstrated the problem with your standard love story that's sad because cancer/memory loss (Yes, fuck you Notebook and whatever the cancer one was called. Thinking of the saddest thing to make money off of has got to be somehow immoral). These problems were realistic and, more importantly, the solutions were too. When it comes to sexuality and love, sometimes there ISN'T A FUCKING CLEAR ANSWER BUT YOU DEAL WITH IT ANYWAY. Fucking romcoms.

Ratings:

Unanswered Questions: 5 out of 5. I didn't even mention that the two brothers hadn't talked for years and you're waiting to find out why for the whole movie. The "solution" is way better than the tactless flashback your shit-conditioned mind is expecting. It turns out nobody really knows when they lost touch; it's revealed Xiong actually paid Wen's tuition because their father got ill, then took care of their father while Wen served military, then sat at his death bed when Wen went off to Taipei, and finally just got pissed at Wen being the successful one that didn't give a shit about anyone else. There is no "oh it was just a misunderstanding" or shocking "we stabbed that hooker together" scene. And Xiong sometimes props houses up on stilts because their town is sinking into the sea. The birds' names are stilts. THE METAPHORS ARE FUCKING ENDLESS.

I Fucked Up and Learned My Lesson and Became a Real Man Romance Movie Inevitable Speech: 0 out of 0. There wasn't one, which is a good thing. Again, this isn't a romcom but Wen still kisses the sexy birdwatching girl and his wife leaves for a while, but their solution is one of the most realistic I have ever seen in a movie. Xiong's solution with his foreign wife who would rather be with another guy is also not bad.

Crying: 5 out of 5. I have to admit, I cried alone in the dark in front of my laptop in my underwear like a little girl watching the Notebook. But again, FUCK THE NOTEBOOK.

Overall: 4.25 out of 5. I liked it, but I don't really enjoy straight drama and I wouldn't watch it again, but it was good. There were also just a few tiny things I had problems with, but this is the longest post ever so END.

If you want to cry like a little girl--out of disgust--check out amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

(P.S. the your father still has AIDS and the doctor did commit suicide after your sister showed signs of recovery.)