Another week, another pair of movies watched with The Pip (SteelyKid checked out of both):
Kung Fu Hustle:
This is Stephen Chow’s comic tribute to great kung fu movies from 2004, starring Chow as a small-time hustler who accidentally attracts the attention of the fearsome Axe Gang to Pig Sty Alley, which turns out to be the home of a bunch of kung fu masters. This leads to a series of progressively more outlandish fight scenes, enhanced with a lot of CGI.
Given the success of the Jackie Chan movies we’ve watched, this seemed like it would go over well, and we own it on DVD, so I fired it up. It holds up pretty well, though there’s some pretty cringey stuff involving gay slurs directed at the tailor character. Though that stuff was cringe in 2004, too, in the US; it’s more cultural than anything else.
The Harder They Fall:
Netflix was pushing this pretty hard a while back, but I’d mostly forgotten it until a passing mention on a movie podcast this week. I pitched it to The Pip as “a rap Western,” which was initially met with a lot of Lil Nas X jokes, but he agreed that it did look cool.
This is a Western where all the principal characters are Black, with a murderer’s row of talented actors— Idris Elba, Lakeith Stansfield, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, Jonathan Majors, Delroy Lindo— and is both very violent and incredibly stylized.
To sum up the feel of the movie, there’s a scene where Majors’s character, Nat Love, is sent to rob a bank in a white town. As the first shot of the town came up showing that all the buildings were painted white, with a title card giving its name, I looked at The Pip and said “It’s a white town….” Then the card added “(It’s A White Town)” under the name.
It is, in many ways, every bit as ridiculous as the Chow movie, but was great fun.
Bonus For-the-#Discourse Content: Don’t Look Up:
The new Adam McKay movie Don’t Look Up has been absolutely inescapable for the last couple of weeks, with highly polarized reactions along the usual Stupid Culture War lines, plus a little bit of a media/not-media split. I was about 75% certain that I wouldn’t actually enjoy this, but it was dominating the conversation to such a degree that I felt obliged to at least take a look.
I made it through an hour, while biking to nowhere, and that’s enough to both get the idea and confirm that I do not, in fact, enjoy this. That’s mostly a Me Thing, what I refer to as my “Inverse Mike Ford Problem.” The late, great John M. Ford (“Mike” to friends) was a wonderful but infamously obscure writer, who once responded to an editor telling him that he needed to make some point more explicit by saying “I have a horror of being obvious.” I’m the inverse of that— I have a horror of other people being obvious.
This makes something north of 90% of modern content billed as “satire” unwatchable to me, because everything is so thuddingly obvious, all the time. There’s just no subtlety to any of it, and I spend the whole time grinding my teeth. This is very much in that vein, as I expected it would be.
So, yeah, I don’t think I’ll be finishing that one, or contributing anything of note to the #Discourse around the film.
So, there’s the traditional round-up of media consumption. Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you want to yell at me about my dislike of heavy-handed satire, you can do it in the comments.