eating cucumbers without permission...

Watched recently: Kung Fu Hustle, God of Cookery, Sideways, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Intolerable Cruelty, Full Metal Jacket, Finding Neverland.

Kung Fu Hustle

I loved Shaolin Soccer, so I was really psyched for this. It’s a surreal martial arts comedy, with 20’s-style gangsters — complete with tommy guns and pinstripe suits — fighting kung-fu dressmakers and indomitable landladies. The chase scene is quite possibly the weirdest in film history.

My enjoyment comes in part from the way Chow draws on cartoon and comic-book-style martial arts — it’s like a live action Ranma ½. It’s kung-fu magical realism, baby, and while there’s not much in the way of character or sensible plot, it’s incredibly enjoyable.

8/10

God of Cookery

After enjoying Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer so much, I hunted down God of Cookery, one of Stephen Chow’s earlier films. It’s vaguely similar to both. Chow starts the movie as the rich, unpleasant “God of Cookery” — think a cross between a pop idol, Simon Cowell and the Iron Chef. It comes out that he can’t cook, so his life of snobbery is destroyed. And then it gets weird.

Kung-fu cooking, cosmetic surgery, a cooking gang turf war, a guy getting turned into a dog… it’s certainly interesting.

6/10

Sideways

I’m always kind of amused by these stories about authors who can’t get their books finished, published, or whatever; it’s a new twist on the old adage, “those that can’t do, teach” — those that can’t do, write about it. “Sideways” combines both: Miles, the protagonist, is an English teacher who’s hawking the latest in a series of rejected manuscripts.

He tours wine country for a week with his philandering friend Jack, who’s determined to sow some last wild oats before getting married on the weekend. They’re an odd couple — Miles is a wine enthusiast and lover of literature, there to enjoy some Pinot Noir; Jack is a sex enthusiast and daytime soap actor, there to enj- you get the picture. Most of the humour (and it is ostensibly a comedy) comes from Miles getting roped into Jack’s schemes, but it’s not worth seeing just for the fun value. The humour serves mainly to prevent the drama becoming unbearably depressing.

The target audience for mid-life crisis movies like this is twice my age, but hey, I can empathise with middle-aged men with the best of ‘em.

8/10

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

How could she even think of dumping Colin Firth? Madness!

I have an obsession with romantic comedies, so my ratings are hopelessly skewed. And Renée Zellweger is cute, so that’s a plus right there. The best part of the movie, though, is the surprisingly original plot. Rom-coms are typically predictable and derivative, so it’s a real surprise to be surprised (resulting in an infinite loop and subsequent buffer overflow).

The Edge of Reason achieves this originality by putting Bridget in a series of extremely unlikely situations, making for a disjointed and unbelievable — but still amusing — story. Seriously. I’ve never seen another romantic comedy where the female lead is sent to a Thai prison. You know how it’s going to end, of course, but the fun’s in getting there.

7/10

Intolerable Cruelty

The basic plot device is the clash between a gold-digging woman, who marries (and divorces) just for a share of the assets, and an unscrupulous divorce lawyer, who manipulates the courts into rather unfair distribution of marital assets based on “creative” interpretations of the truth.

To me, its biggest failing is the almost total lack of comedy related to the basic premise — I was expecting something like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with each trying to out-con the other. As it is, both characters are spectacularly unlikeable, their romance is unromantic, and the funniest part of the movie is a caricature of a gay Frenchman.

This movie is many things, but a witty comedy it isn’t.

5/10

Full Metal Jacket

I doubt that this movie could ever have been made in today’s political climate. Being anti-war is “unpatriotic” enough, but daring to be anti-military — why, it’s practically treason!

Like every Vietnam War movie I’ve ever seen, Full Metal Jacket is anti-war, and it’s pretty safe to call it anti-military too. There’s no way you can mistake this army as a noble organization of brave, bright-eyed young men and women — it’s about dehumanization, about taking in men and spitting out killers.

This is powerful stuff, and it makes me very glad I’d never pass the physical.

9/10

Finding Neverland

It’s a failure as a J.M. Barrie biography (it’s hopelessly inaccurate), but works quite well as a heartwarming, tearjerking etc. Much of the emotional impact comes from the retellings of and analogues to Peter Pan, though, and honestly I think it’d be better just to go and see the play.

Which, in fact, I now have a desperate urge to do…

8/10