Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Review of "Kung Fu Hustle"

The heroic characters are flying and running all over the place, fighting incredibly with mastered martial arts skill, and depicted with fantastical computer graphic and wire effects in the scenes of Kung Fu Hustle. These elements of Chinese ‘Wuxia’ films are carried out in other ‘Chinese blockbusters’—such as Hero/ Yingxiong, House of Flying Daggers/Shimian maifu, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon/Wohucanglong. Kung Fu Hustle, however, portrays the characteristics of Chinese films with approaches and attitudes of different perspective toward the subject, using parody, sarcasm, and comical exaggeration. In this way, Kung Fu Hustle provides entertainment to moviegoers between “Chineseness” and “Hollywoodness” instead of just telling the epic story of Chinese history with aesthetic and theoretical methodology.

The director of Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow (Chow Sing Chi), is a well known actor and comedian in Hong Kong since the early 1980s, and he expands his career to not only an actor, but also to a director and a producer. Chow already has obtained fame as a director through his other films before Kung Fu Hustle such as Shaolin Soccer in local and regional levels in Asia, and yet he was not satisfied with the title of “local-oriented” star and tried to achieve international recognition and capital as a producer and a director at a global extent. In order to reach his ambitious goal regarding fame and money, he not only closely cooperated with a major Hollywood cinema company to get assistance in terms of finance, production, management, and distribution, but he also changed his own film-making style and method. I think that the most noticeable changes between Kung Fu Hustle and his other movies are in two aspects: one is the decrease of verbal scenes using Cantonese and corresponding increase of visual and physical polish. The other is the effort of combining diversity of different references into the movie in order to appeal to a global audience. In doing so, he is finally able to capture the eyes of multiple, distinct audiences in the world by overcoming limitations of translation into different languages from Cantonese, a unique dialect with abundant slangs and expressions, and by parodying Hollywood and Chinese cinemas such as The Matrix and Bruce Lee movies to attract audiences in the West and the East. Eastern and Western arts are melted together in Kung Fu Hustle with Chow’s comic performance and the massive influence of the Hollywood film industry, and the movie contains ambiguity between pure “Chineseness” and “Hollywoodness”. Since Kung Fu Hustle is part of a trend in the film industry of the world, predominately lead by Hollywood, the audience is able to acknowledge the commercialism, capitalism, and transnationalism through Chow’s movie.

In the movie industry, the border between local and global is becoming ambiguous. Even though Hollywood is still the center of the world’s film industries, capital and human resources are emerging in Asia, particularly China and India, since not only the population of Asia and Asian diasporas all around the world are vast, but also Asian countries are developing rapidly in economy, science, and politics. Because of exchange of material and human resources between nations and peoples through immigrants and diasporas from country to country, it is hard to sustain the homogeneity of each people and country. The pure “Chineseness” or “Hollywoodness” is no longer attractive to the audience, and the uniqueness of genuine nationalism in the world, especially within the entertainment industry, is now replaced by a new creation that stems from conjugation and adhesion between old and new, different peoples, and different cultures, as if Asian American in the States has its own unique culture different from Asian or American. The whole world follows where the money goes and where the new originates. As people, residents in a global village, pursue the “new” in food, fashion, and entertainment dominated by this transnational trend, it is difficult to define and identify authenticity of a nation, a people, and a culture. It seems that the syncretism and fusionism is necessary for people who are living in an era of a global village as chasing the “new”.

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