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NEW LEGEND OF SHAOLIN
(1994) Kid fu! We had to have it, and the person to give it to us had to be Wong Jing. Sooner or later, everyone's path crosses that of Wong Jing. It was Jet Li's turn in 1994 and 1995, at a point in his career when he could do no wrong. He had established himself in the Wong Fei-hung and Fong Sai-yuk franchises, both of which are liberally ripped off here-so we know we are in for a treat. The three films Li made for Wong Jing (New Legends, High Risk, and My Father is a Hero) might roughly be seen as marking a transition for Li away from costume films to contemporary settings. When he is re-teamed with ten-year-old Miu Tse in My Father is a Hero, it is in a contemporary cop film, which has a much nastier tone than the genial tone of the period pictures which celebrate the family. The initial premise of the film comes from Japan's Baby Cart series, and the scene in which the father gives his infant son the choice between the way of the sword and death is lifted directly from the first Baby Cart film, Sword of Vengeance. It is worth noting that the original Baby Cart scene takes place nearly forty minutes into the film, where Wong Jing gets through the family massacre within the first two minutes of the film. Before dismissing this film as a knock-off of earlier classics, however, it is worth noting that a lot of this film turns up in later, more tasteful enterprises such as Crouching Tiger. If you give Wong Jing the choice between originality and prolificacy, he'll have his film in the theatre before you can even figure out how to pronounce the latter. In 1996 his BoB company accounted for 30% of the total amount taken by HK films in their domestic market. David Bordwell, in his Planet Hollywood book, has recently celebrated Wong's films for their wildly energetic tastelessness and ability to change tone at the drop of a pair of trousers. You'll be glad to know that this film is no exception. In amongst the kickarse action, choreographed by Corey Yuen, there is a liberal sprinkling of ghost jokes, fart jokes, and aphrodisiac gags. One sequence in which innocents are being slaughtered suddenly turns into farce when everyone decides to fake being dead. As in Fong Sai-yuk, the film works through having Jet play the straight man and deliver the action goods, while the women (Chingmy Yau and Deannie Yip have the Michelle Reis and Josephine Siao parts) provide comedy and changes of dramatic tone. As if you cared about these things, the script actually works out the thematics of family formation in a clever pattern of symmetries and dissymetries. The father-son relation is marked by the inability to be anything but deeply serious (in the middle of a fight, Jet turns to his son and lectures him, "Kill without mercy.") This is mirrored by the mother-daughter relation which makes up the other half of the heroic group, in which the problem is that the pair can never maintain any seriousness of purpose. There is primo villain action here as well with a slime-covered Poison Man who tools around in some sort of silver metal car and is invincible. His henchmen pick up on his style and start to make goodish entrances into action sequences in detachable metal balls. As we would expect with Corey Yuen, the action accentuates canted camera angles, swift cutting, blue light exteriors, and a solid use of wire-work. But enough of this! We all know that the main reason to see this film is the spectacle of a cute, chubby little boy beating the shit out of people. The physical grace of the martial arts hero is transferred on to the family here in order to celebrate it. Would there be any such thing as generational conflict if we could stand on the shoulders of our parents and pound people in perfect unison with them? Would we have any need for this Freud nonsense? MIKE WALSH Mike Walsh is senior lecturer in screen studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, where his specialty is Australian documentaries - this means that he can save Hong Kong cinema for when he's goofing off. His fine essay "Hong Kong Cinema 2001" recently appeared in Metro and was reprinted in the booklet for the 3rd annual Hong Kong Film Festival in Australia.
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