Movie Review: Kung Fu Hustle

I guess I don't really know what to say about this movie seeing as I was pretty distracted during most of it. But, here's what I can remember:

This movie has the great traditional weird translation and dubbing that I expect from great Chinese movies. The word choice is just fantastic, and makes for great listening, and makes me wonder if that's an accurate translation from what is actually said in Chinese. What gets me is the ridiculous amount of idioms they use, many of which I've never heard but make sense, so I wonder if they're just clever phrases or if they actually say that in Chinese.

The special effects were less than fantastic. I wanted them to be, but they weren't. I'm starting to really lose respect for fight scenes that no longer use people, but CG versions of them. The last Matrix movie was my frist prime example of this. People, you can tell it's not the real person. It's cheesy.

But what I liked more about this movie than anything else was the social commentary. After watching the only other Chinese-American movie crossover in recent memory, Shaolin Soccer, I remember thinking if, aside from the silly story, the society presented in the movie is close to normal everyday life in China. It would certainly be interesting. Both movies, Kung Fu Hustle in particular, have reallllly strong throwbacks to old school Hollywood, and I appreciate the somewhat artsy feel the movies have, at least in their grace. I mean, they're cheesy to the core, but, graceful in a way movies haven't been in decades.

Both movies take place in dirty, run down shitholes of places, at least to my eyes. There are cities and nice enough looking places in both, but, the world you're a part of in the movie is dirty and run down and dusty and impoverished, but functional. So I wanna see China now, I want to understand what life is like in this part of the world that the US has worked so hard to make its citizens want to avoid like the commie plague.

But then again, I have to realize that both movies revolve around Kung Fu and special effects, and were probably only brought to the US because someone thought stupid US audiences would pay to watch it regardless of content, and I shouldn't use them as a basis for cultural analysis, rather a statement about what either China thinks America wants to see or what America thinks China produces that's worth paying attention to.