Hungry as a ghost

[muckefuck]

Last year when I bought an Inspector Chen mystery for Nuphy, I never expected that the Old Man would end up reading the whole series himself. He'd never been much of a detective fiction fan before, and then this year...boy howdy! I've got a soft spot for Qiu Xiaolong because he's one of the only writers with much of a profile currently living in St Louis. (I sometimes wonder if I might've run into him years ago at the VP Fair when he was still a student at Wash U and hadn't yet been stranded over here by the events of Tian'anmen.) But the one book I tried to read by him, a volume of short stories originally serialised in the French press, left me dissatisfied.

In any case, it was in one of Qiu's books that he came across mention of the Manchu Han Imperial Feast and asked me about it. Since this plays a prominent role in The Chinese Feast, an old Tsui Hark film starring Leslie Cheung Gwok Wing, I thought I'd NetFlix it for Thanksgiving weekend. I hadn't remembered it as a particularly good film--Tsui's very hit-and-miss as a director, and it came out right during the time at which HK cinema was going into freefall. Stephen Chow Sing-Chi released a cookery duel film around the same time, and it was similarly disappointing and slapdash.

I thought monshu would enjoy the climactic competition with its over-the-top Iron Chef-style nonsense, but I hadn't counted on what a long slog it would be to get there. The middle section was even more slipshod and flaccid than I'd remembered. It was also a pretty bad copy (pirated, I would say, as someone who's had a lot of experience with Chinese videos) and the frequently white-on-white subtitles made it nigh-impossible for the Old Man to follow. At least they were old style, i.e. English and Standard Chinese side-by-side. Often with HK films the translations are so munged that only by comparing the Chinese text can I determine what the intended meaning was.

In this case, having the characters allowed me to solve a mystery that's bedeviled me since my first viewing. I noticed that whenever Cheung's character talks about the "Japanese girl" he's hung up on, the corresponding phrase in the Chinese is 山口百惠. This is the personal name of Japanese singing and television idol Yamaguchi Momoe. According to the Wikipedia article, even though she'd retired in 1981, the rebroadcast of her television work in China and HK during the following decade made her the most well-known Japanese celebrity there. This, in turn, explained a curious dream sequence which occurs early in the film; it's a parody of a scene from 伊豆の踊子 ("The dancing girl of Izu"), which came out in 1974 but was apparently still familiar enough in Hong Kong in 1995 to be a touchstone.

Even though it was a mediocre experience, it did make me nostalgic for the golden age of HK cinema (and for my stabs at learning Cantonese). It would be nice to introduce the Old Man to some of the classics. He said in passing that he'd be interested in watching an adaptation of Journey to the West, but I said that I didn't think there'd been one really worth considering. But then I found that there's a new version coming out of Hong Kong next year and featuring Donnie Yen Ji-dan as Monkey and Chow Yun-fatt as the Jade Emperor. I don't know anything about director Cheang Pou-soi, but Yen certainly knows how to wield a pole. (He's the Manchu general who battles Jet Li at the end of OUATIC II.) Could be another stinker, but it'll be worth finding out.

Comments

[bunj.livejournal.com]

On Thanksgiving, I was trying to engage the Cantonese student in conversation, and thought about bringing up movies. But, at seventeen, I realized that she was probably too young to know any of the movies I was familiar with. We discussed her major instead.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Our stepmom told me she was "from the South, but don't ask me where." In the background Dad said, "Guangzhu!" [sic]. "Guangzhou is Canton," I told her and she was like, "Oh, Canton I know!"

So the cinematic scene may have changed beyond recognition, but at least they didn't change the name of the city on you!

[bunj.livejournal.com]

It was actually me who said it. Guangzhou is what she told me. I didn't think to translate it for stepmom.