A Chinese Ghost Story

A Chinese Ghost Story

1987

Director: Ching Siu-Tung

Starring: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wang, Wu Ma

Wikipedia describes A Chinese Ghost Story as a romantic comedy horror film.  Yes.  Agreed.  A Chinese Ghost Story plays fast and loose with the strictures of genre, deciding to be a little bit of everything, albeit a master of none.  If nothing else, A Chinese Ghost Story will entertain (although I highly doubt it will elevate).

The somewhat complicated plot focuses on a lowly tax collector, Ning Tsai-Shen (or at least that was his name in the version I watched, imdb and Wikipedia list a different name for the character played by Cheung).  His work takes him to a town where there is a haunted temple, and he is forced to spend the night there where he encounters a Taoist swordsman (Wu) and later on, a lovely young woman named Nieh Hsiao Tsing (Wang).  Quickly, though, we realize Tsing is a ghost, and later learn that she is shackled to the service of an evil tree monster who forces her to kill wicked men on earth in order to feed on their souls.  When Ning and Tsing fall in love, you’d think the most complicated thing in their way is the fact that he’s mortal and she’s not, but no, the spirits of the underworld are constantly trying to keep their burgeoning romance from getting off the ground.  Not to fear, though, our Taoist swordsman to the rescue!

 

Before I go any further, a massive tip of the hat to Chip from Tips from Chip for supplying me with the video for this rather elusive entry in 1001 Movies.  So thanks, Chip, couldn’t have seen it without you!

As I was watching the opening credits of A Chinese Ghost Story, I noticed a name.  “Produced by Tsui Hark.”  That sounds familiar.  A quick imdb search, and my stomach plummeted.  Tsui Hark was the director of Once Upon a Time in China, that utter waste of my time.  Is this another giant muddled mess?  Well, to cut a long story short, while A Chinese Ghost Story is definitely a bit muddled, it was more enjoyable – dare I say a great DEAL more enjoyable? – than the poop that is Once Upon a Time in China.  Astonishing, the difference a semblance of a coherent plot manages to make.

There a great number of flaws in A Chinese Ghost Story.  This is definitely a Chinese film made for the Chinese people.  There is a cultural disconnect between this film and the type of film typical American audiences see.  The humor in the film is, frankly, utter crap.  Completely over the top, there is not a single drop of comedy in this film more sophisticated than the basest of The Three Stooges gags.  All the side characters aren’t characters but cartoons walking around making funny noises and saying ridiculous lines.  Frankly, it’s stupid.  And then there’s the soundtrack.  Clearly, the unfortunate aspects of eighties pop silliness were not contained to America, as clearly evidenced by the synthesizer heavy, electronic effects-laden accompaniment.  In a rather spectacular display of cheese, we get a power ballad under a montage of flashback scenes that WE HAD JUST WATCHED.  Yes, I know the history of this couple BECAUSE I WATCHED THIS SCENE NOT FIVE MINUTES AGO.  The power ballad… shudder.  And while overall, I do think the plot is coherent, it’s only just barely so.  It comes dangerously close to flying completely off the track completely on more than one occasion.  

 

And yet.

Wikipedia’s romantic comedy horror film does not work on the comedic aspect for me – AT ALL – but it works on both the romance angle and the horror angle.  The horror aspects, while perhaps not being legitimately frightening, are distinctly atmospheric.  And, um, can I just say The Evil Dead?  Because clearly, CLEARLY the group behind making this movie was a big fan of Raimi’s earlier film.  In the opening sequence, the one that establishes the danger of our heroine, we get Raimi’s classic POV tracking shot of something that’s racing along the forest ground toward the unwitting victim.  Later on there are stop-motion animated grisly skeletons buried in the cellar of the remote temple, and when Ning encounters them, there is more than a small “cabin in the woods” feeling.  There is flesh that oozes and dissolves and bubbles, again making me think of very specific scenes from Evil Dead, a gigantic deadly magic tongue – yes, tongue – that is pure Raimi, and even the evil tree with branches that come to life to trap its victims is straight from Raimi’s playbook.  Am I a fan of The Evil Dead?  Not particularly, but it’s interesting that a camp classic American horror film from 1981 manages to fairly profoundly influence the production design of a camp classic Chinese horror film from 1987.

 

Apart from the abundantly clear and fairly massive nod to The Evil Dead, there is a lyricism to the spookiness and romanticism of the rest of the film.  As Ning walks through the woods at night, flooded with fog and blues and Tyndall scattering, the film is beautiful.  As Tsing rises gracefully in the air and unfurls her silky robe and we watch it wave in the wind, the film is gorgeous.  And despite the ill-timed montage of romantic scenes I mentioned earlier, it’s actually pretty sweet watching Tsing and Ning fall in love.  Ning, despite the screenwriters’ best efforts, manages to avoid most of the cartoon grotesquerie that renders the smaller characters unwatchable, and retains a sense of righteousness that doesn’t feel forced.  He’s just a regular guy with a sense of right and wrong who won’t force himself on a random woman he comes across in the woods (and sadly, that right there sets him apart from nearly every other male character in this movie).  This regular guy who is forced to do battle with the demons of the underworld deserves his happy love story.  I was rooting for him, I really was.

 

While I will definitely admit to A Chinese Ghost Story being more than a little silly, I also rather enjoyed it.  The hero is likeable and not too cartoon-y, the ghost heroine is ten times more badass than the hero, the fight scenes are fun but, importantly, don’t drag on too long, and I latched onto the plight of the central couple very well, which made me root for them and gave me a reason to keep watching.  In short, when you strip away the frills and adornments – the stupid side characters, the pretty awful music, the unnecessary aspects of the plot – there’s a strong central tale that is convincingly romantic and fairly spooky with some cool fight sequences. 

Once Upon a Time in China be damned, I had some fun with this one, its cinematic cousin.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Children of a Lesser God

 

Children of a Lesser God

1987

Director: Randa Haines

Starring: William Hurt, Marlee Matlin

Melodrama usually isn’t my cup of tea.  I tend to go into a film with a very skeptical eye if it at all smacks of a Lifetime Movie of the Week.  From everything I had heard of Children of a Lesser God, it was an elevated version of said genre.  I wish I could say that my expectations were proven wrong, but nah, not really.

James Leeds (Hurt) is a new teacher at school for the deaf.  There he meets Sarah (Matlin), a former student of the school who is now a janitor.  She is tremendously angry and refuses to learn to read lips or try to talk.  He is fascinated and pursues her.  They begin a turbulent love affair that, both literally and symbolically, focuses on the issue of communication.

What I liked, and what I thought Children of a Lesser God did pretty well, was the portrayal of the prickly nature of relationships.  Relationships aren’t easy sometimes, and James and Sarah certainly know about that.  Theirs is a relationship typified by passion of both the angry and romantic nature.  James likes Sarah, but he keeps trying to change her.  She is bound and determined to stick to sign language, and does not want to learn to read lips or speak, but James, as someone who teaches deaf and hard of hearing students to read lips and speak, can’t really understand this.  He tells her several times that he’s sorry, and he won’t try to change her, but then he just plain does it anyway.  It’s like he can’t help himself.  In the “Big Fight Scene” (oh come on, this is a romance, you must have figured out there would be a “Big Fight Scene”), Sarah accuses James of not allowing her to be an individual.  She realizes that she has lost herself in the relationship.  Thank goodness for that scene, because up until that point, that was exactly what I was thinking.  Why on earth was James continually trying to take charge and lead Sarah around?  He was making all these decisions for her rather than asking her.  He was making changes that affected her life FOR her.  Thank goodness Sarah realized it, because if she hadn’t, I would be writing a very different review right now, one that would involve every synonym I could think of for “ridiculous.”  She pulls away from him, from their relationship, because she is such a strong character, she won’t allow that to happen to herself.  I liked that, and Matlin does a great job with her performance.

The Princess Bride

 

The Princess Bride - a re-post from my old site

1987

Director: Rob Reiner

Starring: Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Peter Falk, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon

There are some movies that I appreciate on a pseudo-intellectual, pretentious level.  I like these movies.  I like them a lot.  The way someone likes a really good, interesting college lecture.  And there are some movies that I honest to god truly love, regardless of what the content of the film is.  I honest to god truly love The Princess Bride.

A modern-day grandfather (Falk) reads a fairytale to his sick grandson (Fred Savage).  The story he tells his grandson is of the beautiful Princess Buttercup (Wright) who loves the handsome and virtuous Westley (Elwes), but she believes him killed by pirates.  She is engaged to the evil Prince Humperdinck (Sarandon).  In order for true love to prevail, duels must be engaged in, giants must be fought, and evil must be vanquished.  As the grandfather says, “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles!” 

Au Revoir, Les Enfants

Au Revoir, Les Enfants
1987
Director: Louis Malle
Starring: Gaspard Manesse, Raphael Fejtö

Julien (Manesse) is a privileged young boy whose wealthy mother sends him to a Carmelite school to get him out of Paris in 1944. He’s a bossy little kid who acts tough but really misses his mom. One day, three new students arrive at the school, and Julien is somewhat fascinated by Jean (Fejtö). Which, of course, means, that Julien starts picking on Jean. Ultimately, though, the two form a friendship, each an outsider in their own way. Julien slowly starts to realize that Jean is hiding a secret. This is 1944 Paris. I’ll give you three guesses what Jean’s secret is, and the first two don’t count.

The performance of the two young boys, Manesse and Fejtö, is outstanding, and ultimately, that is what makes the film really succeed. The characters they depict, Julien and Jean, are never, not once, stereotypical movie children. They are never sweetly precocious or overtly mugging. Instead, both are completely naturalistic; mean at times, sympathetic at times, but never forced. Manesse, in particular, turns in one of the most refreshingly low-key child performances I’ve ever seen. I was reminded several times in this film of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (not surprising, given that Malle was also part of the French New Wave movement), and Julien certainly shares a movie lineage with Antoine Doinel.

Withnail & I

Withnail & I
1987
Director: Bruce Robinson
Starring: Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths

In terms of razor sharp witticisms and bizarrely black comedy, I doubt any other film quite reaches the same heights – or, rather, depths – as Withnail & I. This is a film that has inspired some truly rabid followers, preaching its gospel. Even before I started purposely watching movies from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I had seen this one because a friend of mine just wouldn’t shut up about it. “You’ll love it, OMG, it’s hysterical, BEST MOVIE EVER!”

Not quite.

Withnail (Grant) and his friend, the “& I” from the title (McGann), are unemployed actors living in 1969 London. Their apartments are a mess, they don’t work, they don’t eat, instead spending their time drinking and complaining and developing a disdain for the common man. Fed to the gills with their dire circumstances, they decide to ask Withnail’s Uncle Monty (Griffiths) to borrow his country cottage to “get away from it all.” As soon as they get to the country, shenanigans ensue, and they realize they are hardly any better off there than they are in town.

This is comedy, to be sure, but it is a dire black-hearted comedy. I’m hit or miss when it comes to black comedy, and even with a number of the gags in this film, I’m hit or miss. There were moments when I was legitimately laughing, and moments when I felt nothing but uncomfortable at what was supposed to be a funny situation. So I agree with the legions in terms of this being a funny film, but I was not continually amused.

The Untouchables

The Untouchables
1987
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro

De Palma’s ode to the Prohibition era gangster mythology is a taut, suspenseful story that, despite his trademark wide brushes of violence, also manages to be an interesting look at daily life in the 1930s. 

The story is right up there in the annals of great American folklore: Al Capone (De Niro, in full scene-chewing mode) is the Gangster King of Chicago, giving the people the booze they so crave during Prohibition. Eliot Ness (Costner) is a federal agent intent on bringing him down. Typical stakeout stuff gets him nowhere, so he assembles the classic “rag tag” group to bring down Capone. There’s the accountant (Charles Martin Smith), the sharpshooter (Andy Garcia), and most importantly, the world-weary beat cop who has seen it all and, more importantly, seems to know it all (Connery, in an Academy Award winning performance). Together, they are The Untouchables.