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lone, dissenting voice
Saturday, 10 September 2005 10:53 amWatched Kung Fu Hustle the other night. I know a lot of the London crowd raved about it with much approval, but I found myself a bit confused, and I swear it wasn't just the pain-killers for the headache.
I love martial arts movies, as witterers will know; I deeply enjoy the fantastic, magical, deliberately unreal floating through the air, etc. But I found Kung Fu Hustle seriously disturbing to watch, mostly, I think, because it coded itself as a comedy (and had some very funny bits - high-speed landladies etc) but was also nastily, bloodily, unpleasantly violent. Violence, as I keep on telling Quentin Tarantino, is not funny, nor cause for self-congratulation. Martial arts movie violence is usually unreal enough that it becomes a sort of balletic code; often it's actually tragic. Instead, Kung Fu Hustle had wonderfully surreal and silly moments - sudden hundreds of dancing top-hatted gangsters being my favourite - that it then re-figured as something completely different, i.e. Godfather-style ruthless brutality. (Slicing a cat in half never gets my vote).
I'd be interested to know precisely why everyone enjoyed it so much. It honestly didn't strike me as a very good film, even within the parameters of its genre.
Must now go and mark a bunch of essays on fairy tale and suchlike. Woe is me, for of such shall be the stuff of my whole weekend. That'll teach me to do them earlier.
I love martial arts movies, as witterers will know; I deeply enjoy the fantastic, magical, deliberately unreal floating through the air, etc. But I found Kung Fu Hustle seriously disturbing to watch, mostly, I think, because it coded itself as a comedy (and had some very funny bits - high-speed landladies etc) but was also nastily, bloodily, unpleasantly violent. Violence, as I keep on telling Quentin Tarantino, is not funny, nor cause for self-congratulation. Martial arts movie violence is usually unreal enough that it becomes a sort of balletic code; often it's actually tragic. Instead, Kung Fu Hustle had wonderfully surreal and silly moments - sudden hundreds of dancing top-hatted gangsters being my favourite - that it then re-figured as something completely different, i.e. Godfather-style ruthless brutality. (Slicing a cat in half never gets my vote).
I'd be interested to know precisely why everyone enjoyed it so much. It honestly didn't strike me as a very good film, even within the parameters of its genre.
Must now go and mark a bunch of essays on fairy tale and suchlike. Woe is me, for of such shall be the stuff of my whole weekend. That'll teach me to do them earlier.
