Welcome, once again, to this week’s Movie Reviews. I thought maybe because of the long weekend we would watch more of the suggestions than usual, but two of the suggestions were actually multiple films, so that ruled that idea out. Instead we took two out of the five down to the south coast while we visited Ben’s parents and figured we could watch them together.
This week’s theme was “Wizard Death-Match”. Marc Fennell chose the films for this theme in terms of strange wizards, rather than particularly impressive or “noble” ones. While this is an interesting take on the theme, he still chose some obvious films to suggest, and I feel like it would have been a more interesting theme if he had made a few different choices.
We started on Friday (after a deliciously sacrilegious dinner of Chinese food) with Big Trouble in Little China. Tough Guy Trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russel) accidentally gets caught in the middle of a feud in San Francisco’s Chinatown between factions of the Chinese population. Somehow this also involves some powerful (but cursed) wizard-emperor guy who is looking for a specific lady to marry to break his curse. Or something like that.
Ben and his family had seen this film a fair few times, so they knew all the funny lines and commented through it. Ben’s Dad likes to do this a lot, and I can’t decide whether it annoyed me more than usual because I hadn’t seen the movie before, or because I’m normally doing that and it made me realise how annoying I am probably being to everyone else. To all my friends who I’ve watched movies with, I apologise for being irritating.
In regards to the movie, I took notes while watching it because it was so strange and I knew I was going to forget things. It devolved pretty quickly into comments on how terrible Kurt Russel’s hair is. Seriously, every film I have seen him in has him sporting a spectacular mullet. He seems to never learn. Some of the notes I can’t even remember what I was referring to. One of them was “Jack Burton, so manly he defies physics”; I think maybe he jumped to kick someone and flew through the air? There was a lot of that going on, so I guess it could have referred to any number of scenes.
I don’t know if I am being overly sensitive these days from having to deal with racist coworkers, but I felt pretty uncomfortable while watching this. For me it felt kinda racist, in the same way that Monkey Magic does; it was cheesy and the effects were a bit dodgy so it seemed harmless, but something was still a bit off. I understand that Chinese culture and history and religion is pretty confusing to westeners in general and Big Trouble in Little China play on that and refer to that throughout the film, but I just can’t get past the fact that most of the time it felt like I was laughing at the silly Asians and their silly culture. Look at them; so funny with all their elaborate hells and they’re all good at fighting because they all study martial arts, right?
Ben gave me a different perspective on it, which I think helped me to understand it but didn’t really make me feel any less uncomfortable by it. He feels that every character in the film is a cliché, not just the Asian ones. Jack Burton is a stereotypical action hero tough guy thrown in the middle of a strange situation; Gracie Law is a clichéd plucky attorney trying to get more information about ‘evil’ Lo Pan; even the journalist is a clichéd ditzy woman being pointed towards a story and missing it entirely. The Chinese characters may also be stereotypes but they seem to be more self referential, in that they also realise that certain aspects of their culture is batshit crazy.
That being said, even though I was not entirely comfortable with the film, I did enjoy it to some extent. Jack’s reactions to the increasingly insanity was a nice touch, and Lo Pan’s character in general was hilarious. I did enjoy the way it was the opposite to a normal buddy comedy film; the big tough guy was actually pretty useless while his slightly weedy sidekick is actually pretty proficient in beating people up. I think I’ll have to watch this again by myself or just with Ben to catch the bits I’ve missed and see if I feel less uncomfortable the second time around.
The next night we watched Excalibur. The plot’s fairly obvious, it’s just the story of King Arthur and Merlin.
My real point of reference with the Arthurian Mythology is the TV miniseries Merlin, with Sam Neil in that role. I think that because of that I judged Excalibur a bit harsher than I would have if this was my first experience with the story. Of course a lot of the (2 hours and 15 minute) viewing consisted of us making snarky comments on the film. I pointed out British actors I recognised, asked why Arthur’s accent was completely different to the people who raised him, noticed that Arthur looked more and more like Dave Grohl; you know, the usual film-watching stuff. The film is pretty dated, effects-wise, and the acting is pretty camp so I couldn’t really take it that seriously. Plus it went for ages; I realised we’d been watching it for an hour and a half and still had to get to the holy grail part of the story and just wanted it to be over.
The character of Merlin was actually pretty interesting, though. Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, had an interesting take on the role. He was still pretty camp like the rest of them, but there were times where he seemed so frustrated with the people around him. He just keeps trying to help men but they keep not listening to him and doing stupid things all the time; then they keep asking for him to help them fix what they screwed up! I can see that being really annoying if I was in that situation. Ben mentioned that at times he seemed to be portrayed as a kind of jester at the court, which makes Arthur asking him for his advice at times take a more mocking feel, and I guess makes the character of Merlin a bit more tragic. He was definitely the most interesting of all the characters in the film. I really think I need to watch this again without Ben’s Dad making a running commentary, but it’s so long and I am lazy, so I probably won’t. What I have really taken away from this film is that I want to watch the miniseries again.
We meant to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail this weekend also, but figured it would be best to leave that until we were back home, and then watched the new episodes of our latest favourite TV shows instead. I’ve seen Holy Grail before, and the wizard in that s not really a hug part of the film so I couldn’t really be bothered watching it all for that one section. The other suggestions were the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings series, and we don’t have enough hours in the day to watch all eight Harry Potter films and the three Lord of the Rings ones, so they also got rejected. I can see why they were chosen though, the main wizards in both series are pretty quirky compared to the stereotypical all-knowing sorcerer in a lot of fantasy stories.
That’s it for this week! Next week is going to test me to see if I am claustrophobic or not, so it might not be as successful as some of the previous themes. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes, eh?