Previously, I had divided all cinema to that of humancentrism, a cinema about people and human concerns; and the experiential, a cinema purely about attitudes and ideas. After having seeing Kung Fu Hustle, I realize that I am far more a humancentrist than I had originally thought. When Pulp Fiction was first released Paul Schrader saw it, loved it, and was horrified. The age of the "existential hero" that he had inhabited was now over, and he had to make way for the "ironic hero.” You know, now the "existential hero" is put in quotes, and Schrader was now a dinosaur. Much more so than Pulp Fiction however, Kill Bill: Vol.1 encompassed post-modernism. And I dug it as such; it was all the wheat and none of the chaff, a streamlined purified drug. And yet looking back on it, while I believe that it produced a diverse array of effects simply for their own sake, many of these effects were tied directly into our sympathies for the characters and the drama of their interactions. The Bride searching for the missing baby in her belly or pulling a knife out of Vernita Green while reciting some William Munny-esque dialogue to Green's onlooking daughter; I mean, even with the pop cultural references these are fairly intimate actor's moments. At the time I had thought Kill Bill: Vol.1 to be a pure movie, but I now realize that you can't write off the existence of the human being in Tarantino's films. He has a hook.

There are two extremes to the experiential cinema, and I'll be separating them into the highbrow and the lowbrow. The highbrow could be represented by Luis Buñuel’s L'Age D'Or. Despite liking Buñuel’s other (later) films I had a very difficult time with L'Age D'Or. The DVD release from Kino contains an audio commentary by a film scholar who breaks it down for us, occasionally rather fruitfully. L'Age D'Or ends with a re-enactment of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom. As you remember, 120 Days of Sodom is about four aristocrats who rent out a villa, kidnap several teenagers and children, and set out on a four-month orgy. Well, here at the end of L'Age D'Or Bunuel has Jesus Christ cast as one of the aristocrats. The idea, says the scholar, seems to be to indict Christianity for the perpetuation of sexual violence. Christianity suppresses the sexual drive instead of channeling it and this manifests itself through violence. Okay, that sounds like a Nietzschean critique, doesn't it (reflections of his The Anti-Christ)?

Anyway, had the entire film been about The 120 Days of Sodom this point could very well have been kept intact. But Buñuel introduces it as a cutesy-pie twist. The idea itself does not produce any impact; its isolation in non-context ensures that it never rises above the state of mere idea. I think I chuckled at it, like, "Oh, Luis, you're such a troublemaker,” whereas the sequence could have and possibly should have been milked for its qualities as audience abuse. I think that it is incredibly easy to dismiss. The scholar on the audio commentary reads L'Age D'Or as an essay that has been coded into filmic image. You aren't going to "get it" unless you are willing to tear it apart. It doesn't work as cinema, the audience is emotionally alienated by it, and this seems to have been Buñuel’s intent anyway. I think that he believes that emotional reaction is a defense mechanism against the "truths" that he is presenting us, or perhaps he is simply trying to topple our "fascist" pro-cultural state. (Cripin Glover one-upped Buñuel with What Is It?, by making a genuinely meaningless unwatchable film. Ha ha!)

And so that is one extreme on the alienating-cinema spectrum: the filmmaker will make you work for meaning and you have to do all the legwork. The other extreme is shit like Van Helsing and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which we needn't exert much energy in exposing. It's both terrifying and sort of inspiring to see that a film like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (I'll omit the similar Van Helsing in this discussion for the sake of brevity) exists. They are as big and as heavy as Apocalypse Now or Aguirre: The Wrath of God et cetera, but there is no strong or important drive necessitating their existence. These films are so spiritually and intellectually bankrupt, so utterly gratuitous, and yet, so huge that they suggest that filmmaking has become easy. Mediocre people who have absolutely nothing to say can make epic movies too.

Still, goddammit, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle has momentum. Because of that momentum, they survive complete condemnation from me. I'm reminded of Morgan Spurlock, the guinea pig of Super Size Me who offers that he can't eat McDonald's fries, but his mouth still waters when he smells them. While not at all involving, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is attractive and exciting. The film deserves mention, because I think that it is earnestly and genuinely experiential: pure cinema if you will. I shouldn't have described Kill Bill: Vol.1 in those terms, because even though it was more experience-centric than Pulp Fiction, or Psycho or Once Upon a Time in the West et cetera, it was not more experience-centric than Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. The films that I mentioned are filled with archetypes, but rather then being divorced from the human, the archetype proves to be characteristic of it. Culturalism is a function of humanity, and as such the archetype-laden film cannot be purely filmic.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is essentially acultural. To call its use of celebrity shock cameos, pop satire, faux feminist empowerment and parallels with Judeo-Christian mythology a sugarcoating of its aculturalism would be a vast understatement. The triumph, if you could call it that, of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is in successfully reducing popular cinema to nothing more than a series of moving globs of color. That thin veneer of culturalism, it's just enough to get under the radar, to suggest that there was a time when popular cinema was actually about something more than moving globs of color. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is a tenth-generation photocopy of a real movie; it's been dumbed down to a degree in which the only possible audience is one of cooing infants or Terry Schiavos still hooked to the feeding tube. Ooooh, look at the pretty colors! There is no way that the cinema can get more basic, short of those revolving lamps that project shadows on the wall.

The intellectual caste and the toddler caste disagree on the central issue of meaning. The intellectual caste sees nothing but cultural meaning; everything has been coded and must be deconstructed into recognizable verbal terms. The toddler caste disregards meaning altogether. They are just interested in look at the colorful shapes. Both castes however disregard emotional engagement. They are both grossly alienated from the movies.

That's a pretty good way to start a review of Kung Fu Hustle. It's a kissing cousin to L'Age D'Or and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and that is really the main reason that I am reluctant to jump onto the film freak bandwagon and canonize it. But I do like it better. I'm not sure what it is, but I think that my relative admiration for the film is rooted in the fact that it resists categorization as either an academic film or an infantile one. Any argument that favors one over the other will prove to be grossly incomplete. As such, I find myself unable to dismiss it as either. Rather than viewing ahumanity in cinema in terms of a spectrum we should look at it as existing on a Mobius strip. I'd hate to do anything so banal as critiquing the movies with such a calculated scientific formula, but Kung Fu Hustle suggest to me that all art is made up of the cerebral, the visceral and the emotional (that is to say social and human). Most films have some sort of balance between the three elements, in particular at least some of the emotional. But Kung Fu Hustle exists with rather equal parts the cerebral and the visceral, and doesn't dare dilute the effect with anything approaching humanity. This is not a film lacking in a value system (which would make it a "bad" movie), this is a film with a value system parallel but pretty much entirely divorced to the ones we are familiar with. To help illustrate I have designed this helpful diagram:

The film does work rather splendidly almost in spite of itself because, I suspect, movie audiences have a real hunger for an expensive grand-scale kung fu epic. We've seen action movies before but rarely anything that swings for the fences so audaciously as this. The film announces early on that if laws have to be bent to produce a certain image, effect or even gag, then so be it. I was utterly spellbound during the first fifteen minutes or so. Sooner or later, however that spell is broken. It isn't that Kung Fu Hustle is quick to run out of steam, it's just that it's so irrelevant that we eventually realize that there isn't much at stake. In a world where all the rules can be bent and anything can happen, the heroes have little use for our sympathies. Two hitmen can form swords and demons out of the sound waves produced by a harp, all of which are conquered by the landlady kung fu master's "lion’s roar": a deafening shriek that lays waste to everything in its path. So what? No matter what hero and villain do to one another we always know that they can always pull out another trick from their magic bag.

A recent four-star rave of the film by Scott Renshaw of City Weekly (a Salt Lake alternative paper), the same guy who rewarded his rare four-star rating to Jared Hess' slimy Napoleon Dynamite, actually argues that director Stephen Chow keeps things on a human level by including an homage to Charlie Chaplin (his City Lights, I guess it would be). Is Renshaw actually listening to what he is saying? The very fact that he can identify it as being an homage to Charlie Chaplin seems to indicate that the characters are essentially movie concepts and are not human beings. And anyway, to say that seems to shortchange Kung Fu Hustle's strengths as well as underestimate its weaknesses. I mentioned that quite unlike Tarantino, Chow is an aculturalist who is not interested in perfecting or particularly exploring filmic archetypes. What he does instead is parody them and occasionally even upstage them.

Kung Fu Hustle is above all a very smart and very funny picture. I laughed at it and had a lot of fun. That isn't everything, mind you, but that is certainly something. One of the film's funniest moments, I guess that I hesitate to say best, is with this Charlie Chaplin homage. Chow's character Sing stops by a female ice cream vendor to get a cone. Sentimental music creeps onto the soundtrack and their eyes meet. "What's the matter?" Sing asks her. "You've never seen free ice cream before?" He then jumps on a passing bus and she runs after him. He points and laughs at her instead, ice cream dripping from his face. Importantly, Chow has the sentimental music carried over through the entire scene, transforming it from being about people to being about subverting cinematic conventions. We're not laughing with Sing here (the music infers that we are sympathizing with the girl), but we aren't laughing at him exactly either. We don't know anything about him, and we don't know anything about her; all that we get from the scene is that which has been told to us through the shorthand of the soundtrack. We laugh out of shock toward Chow's sense of irrelevance, as well as possibly the sheer visceral hyperbole of that reaction shot. Of course even through laughing, Chow is making a very specific argument against film as art. He satirizes melodrama to show how stupid all serious drama is.

Although I thought that the ice cream scene was the funniest in the film, the audience that I saw the film with seemed to be much more blown over by the climax where Sing battles an assassin by flying up in the air, bouncing off an eagle (satirizing the flying Chinese warrior conventions of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero), sharing screenspace with a giant Buddha formed from the clouds, before falling down to earth to press a giant handprint onto the ground crushing his opponent. Buddhism is also satirized through a lollipop carried by the ice cream vendor. It's a small leap to argue that the lollipop resembles one of those sand mandelas that the Tibetan monks prepare, especially given that Chow treats the lollipop as an important symbol; when it breaks, it breaks in slow motion. It’s Buddhist symbolism in the form of hardened sugar.

The supposed heart of the film centers around Sing, much like Luke Skywalker, Neo and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, realizing his "Chosen One" destiny and fulfilling it. I say the “supposed” heart of the film because not a lot of the storyline is spent on illustrating Sing's spiritual actualization; it’s just this... thing... that happens. Far from being a spiritual film, or even a pop spiritual film, Kung Fu Hustle is pop pop spirtual. Pop squared. You don't recognize it as being in the same league as Star Wars, you see it as a goof on the Star Wars format of films: it has the form but none of the weight. Religion had been secularized through Star Wars; it was a religion that included everybody and could more or less be customized toward each individual regardless of political orientation: it was just against "evil". But even those meager terms prove to be too stringent for Stephen Chow. Imagine how low we're scraping when the Star Wars trilogy is attacked for its qualities as high art. Literally, Sing decides that he wants to be one of the "bad" guys because the "good" guys never win. Literally. The terms "good guy" and "bad guy" are used because Kung Fu Hustle is not about good and evil, but about movies that are about good and evil.

I have heard critics describe Kung Fu Hustle as being borne out of Chinese pride and to have a significance and (according to Armond White at least) a morality that is missing from the Tarantino/Rodriguez films. I honestly cannot see it. There is a temptation to read some sort of Marxist subtext to Kung Fu Hustle but I can't help but to think that this is residual to its source material. As soon as I got home from the theater I looked up my Danny Peary and found this quotation in his Cult Movies 1:

Um, yeah. That description pretty much fits Kung Fu Hustle to a tee. But as I have mentioned there is no sincerity to Chow's spiritual actualization; it's all lost in the hyperbole and visual jokes. And there is no sincerity to the conflict between the heroes and the gangsters as the two sides have been explicitly sanctioned as "good" guys and "bad" guys. It's all a goof. Mind you that the film doesn't explore social/spiritual/moral issues through pulp, much less by art; rather it pisses on those who even attempt to pursue such a quest.

White specifically made a comment as to how Chow has introduced morality to violence, whereas Tarantino and Rodriguez have not. The alleged problem with Tarantino and Rodriguez is that they humiliate their characters through violence, that their films are grisly and angry. However, I've found that the immorality of their work goes to such extremes that it moves clear around the bend and develops a morality of its own on the way back. The act of breaking boundaries has the curious effect of re-enforcing them. The shock of the violence in a film like Sin City cuts through any and all distancing techniques. The stylist flourishes of Sin City sugarcoat the violence but they don't change it. We get off on seeing a pedophile's head getting split open and we are then indicted for liking it when a pedophile's head gets split open. The very fact that Sin City is immoral is what makes it a moral film. You don't see that with Kung Fu Hustle. The violence is silly and fun. Palatable. Rather than sugarcoating the violence, the film's style changes the nature of the violence. It neutralizes it to pop. To mere cinematic flourishes. Quentin Tarantino once said that saying you don’t like violence in movies is like saying that you don’t like tap-dancing in movies. Chow takes this to heart.

Before I forget entirely I want to mention that there is something to be said about a filmmaker who actually successfully subverts homosexual stereotypes instead of perpetuating them. Just like everything else in the film, we don't laugh at the gay characters' adorable gayness, but in how the type had been subverted. Ah, but of course, Kung Fu Hustle is inoffensive. It's groundless nonsense that never has to make a stand.

Stephen Chow certainly comes off as a very talented filmmaker and, even more, a smart film critic. But I have doubts as to his greatness as an artist. Irreverence is not a defense against perspective; irreverence is a perspective in itself. Kung Fu Hustle provides a rather intellectualized message for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle: movies are stupid, which means that art is stupid, which means that religion is stupid, which means that our entire culture is stupid, which means that me might as well detach ourselves from one another and get sedated. It’s the academic foundation for the philosophy of anti-intellectualism.

Boring or difficult-to-watch movies demand justification. Stupid, manipulative or immoral movies (like, say, the paternalistically racist To Kill a Mockingbird) demand even greater justification. Those tend to be the pictures that I refer to as my own personal "guilty pleasures.” But you know, when a movie is soulless, like Kung Fu Hustle is, well, that demands justification as well. Movies need to be more than pretty pictures and derisive knowing laughter. Chewing gum keeps the jaw working, but sooner or later you’re going to want a decent meal.