Submitted by admin on Wed, 2005-11-23 09:00. ::
There were so many possibilities with the word “China,” the victor of Film Phonics Week 13. “The China Syndrome” (James Bridges, 1979), “Big Trouble in Little China” (John Carpenter, 1986), Tsui Hark's “Once Upon a Time in China” films (early 90s), and approximately 236 other pieces constituted my options. I went with “China Dragon” (Chu Yin-Ping, 1995) because I used to be totally in love with Takeshi Kaneshiro. Born to a Taiwanese mother and a Japanese father, he speaks Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Japanese, and English (he might as well learn and add Korean to that list). In the seventeen years he has been an idol in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan, he has released a handful of albums and starred in thirty-six films and TV series.
Though both abstracts highlight the nonsensical aspect of the narrative, the latter provides background information on the cast and crew that contextualizes the zany comedy. It might be funny and feature two adorable little boys who engage in Little Rascals-type antics, but it is no innocuous children's film. Scatological jokes, what could be considered child abuse, and pastiche parody make “China Dragon” something that only adults could comprehend or even begin to appreciate—on an intertextual level. Specifically, there is a sequence where Kaneshiro's character daydreams in reference to “The Lover” (directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Jane March), “Sex and Zen” (Michael Mak), and The Butterfly Lovers story (or Liang ShanBo and Zhu YingTai). If you don't get these references then this particular segment becomes just another example of the film's (superfluous) peculiar humor. There's also that part where Shao-Wen's character wears painted clothes, including an elephant's face. When he sits on a bench next to a few old ladies, the camera cuts to a close-up of an elephant, whose trunk intrigues one of the women. She tells her friends, “It's real.” He responds in Mandarin, “What, you've never seen one of these before?” Definitely not for kids.
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