shaolin soccer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Hollywood is always looking for high concept movies that can become franchises, dependent more on the premise or the character than the talent involved. In that same spirit, Hong Kong superstar Stephen Chow started his own franchise. His kung fu comedy Shaolin Soccer was a huge success in 2001, but he resisted any direct sequels. Instead, he joined with Japanese producer Chihiro Kameyama to make a spin off: Shaolin Girl.

Reminiscent of the original, the titular character is trained in Shaolin-style kung fu and wants to share that training with others. (One minor change: instead of soccer, she plays lacrosse.) The lone warrior must learn to become a team player. The film was released in Japan in April and is still playing after seven weeks. Mark Schilling of The Japan Times was not impressed, though: "This sort of thing plays well in Japan, especially with the TV-watching masses who are Kameyama's main target, but the rest of the world has so far remained indifferent."

Now Shaolin Girl has been released in Singapore and the buzz is not good. Stefan S. at A Nutshell Review suggested that a cameo by Chow might have rescued the picture, "but alas, knowing that it would stink, he rightfully kept his distance. And so should you." Blogger/movie reviewer r3gular at The World Through Me was just as blunt: "It's draggy, long-winded and some scenes were almost painful to continue watching."

I'm disappointed. The trailer looked promising. And the world needs more Shaolin girls.

Already a popular success in Asia, Stephen Chow's CJ7 arrives in the US, hailed as a Chinese version of ET. (It opens today in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before expanding to other cities in the coming weeks.) Like its predecessor, CJ7 features a young boy who befriends a small alien creature, from whom the boy learns important life lessons. Instead of ET's Elliott, living in the lonely suburbs and pining for his father's return to patch up his divorced family, CJ7 features Dicky Chow (Xu Jiao), living in abject poverty and wishing that his widowed father had enough money to buy him a toy. But don't worry about the differences in the set-up: CJ7 is a gentle and sentimental fantasy, just like ET, filled to the brim with humor. It also casts a sharp eye on the true nature of modern children.

Poor Dicky Chow! The young lad doesn't mind so much going to school with dirt on his face. He doesn't mind so much that his mother is dead and his father can barely provide for the two of them. But what he does mind is when the other kids make fun of his dad. And, what finally sets him off is when he realizes that he can't have the same toy as the other boys in school.

Stephen Chow's still got it. Now in his mid 40's, the Chinese comic actor par excellence has slowed down his output since his prolific earlier days (i.e. the early 90s), when it wasn't unusual for him to appear in three, four or more flicks per year. Firmly in control of his own projects as star, writer, and director, his last two films (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle) have been comedy gold and incredibly successful at the worldwide box office.

His latest, CJ7, a family-oriented fantasy comedy about a kid and a cute alien critter, opened a few days ago in Asia and is making ordinary moviegoers act like postal carriers. (You know, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night ...") Variety reports that thousands of people in mainland China "defied blizzards" just to see the film, pushing the box office take to 60 million yuan ($8.35 million) in just four days of release. It's been equally successful in Hong Kong, grossing HK$15.8 million ($2.03 million) on a massive 100 screens, according to Variety. A different source, Box Office Mojo, puts the gross at $2.11 million, which translates into $24,894 per screen at 85 locations. And in Taiwan, Variety says partial figures peg the total so far at NT$35 million ($1.09 million).

As Monika reported, Chow talked up the film at a recent press conference. The reviews so far has been mixed to good, but not ecstatic (see Variety, Twitch, LoveHKFilm). CJ7 opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 7, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics; hopefully the rest of us won't have to wait much longer to see it. To get an early taste, check out the trailer.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.