A Chinese Tall Story Review
When the first images from Hong Kong fantasy blockbuster A Chinese Tall Story began to circulate the general response went something like this: “What the hell have they done to Charlene Choi?” Choi, one half of pop group The Twins, is not what you'd call an ugly woman but the film's producers certainly gave her their very best beating with the ugly stick, burying her features under layers of facial prosthetics, massive buck teeth, warts, a hunch back and absolutely horrible hair. But lost in the reaction to Choi's makeover for the film was the possibility that it might actually be good. And it is. Based on the popular Chinese folk tale A Journey Into The West and a quasi-sequel to the Steven Chow starring Chinese Odyssey films, A Chinese Tall Story is a bewildering, sometimes inconsistent film prone to making major leaps in logic and story and given to an occasional over reliance on CG effects but it is also visually stunning, well performed, frequently laugh out loud funny, and very entertaining.
Populated with monks, demons, magical forces, time traveling space ships, Spider-Man, and malevolent tree spirits A Chinese Tall Story is a broad, convoluted, slapstick fantasy. Though Chow himself does not appear in this film director Jeff Lau is a long time collaborator, directing Chow in the Chinese Odyssey films based on the same source, and that same sense of humor pervades the film: nothing is too absurd, no distance to far to go, for a joke but running beneath the pratfalls is a desire to actually tell a legitimate story based in legitimate emotions.
Nicholas Tse stars as Tripitaka, a monk traveling to the Shache City with his three disciples – the monkey king Wukong, pig monk Wuneng, and sand monk Wujing – to find and translate some legendary ancient sutras that Tripitaka believes will usher the world into a state of peace and harmony. But, you see, not everybody wants peace and harmony, and unknown to Tripitaka the evil tree spirits are lying in wait to spoil his plans. A massive battle ensues, Tripitaka's disciples are captured and Wukong forces Tripitaka himself to flee. When Tripitaka is captured by a clan of lizard imps he is placed in the care of Meiyan, an imp outcast from the rest of her clan due to her extreme ugliness. Meiyan's mother advises her to eat Tripitaka to achieve eternal youth but Meiyan falls in love with him instead and sets off to help him save Wukong and the other disciples. Along the way they encounter a space princess from another time, join a clan of demons who give Tripitaka evil lessons, and ultimately travel to the heavens.
Personally I wouldn't want the job of taking the lead in a sequel to a Stephen Chow film but Tse - in a different role as Chow played the monkey king Wukong in the earlier films - proves surprisingly up to the challenge, giving his normal cool tough guy image a break to show a skill for absurd slapstick. Choi, the more talented of the Twins, begins with the barest sketch of a character and eventually manages to flesh it out into something far more complete and appealing than it has any right to be. As for the rest of the actors, there are simply far too many characters popping on and off screen for any of them other than Wukong and the Princess to get any significant screen time but everyone acquits themselves well with as much as they're given to do. Observant fans will even spot a good number of cameos from classic stars such as Gordon Liu.
On a technical level the film is generally fairly impressive. Any film smart enough to hire frequent Miyazaki and Kitano collaborator Joe Hisaishi to write the score obviously has something going on and the quality of Hisaishi's work is generally matched in other aspects. Production designs are vast and lush and while the extensive CG work is generally not photo-realistic in any sense the film is smart enough to turn that potential liability into an asset by using a deliberately stylized approach to compositing the images that bolsters rather than distracts from the fantasy elements of the film. The one major exception to this is a major sequence that abandons the human characters entirely in favor of a fully CG approach and, with the human element removed, ends up looking like a mid-grade video game.
The Hong Kong DVD release is excellent. The transfer is crisp, clean and anamorphic, the soundtrack pops and the release is hugely English friendly with every single one of the extensive special features – yes, even the audio commentary in a very rare move – offer good English subtitles. I recommend taking the time to watch the director interview after watching the film as listening to him discuss the philosophical underpinnings of the film will open up a surprising amount of depth to all the manic goofiness. No, it's not high art but it's not the piece of fluff it appears to be on the surface, either.
A Chinese Tall Story is not without its weaknesses. There are some major leaps of logic and gaps in the plot that will leave viewers scratching their heads from time to time and the script seems to take short cuts assuming that the audience will already be well familiar with these characters, which may be true in China and Hong Kong where the source story is well known but is much less the case here in the west. That said, it's good fun and well worth a look.
