StuRants

Devil's Disciples

So, that soap with people shooting lightning and shit, Devil's Disciples, was really good. Well, the effects were pretty rubbish, actually, somewhat reminscent of the Commodore 64 effects they used to do on 3:45: Live! when I were an early teenager. Well, okay, they weren't that bad, and if they had been, it would have been better, like Picasso running Weta Digital, or something.

This is the imposing poster for Devil's Disciples. The young hunk on the left is not-so-young 36-year old Kevin Cheng, the stoic loner from the soap The Seventh Day (mentioned in the last post). How he defies the aging process is not known.

Here's Sally's swoonful love, Bosco, picking flowers with his in-show amore, played by Bernice Liu. Looks innocent enough, but wouldn't you know it, her ruthless father is head of the principle bad mutha kung fu clan, and killed off his parents when he was a baby?

Hong Kong fantasy soaps have their own strange conventions. One is that no matter how dramatic things are getting, there is are always a few mechanicals on hand to provide light (if slightly jarring) relief. Also, whenever anyone gets hit with a blow, it's obligatory for actors and actresses to chew on blood capsules and spit out the resulting plasma. In Western cinema, of course, blood spitting is a sure sign of imminent demise. However, in Chinese film it merely signifies that whatever blow was received really hurt.

It's hard to take a soap seriously, and it seemed that even the show's writers had given up trying when, in the final episode's climactic confrontation, there was a bizarre foray into advertisement parody, and even a song and dance number. It was sort of like the Marx Brothers hijacking the end of Braveheart. But it was all in good fun, and justice won the day. And the bad guy exploded. Unconvincingly.

While this may sound a bit like I'm taking the piss, these soaps are pretty tongue in cheek and no one in Hong Kong takes them seriously. And it goes on in the West, too. Watching an old episode of Battlestar Galactica the other night with Andy and Eileen, I realised for the first time that that show wasn't merely terrible, they'd actually meant for it to be that silly. Overly blonded aryan kids pranced around on horses with unicorn horns glued to their heads, and I realised with some surprise that at last I'd found something that made The Phantom Menace seem like Shakespeare.

Bobby v. Bosco

We've had a busy time of late with our HK soap operas, which is just as well as now is New Zealand's winter of discontent, apparently. What a fucking awful country.

Anyway, the first of our soaps was 'The Seventh Day', which Sally chose because it features her Sino crush du jour 'Bosco' (rhymes with Rosco) Wong. To give an idea of why Sally is enamoured of this fellow, here's a picture.

I'm told it's his eyes.

The Seventh Day was basically a chick soap (well they all are really) featuring two couples, one serious and tragic, the other silly. I preferred the silly one of course, the tragic one featuring a woman with a gene disorder who gets multiple cancers, and hides it from her rogueish but sensitive boyfriend because he's already looking after his ex-girlfriend dying from Aids (which she didn't get from him). Because a Japanase touris board has thrown money TVB's way, the ex girlfriend happens to be living in scenic Kanazawa Prefecture in winter time (Sally enjoyed this too).

The next one we watched was Marriage of Convenience, where, via a series of ridiculous unlikely events, the married owners of a dating agency divorce but continue to live in the same house (they remain fighting for it), while the husband is forced into marrying a girl from Xinjiang provence who happens to have a brain tumour and is on the run from Triads. By this point I was urging Sally to have a checkup as it seems the cancer rate among young Chinese women is very high.

The husband involved of the titular marriage of convenience is played by Bobby Au Yeung, an actor seemingly genetically modified to have maximum appeal to Cantonese housewives. He's humourous and charismatic, and, with a thick layer of padding around him to ease out any potentially alarming sharp edges on his form, completely nonthreatening. He has warm eyes and a delightful smile. Sort of a cross between a jolly baby and Buddha. In TV terms, he's a license to print money. Dreamy!!!

Okay, so perhaps I am a bit smitten, but if you check out this fan-made vid, you will be too!

(In case you're wondering, I did not make this motion picture.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed Marriage of Convenience immensely. Beats the flaming crap out of Shortland Street anyway.

We've now moved on to a kung fu (with flying and lightning bolts!) soap called Devil's Disciples, also featuring Bosco and the brooding, caring guy from Seventh Day. Both Sally and I are in heaven!

As an addendum, if anyone was thinking of seeing Stephen Chow's latest flick CJ7 at the film festival, best not to if you're expecting anything like Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer, or his underrated 1990 classic, Look Out, Officer! featuring Chow being helped to catch some crooks by a the ghost of a policeman. No, CJ7 is pretty much Batteries Not Included set in China, and Chow keeps himself off screen as much as possible. Unless you have children, avoid!

Apparently though there is a sequel coming to Kung Fu Hustle coming in 2010. Chow doesn't have the best of records with sequels (who does?), though in my opinion Fight Back to School II was an improvement on the original. Waiting, waiting...

Doing our bit

This climate change bizzo is really starting to irk me. Not that I don't accept the rationality of the IPCC's arguments (although I still reserve a small amount of scepticism, just in case). But the zeal with which climate missionaries preach is a little alarming. Shows like TV3's Wa$ted, in which a couple of jerks bully lardy types into skipping showers, just seems nasty.

Our Government takes the view that responses to climate change should come from the bottom up. Or in other words, "you first". That's commitment for you. Alright, there are initiatives like the Emissions Trading Scheme... which has been postponed... well at least we did ratify Kyoto... for all the good that is doing.

And, irony of ironies, we hosted World Environment Day this year.

All up you have self-flagellating zealots on one side of the debate, big-business backed reactionaries on the other side, and governments in the middle going... 'meh'.

It's all so hopeless I refuse to give it any attention. Wake me up when the seas and deserts claim us, frankly. Or as Ice Cube once put it, Fuck all y'all.