Hei kek ji wong

"As a prostitute knows no true love, so an actor knows no true feelings."
-Chinese saying

"King of Comedy" is less a coherent movie than it is a series of comedy sketches, half of which focus on an incompetent extra trying to sneak back onto a film set (which grants the opportunity to parody any number of Chinese action films), half of which focus on the acting lessons he gives to local gangsters and hookers. The comedy's pretty hit-or-miss, but it's funny enough often enough -- there's even some genuine (if mild) satire, as he takes perfectly nice, normal people and transforms them into incoherent lunatics with his "acting advice." But ultimately, there's exactly two things that make this movie worth seeing: Stephen Chow, and Stephen Chow.

The first is Stephen Chow the actor, and it's his appealing, wide-eyed naivete that sells most of the jokes. Over the course of the flick, he's repeatedly slapped in the face -- both literally and metaphorically -- and it's his refusal to indulge in self-pity that makes him a sympathetic character. The second is Stephen Chow the celebrity, and it's hard not to read the storyline as being at least pseudo-autobiographical. In particular, an early cameo by Jackie Chan manages to be both hilarious and somewhat moving.

In fact, the movie gets both surprisingly dark and surprisingly sentimental for a Cantonese comedy. And it's an impressive feat that the climax -- in which he is incapable of breaking character until a wounded police officer utters the word "cut" -- manages to be both absolutely ludicrous and surprisingly touching. It's no "Shaolin Soccer," but it's worth seeing, if only as a reminder to how Stephen Chow got where he is today -- by being a first-rate clown, whether he has a lot of expensive toys to play with or not.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

When I first heard of this project, I was skeptical. See, I'm a big fan of the book, and the book strikes me as being totally unfilmable -- not just in terms of structure and narrative, but in terms of the basic concept. Hell, if I were producing this thing, the closest I could come to a faithful adaptation would be to take a film crew, load them down with a copy of the book, film equipment, and a fuckload of drugs, and send them out into the Nevada desert to see what they come up with. And even then, the story is so much a product of its place and time -- the disillusionment immediately following the sixties -- that it's impossible to re-create. The whole exercise of making a movie at all just seems intellectually bankrupt, offering little more than an opportunity to show some visual inventiveness.

But then they gave the project to Terry Gilliam, and visual invention is kind of his thing. What makes the movie work is how carefully it builds a world -- yeah, there's the really memorable visual gimmicks like the floor being covered with blood and the lounge full of bloodthirsty reptiles -- but that sense of the world being constantly off-kilter, shifting in subtle and almost subliminal ways, is what fills the two-hour running time. To complain that it lacks a cohesive narrative seems to me to be utterly missing the point -- this isn't a story so much as it's a really horrible trip, in every sense of the word.

If there is an underlying point, it's the implication that the lunacy they create and inhabit is nothing compared to the grand lunacy of the country in which they're trying to survive, to the agreed-upon fiction of normality. Their pointless self-destruction is held up to ridicule -- but is it really any more pointless than the plastic, unfeeling existence of those who pretend to be disgusted with them? The apparent sanity of mainstream culture is so self-evidently absurd that the brutality with which they attempt to destroy it in their own lives actually makes a terrifying kind of sense. And lately, maybe it's not so hard to re-create that context in our own time.