My Sweet Pepper Land

MY SWEET PEPPER LAND        B    
Iraq  France  Germany  (95 mi)  2013  d:  Hiner Saleem            Website

The War in Iraq cost Americans nearly 4500 casualties, 32,000 more wounded in action, and 175,000 Iraqi’s dead, not to mention 3.5 to 4 trillion dollars spent, a heavy price to pay for the disposal of Saddam Hussein, where what we got out of it was a tenuous democracy, at best, and, at least judging by this effort, we now get Hollywood style genre films out of Iraq.  We have seen films dealing with the Kurdish border regions coming from Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurdish filmmaker, in particular A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES (2000), set on the Iran-Iraq border, and TURTLES CAN FLY (2004), the first film to be made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.  Hiner Saleem, however, is the first Iraqi filmmaker, also of Kurdish ethnicity, to successfully export Iraqi films in international festivals, playing at the Un Certain Regard at Cannes, while winning the Gold Hugo Best Picture prize at the Chicago International Film festival, where the jury described it as “a refreshing film that uses different genres in an original way to deal with important issues.”  Something of a spaghetti western that opens with gallows humor, the film is set in 2003 right after the fall of Saddam Hussein as the new Iraqi regime can’t even conduct their first hanging properly without making a mockery of the ordeal, where, lacking official resources,  the criminal was forced to stand on an upside down ballot box.  Disgruntled by the bumbling lack of efficiency, former war hero and Kurdish freedom fighter Baran (Korkmaz Arslan) leaves city administration and returns home to his village.  But he soon tires of his mother continually arranging blind dates for tea, each with a renewed attempt to marry him off, so he returns to work where they send him to be the first policeman in the Kurdish hinterlands, a remote, no man’s land region in northern Iraq along the Turkish border.  It’s a 3-building town with only two phones consisting of a ramshackle police station that is in a state of disrepair, a local elementary school, and a town saloon called Pepper Land that also passes as a hotel.            

In the event the audience couldn’t figure out the subversive tone of Westernized humor interspersed throughout the film, what spells America better than Elvis Presley?  One of the more curious moments is seeing Baran barreling down the highway in his convertible with Elvis on the stereo blaring “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care” Elvis Presley # Baby I Don't Care (Jailhouse Rock)  YouTube (2:02), finally free again of his mother’s clutches.  But due to a damaged bridge on the road, he’s forced to go the rest of the way by horseback, which immediately sets the tone for homages to Clint Eastwood in his Man with No Name, Sergio Leone era.  Along the way, of course, he picks up the young heroine of the movie, Govend (Golshifteh Farahani), a 26-year old unmarried beauty with an independent streak, a school teacher defying tradition, forced to fend off her father and dozen brothers just to get there, as they fear for her alone in some backwater outpost.  Intrigue mounts when the school is locked, as this also prevents her from reaching her room in the back.  Forced to try the saloon, apparently no honorable Muslim man would allow a single woman a room for the night (the mind boggles), so Baran gives her a room at the police station, which spreads venomous rumors about their ignoble character throughout the territory.  Enter the man in black, the local warlord Aziz Aga (Tarik Akreyi), only here he’s made to look a bit like Yasser Arafat, wearing the traditional black and white headscarf (keffiyeh) around his head, draped over one shoulder, while toting an automatic weapon.  This is a director that is freely playing with stereotypical images, interjecting Western movie lore for absurdly dark humor, much like Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman in DIVINE INTERVENTION (2002), continually poking fun at the ingrained perceptions of cultural ignorance, which are largely a result of decades of isolation and political oppression.  Yet what the film does hold close to its heart are the rugged Kurdish landscapes, beautifully captured by the cinematography of Pascal Auffray, who normally works with Mia Hansen-Løve.       

While the Kurdish population is divided between the borders of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, Aziz Aga transports stolen black market goods through the mountainous borderland regions, indiscriminately selling arms, alcohol, and medical supplies, literally cornering the market, forcing customers to pay exorbitant prices while local villages go without medicine.  While this is a lesson in capitalism, it’s also corruption of the highest order, where a band of female Turkish resistance fighters also roam the mountains, occasionally engaging in skirmishes with Aziz Aga for needed medicine.  The warlord hides under the banner of moral authority, calling the women infidels and greedy whores for daring to interfere, and when he learns of Baran’s attempt to legitimize the law under anyone’s rule other than his own, he spreads rumors of their unholy alliance under one roof in an attempt to drive them both out of the region.  Govend can’t teach if no one sends their children to school, and Baran’s law is useless if no one obeys.  Aziz Aga and his ruthless band of cutthroats rule by fear and by hoarding goods, as they have for hundreds of years, while Baran and Govend are committed to new and unproven concepts in the region, such as childhood education and the restoration of law and order in a war damaged country.  Amidst this chaotic scene, a discreet romance blooms between the two outsiders mysteriously brought together under differing circumstances, but sharing common goals.  The broadly outlined themes may be overly obvious to western eyes, as is the subversive spin on female empowerment, which is all but missing in Islamic countries.  While the film does feel broadly over simplistic, it amusingly introduces liberating concepts that go against the grain of Muslim traditions, where it will likely play better in the West than in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, which are the areas worst affected by illiteracy in Iraq, higher in the rural areas (25%) than urban areas (14%), where illiteracy among women (24%) is more than double that of men (11%). 

Only God Forgives

ONLY GOD FORGIVES                    C+                  

Denmark  France  Thailand  USA  Sweden  (90 mi)  2013  d:  Nicolas Winding Refn    Official site [France]

An overly somber style over substance film, where except for the excessively violent subject matter, one might think this is a Wong Kar-wai film, as the lush visuals combined with the highly eclectic musical soundtrack written by Cliff Martinez add a hypnotic, near surreal color palette.  Stylishly impressive, set in the dreamy underworld of Bangkok, Thailand, but the characters all feel like they’re sleepwalking through their roles, not unlike Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), a director singled out in the credits by Refn, stuck in a netherworld purgatory waiting to be judged by a martial arts policeman named Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), dressed out of uniform in loosely fitting and comfortable clothing, who like a spaghetti western Avenging Angel or God, restores order through brutal punishments, bordering on torture porn, but his judgment comes swift and decisive instead of inflicting prolonged agony.  Afterwards, in perhaps the most surreal moments in the film, Chang sings karaoke while his fellow cops sit around in uniform to listen.  While the surface effects can be near spectacular, as the composition of each shot couldn’t be more remarkable, along with an edgy use of lighting and a dazzling color scheme, shot by cinematographer Larry Smith who worked on three Kubrick films, recreating the spooky element of surprise in the long hallways shots of the Overlook Hotel, but there’s little to no interior involvement, where the viewer is never connected emotionally to anything onscreen.  The dialogue is so campy during some of the most violent showdowns that it borders on the ridiculous, adding an element of the absurd to the already over-the-top visualizations, making this a midnight run cult film at the time of its initial release.  Refn also dedicates this film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a cult figure whose films depict picturesque horrors and humiliations, where Peter Schjedahl in his New York Times review calls EL TOPO (1970) “a violent surreal fantasy, a work of fabulous but probably deranged imagination.”  Jodorowski himself is quoted as saying, “Everyday life is surrealistic, made of miracles, weird and inexplicable events.  There is no borderline between reality and magic.”  All of which means this was meant to be a head-scratcher, something of a mindfuck of a movie, where the Argento-like atmosphere of menacing doom defines the film.

Ryan Gosling is Julian, who along with his brother Billy (Tom Burke), run a Thai kickboxing club, which we learn later is just a front for a major drug operation.  Julian’s demeanor is so calm and understated that he barely utters more than a sentence or two throughout the entire film, where he doesn’t act so much as sulk, but like Chang, he’s more of a presence than an actual character.  When his brother inexplicably goes berserk, raping and killing an underage prostitute, leaving her lying in a pool of her own blood, the sickening aspect is so acute that the regular cops turn to Chang, something of a specialized expert only called upon in the most hideous crimes, where his unique method renders immediate judgment, with no arrest, no trial, and no imprisonment, as if he’s not really a part of the human condition, but an elevated force to contend with, seemingly drawing upon supernatural powers.  Except for his lightning quick martial arts strikes, he does everything else in a Zen-like calm, in near slow motion, as if he’s hovering over the consciousness of these criminal suspects with their fates in his hands, outraged at hearing their pathetic, self-justifying defenses, demanding that they admit to their crimes, enacting a savagely vicious arm mutilation when they don’t answer swiftly enough.  In this way, the act of justice is decisively rendered and remains permanent, not some idealized concept.  When Chang allows the girl’s father to take his revenge upon Billy, it’s as if the world turns upside down.  Kristin Scott-Thomas arrives on the scene in an outrageously over-the-top performance as the diabolical mother mourning the death of her firstborn, still fuming and in a state of rage that Julian hasn’t exacted revenge for his brother’s murder, re-establishing her iron-like control over the drug operations, and ordering Julian around as if he was still an insolent child.  The scene of the film is a formal dinner sequence between mother and son, where Julian is joined by Mai (Rhatha Phongam), a prostitute pretending to be his steady girlfriend, where the vile flamboyance of the mother turns this into a classic scene and one of the memorable highlights of the year, a uniquely horrific and thoroughly embarrassing moment where Scott Thomas becomes a dragon lady that turns belittling and malicious humiliation of her son and his hooker girlfriend into an artform, initiating an assault of crude language so debasing that she’s a contender for the most evil mother in screen history, something of a parallel to the Albert Brooks character in Refn’s previous film Drive (2011). 

Thematically, a film this very much resembles is Taxi Driver (1976), another avenging angel film where Chang has to literally clean up the scum and garbage on the streets, holding the same contempt for moral rot and decay as Travis Bickle, using many of the same unorthodox methods as well, creating an eternal bloodbath as human salvation.   But Scorsese’s film is deeply rooted in an incendiary, character driven performance, something altogether missing here, as outside of the commanding performance of Scott Thomas, the rest may as well be zombies or the walking dead.  With each successive shot so perfectly rendered, Refn uses the photograph-like composition to advance each scene, where except for the violent action sequences, much of this film is a picture of stillness, an induced calm, like an oasis on the horizon, but something of an illusion covering up the internal turmoil hidden within.  The sins of the world are covered in a kind of toxic moral laziness, while Chang’s job is to root out each rotting soul one by one.  Scott Thomas blames Chang for allowing her son to be murdered, completely overlooking Billy’s own wretched acts, and sets into motion a series of blistering assaults on the police designed to remove Chang from the picture, but it’s as if he’s from a different realm, inscrutable and untouchable, surviving every attempt, until ultimately Chang finds Julian.  In exaggerated spaghetti western fashion, the two head for the ultimate showdown playing out in Julian’s own boxing ring, now nearly deserted except for a few miscellaneous cops, Mai, and  Julian’s mother.  In the emptiness of the room, Julian proves no match, as his opponent is a phantom, a demented godlike figure with a bloodthirsty appetite for inflicting pain, literally pulverizing his victims before walking away unscathed, leaving behind a grim and overly solemn world that resembles a morgue.  The film lacks the energy and entertaining appeal of any Bruce Lee movie, but overwhelms with its superb production design, ultimately feeling like an empty experience that is all surface visuals with little more to offer.  Lacking the well-crafted characterization of Sergio Leone, this feels more like a cartoonish homage to the macho revenge genre, where the Tarantino-ish, overly stylish bloodletting continues, but it all feels so meaningless after awhile, becoming a one note film that only grows more tiresome.

Django Unchained

DJANGO UNCHAINED        D                    

USA  (165 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Quentin Tarantino                 Official site

Slavery as entertainment?—It is in Quentin Tarantino’s world, where next to nothing about slavery is learned by watching this film.    

In matters of racial understanding, historical or otherwise, it’s a curious thing about fantasy, as it doesn’t really fit anywhere, but exists in a netherworld all its own.  Some may take delight in the imaginings of male revenge fantasies where women are mere afterthoughts, while others will wonder what’s the point of bringing a comic book, super hero sensibility to matters of actual American history?  Do we really need, as an example, a heroic Abraham Lincoln riding a thunderous horse through the rebel lines killing Confederates at Gettysburg bringing victory to the Union, or a Southern version where the Confederacy is victorious?  As these events never actually happened, one might question the purpose of anyone presenting movies in such a manner.  And so it is with slave fantasies that exist outside historical reality, where one wonders who gains from this perspective, or simply what’s the point?   The idea of a white savior director retelling a revisionist, wish fulfillment black slave fantasy makes about as much sense as a movie with Jesus rising up and murdering Pontius Pilate right there on the spot.  Is the world a better place for having experienced such a rendering?  In typical Tarantino fashion, this is another B-movie blaxploitation saga set a few years before the Civil War about an escaped slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) that wreaks havoc and a trail of dead bodies along the way as he seeks to find his missing wife on their road to freedom.  As this director has done since his earliest films, he continues to immerse his films with the use of the word “nigger,” using the historical pretext to literally bombard the viewer with its over-use by both black and white characters, as if intending to either find humor or neutralize the meaning of the word.  Of course, just the opposite happens, as the repugnant peculiarity of hearing the word “nigger” repeated so often is like hearing a bell ring repeatedly with each use, calling attention to itself again and again, where it doesn’t shock or provoke, but regrettably plummets into a sinkhole of adolescent tastelessness, as it has throughout Tarantino’s entire career.  

While the film plays out like an irreverent spaghetti western, using stereotype and exaggeration, what’s missing is the everpresent tone of danger and suspense in Sergio Leone movies, where the bad guys (Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach) are often as cunning and conniving as the hero, where extreme character ingenuity places the outcome in doubt.  In this film, like blaxploitation movies, the outcome is never in doubt, as the world is broken down into good and evil, and evil gets a taste of its own medicine.  The problem here is not the revenge fantasy itself, such as the bumbling Klu Klux Klan raid that amusingly gets hung up on the pettiness of seemingly insignificant details, but the loathsome degree of wretched sadism that goes along with it, which brings a repellant nature to the film.  Outside of two central characters, Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz, a highly successful bounty hunter, and Foxx as Django, a young apprentice in the trade, who operate as a professionally trained team throughout, and an always convincing appearance from Samuel L. Jackson as an ever faithful yet uppity house “nigger,” there is no character development whatsoever.  If this were a rollicking screwball comedy where people were continually being made fun of, perhaps exaggeration and excess would be relevant to the style of humor, but much of this is no laughing matter, and is instead simply endless talking waiting around for something vile to happen, where the foul and tasteless use of the n-word passes for the otherwise missing drama, where the South is continually reduced to typical ROOTS (1977) style set pieces and sadistic white stereotypes, people with a salacious appetite for the most gruesome aspects of slavery.  For a near 3-hour film, this can only be described as excessive, especially when it’s being passed off as Hollywood entertainment.  Waltz is easily the most entertaining character, while as a German European he’s also the least racially offensive, relishing his role as a skilled marksman, who has a way of concealing that fact through his endless verbiage which acts as a smokescreen or camouflage for his real intentions, murder for hire.     

Foxx is a bit preposterous in the role, as he quickly shifts from a nearly inaudible chained slave huddled together with other similarly shackled men to a highly skilled black cowboy with excellent horsemanship and near perfect shooting skills, where the audacity of what comes out of his mouth would no doubt have gotten him shot in real life, but in this version people somehow avoid the temptation, perhaps enthralled by the prospective financial incentives offered by Dr. King, a method used to lure out his targets.  Waltz’s introductory gift for gab is charming, where his flowery elucidation of the English language in the remote, uneducated frontier of the American West has an element of the patently absurd about it, where most of the humor is in the earlier stages of their friendship.  By the time they get to a slave plantation in Mississippi, where the continuously smug Leonardo DiCaprio continually overacts as the smarmy plantation owner who happens to be in possession of Django’s wife, a slave supposedly given the mythical name of Brünnhilde (Kerry Washington) by her white German mistress, the bounty hunters are knee deep in Southern Gothic plantation lore, expressed through a series of ever increasing levels of sadistic horror viewed with varying degrees of pleasure, such as witnessing a slave get eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs, or casually watching, over cocktails, Mandingo fighters battle to the death.  Why this needs to be exhibited as entertainment fodder in the film is an open question, as in SHOAH (1985), Claude Lanzmann makes a 9 and ½ hour Holocaust documentary without ever showing the death camps, and Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002) reveals the wisdom and cultural insight of a chained black Aboriginal in the Australian outback, continually differentiating between the brutal racism of his white captors and the sly intelligence of his own character.  Rather than escalate these cultural differences in a journey of mounting psychological dread, Tarantino simply leads us where he predictably always leads his audience, into a nihilistic, apocalyptic hellfire of explosions and gunfire, where bodies are strewn across the screen in a landscape of the collected dead, where it may as well be zombies getting blown away.  This is a sorry excuse for a movie turning the wretchedness of slavery into sports bar entertainment. 

Yuma

YUMA                        B-                   

Poland  Czech Republic  (113 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Piotr Mularuk

There’s a back story to this film, well known in Poland and Germany, but not the outside world.  Set in a small Polish border town of what was Soviet occupied East Germany, where the Soviets built a factory on the Polish side filled with Russian workers who purchased Polish goods, which was a welcomed and thriving business arrangement, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire, the Russians just up and left, abandoning all businesses and commercial trades, leaving the Polish side destitute, without any money or commerce.  A kind of chaos and Wild West lawlessness intervened, where police presence was all but absent, so gangsters took over, stealing hordes of commercial goods from Germany, which was the only side that had anything of value, and redistributed them across the border in Poland for black market barter, trade, drugs, weapons, or money, a practice known as “Yuma.”  Today, neither country acknowledges this complicit arrangement between the two nations, as it was completely illegal, especially the blind eye shown by the border guards, who often got a hefty portion of the take, a practice that lasted for several years until security measures improved in Germany.  The director spent years attempting to finance his film, but the Germans felt the subject was “anti-Polish,” while the Polish financiers balked at the portrayal of Poles as black market thieves and profiteers, considering it a taboo subject, where the director claimed “Officials in Poland said I’d never make this film.”  In fact, two weeks before the shoot, the Polish Film Institute backed out, so in desperation they called the Polish owner of the Las Vegas Power Energy Drink, today a respectable businessman, but who engaged in yuma during the early 1990s, recalling it as his early “glory years.”  Amusingly the film opens with a blatant product placement ad, again recurring throughout the film, which is how the film was financed.  They were also fortunate to receive money from the Czech Film Fund, where the film premiered at the Czech Karlovy Vary Film Festival. 

When the director first met Jakub Gierszal as his lead, he was too young to play the part.  But after years of searching for money to make the film, he was finally old enough for the role, where today, according to the director, he is the hottest actor in Poland.  The film opens with a brief 1987 preface, where with nothing better to do, best friends Zyga (Gierszal) and Rysio (Kazimierz Mazur) assist an East German (Tomasz Schuchardt) successfully escape over to the Polish side, but in doing so both friends are subject to a horrifically devastating ordeal by the chasing military troops.  The film jumps ahead a few years where Zyga is little more than a layabout, an aimless kid with no job, no prospects, and no future.  With an eye on western symbols, Zyga watches B-movie western 3:10 TO YUMA (1957) playing to a near empty theater that may be forced to close, where the rousing song by Frankie Laine is heard 3.10 TO YUMA. 1957. YouTube (4:52).  Ironically, with the encouragement of his sexually charged aunt Halina (Katarzyna Figura, Polish Playboy calendar girl from May, 1994, nearly two decades ago), who secretly runs a brothel, he amusingly takes the 3:10 train from Yuma to Frankfurt, finding it ridiculously easy to shoplift, starting with small items, like cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, but eventually with two friends, and the cooperation of Polish border guards, he is returning truckloads worth of merchandise, literally delivering the land of plenty to a tiny Polish town that previously had nothing, becoming immensely popular, like a local Robin Hood handing out Adidas to everyone, plundering the shopping malls and jewelry stores of their more affluent neighbor, literally preening in their extravagance to the tunes of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby - YouTube (4:01).

Zyga is initially driven by his attraction to a local red-headed beauty, Majka (Karolina Chapko), who remains unimpressed but shelters the East German in the opening scene, reuniting with him again later in the film, which draws the ire of Zyga and his friends, now little more than thugs themselves, venting their hatred against this otherwise decent man, blaming him and the Germans for actually having the material wealth that they don’t.  Of course this practice escalates until it draws the attention of bona fide gangsters, complete with a small army, first wanting in on the action, but soon wanting to take it all for themselves.  This portrait of greed grows ridiculously excessive, as Zyga makes the obvious mistake of flaunting his wealth and power, literally drawing attention to himself, changing the entire tone of the film from stark realism to exaggerated caricature.  By the end, this has blown up into a B-movie gangster western, where without a sheriff the town isn’t big enough for two criminal enterprises that never learn to share the wealth, eventually fighting between themselves for the town’s profits.  The criminalization of the town is complete, not only including Zyga’s family and friends, but also the church which sanctions this activity, as everyone in town benefits from having access to things otherwise unavailable to them.  This exaggerated excess is reminiscent of the exhilarating anarchy of an Emir Kusterica movie, like Black Cat, White Cat (1998), a rollicking black comedy with outrageous wall-to-wall, gypsy party music from Goran Bregović, where Halina’s brothel becomes the local watering hole of the young punks who like to drink and party themselves, literally basking in the glow of their self-styled heroism until things start spiraling out of control.  The film was shot in Poland, Frankfurt, Germany and the Czech Republic, where the initial allure of capitalism evokes the “glory years,” a consumer bonanza depicted as a momentary reverie when life was a free for all of dreams and opportunities before reality intervenes.

Let the Bullets Fly (Rang zidan fei)

LET THE BULLETS FLY (Rang zidan fei)       B-                   

China  Hong Kong (132 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Jiang Wen

Who says the Chinese can’t produce the same kind of overblown cartoonish violence that not only packs American movie houses but are exported around the world like a church of cinema collection plate, a kind of exploitive capitalist enterprise designed to rake in gobs of money?  While still working on the reservoirs and run off tributaries created from the monumental megalith that is STAR WARS (1977), movies love to create epic spectacle where more is supposedly better, creating exaggerated caricature of Hollywood proportion where truth and reality are discarded, unnecessary variables when all that matters is nonstop action.  Little more than a blur of kinetic energy connected by threatening macho dialogue, one wonders where political entities get the idea of aggressive militarism?  Political leaders are a product of their own nation’s mythology, where American Presidents Reagan and Bush were identified with “cowboy” diplomacy, a reckless form of political aggression backed up by arrogance and belligerence, the kind of Wild West machismo they saw in the movies when growing up, choosing to act upon the myth, literally inventing their own reality on the world stage.  For China to enter this monolithic view of the world already dominated by American movies can hardly be seen as progress, but they have every right to compete for the same target audience and gargantuan box office dollars.  Already the highest grossing film in Chinese history, this simply does not bode well for the movie industry overall, as this is grand scale filmmaking with an over-reliance on cartoonish computerized special effects, exactly the kind of nonsense Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli Studios, for instance, refused to mass produce in Japan, instead relying upon human manpower to draw his films frame by frame, showing artistic integrity in the creation of their animated delights. 

As for entertainment, half the fun is in the casting, bringing back big mainstream attractions that have been off in Hong Kong making mega-dollars, where Chow Yun-Fat hadn’t made a Cantonese movie in nearly 20 years.  Loosely based on an exaggerated spaghetti western style, the film is set in the wide open spaces of rural China in the 1920’s, a time when modernization was threatening to alter an entrenched system of corruption that was likely in place for centuries.  Nonetheless, the ties to the past have a way of preventing any possibility of progress, where power remains in the hands of a few who reign over the capitulating populace like typical warlords.  The writer/director cast himself as a thinking man’s bandit, Pocky Zhang, known throughout the land, but never captured and rarely seen.  His small entourage of gun proficient followers makes him the leader of an outlaw gang that robs a train in an opening scene, using a nonsensical, hyper-inflated style that is amusingly ridiculous, that sets the improbable tone for what follows, creating a larger than life persona for the bandit who immediately decides to assume the role of the governor who supposedly perishes on the train, taking as hostages the governor’s counselor (Ge You) and sultry wife (Carina Lau), the only survivors from the train wreck.  Their expected arrival in the desolate outback of Goose Town is greeted by a percussive litany of drums, with beautiful women pounding on them in a fury of exalted submission, bowing down to the new governor who quickly makes his presence felt.  Ge You, who is really the governor (a purchased position) pretending to be a counselor to save his life, is a lying weasel throughout, where his chameleon like ability to change allegiances defines his inherent spineless character.  Chow Yun-Fat, however, is the notorious crime lord Master Huang, a highly profitable crook who has already stolen all the money from everyone in town through various criminal enterprises, exploiting the citizens through excessive taxes while running a house of prostitution and controlling the opium trade, leaving nothing left for the new governor to steal. 

Immediately the illusory tone of deception is set between the governor, a Robin Hood like socialist who shares the wealth, and Huang, a corrupt and greedy capitalist who steals the wealth, two stridently confident examples of leaders who each refuse to back down but instantly feign humility and gratitude, setting various traps behind the scenes with double and triple crosses, where the blunt but insidiously clever dialogue is loaded with half truths, double entendre, and ancient proverbs, all designed to mislead the opponent.  A series of altercations ensue, each secretly challenging the other, but leaving no trace of origin, feigning innocence and mutual cooperation while attempting to undermine their enemy and bring them to their knees.  While there are traces of machismo from Sergio Leone westerns or the swagger of Toshirô Mifune, Kurosawa’s epic samurai figure, this film is too cartoonish and simply doesn’t share the same touch of grace or air of nobility.  While not as extravagant as John Woo’s RED CLIFF (2008) or as sumptuously lavish as Zhang Yimou’s CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (2006), two recent Chinese historical dramas, this effort instead thrives on continual action sequences, big set pieces, along with an ample dose of silliness, eccentric behavior, and devilish humor, where the onscreen personas add a playful yet cherished element of nostalgia, like seeing Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson onscreen.  Their distinctive personalities bring an unmeasured charm and charisma to the screen, which certainly adds to the grandiose popularity in China, but feels like a breezy, lighthearted, gangster entertainment venture that may be attempting to have fun satirizing the inept, state sponsored corruption that passes for government in China, but the film takes no real political shots, only makes vague references shrouded in the good and evil western genre scenario that plays out.  The finale especially suggests there remains a modern disconnect between the “people” and the “republic” of China that continues to operate through a Communist political structure where the theoretical benefits continue to elude the massive population at large.  This silly and nonsensical action drama may subversively, through the liberated personalities of the stars, be as close to freedom of speech as can be found in China today.