Gone are the swordsmen, heroes and women crushed by a pernicious patriarchal system. Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), the once powerful auteur, has turned his hand to slapstick comedy in A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (三槍拍案驚奇) (previously titled A Simple Noodle Story in English), a remake of the Coen brothers’ 1984 Blood Simple.
In Zhang’s garish adaptation, the Coens’ bleak and noirish treatment of human nature is lost amid boisterous and boorish regional humor.
The film is aimed at neither the international market nor fans of Zhang’s earlier works, but the masses of China, who reportedly paid some US$32.4 million to see the movie within three weeks of it opening there in December.
The Texan bar in Blood Simple becomes a noodle shop in the vast deserts of Shaanxi.
At the roadside mom-and-pop operation lives miserly owner Wang Mazi (Ni Dahong, 倪大紅), his young wife (Yan Ni, 閻妮), her paramour Li Si (Xiao Shenyang, 小沈陽), an apprentice, and two dim-witted servants, Zhao (Cheng Ye, 程野) and Chen (Mao Mao, 毛毛).
In the film’s farcical opening, a Persian merchant stops by and sells a gun to the wife, who has had enough of her abusive husband. Meanwhile, corrupt police deputy Zhang San (Sun Honglei, 孫紅雷) secretly approaches the cuckold Wang to inform him of his wife’s ongoing affair with Li. The husband is furious and hires the stone-faced Zhang to murder the adulterers.
But the plot takes an unexpected turn and the A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop moves to darker territory as the killer’s hidden agenda surfaces, leading to a string of misunderstandings, double-crossings and the age-old problem of how to dispose of a corpse. The film abruptly changes tempo and style when, with a nod to the thriller genre, the murderer executes his crime with precision.
As Coen fans may notice, the plot closely follows the original, but the film is quintessentially Chinese, crammed with comical brawls and gags borrowed from the tradition of errenzhuan (二人轉), a folk art form from northeast China that involves storytelling, singing, dancing and clowning about.
Zhang calls on errenzhuan stage actors Xiao Shenyang (a showbiz sensation after his appearance on China Central Television last year), Mao Mao and Cheng Ye to elicit wows and laughs with tongue-twisting wordplay and acrobatic feats.
Sadly, the comical segments are farcical farragoes cooked up by the cast’s flamboyant acting, silly dialogue and crude humor. Even the cameo by celebrated comedian Zhao Benshan (趙本山) as a boggle-eyed police chief is nothing more than a gimmick for cheap laughs.
It’s as if Zhang couldn’t care less about the discord that arises from panoramic shots of awe-inspiring barren landscapes (recalling the director’s Hero (英雄)) populated by buffoons in gaudy costumes.
The film’s highlight may be the cast’s hip-hop routine, accompanied by Zhang rapping in his native Shaanxi dialect, during the end credits.
If you are a Western and especially a white foreign resident of Taiwan, you’ve undoubtedly had the experience of Taiwanese assuming you to be an English teacher. There are cultural and economic reasons for this, but one of the greatest determinants is the narrow range of work permit categories that exist for Taiwan’s foreign residents, which has in turn created an unofficial caste system for foreigners. Until recently, laowai (老外) — the Mandarin term for “foreigners,” which also implies citizenship in a rich, Western country and distinguishable from brown-skinned, southeast Asian migrant laborers, or wailao (外勞) — could only ever
Sept. 23 to Sept. 29 The construction of the Babao Irrigation Canal (八堡圳) was not going well. Large-scale irrigation structures were almost unheard of in Taiwan in 1709, but Shih Shih-pang (施世榜) was determined to divert water from the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) to the Changhua plain, where he owned land, to promote wet rice cultivation. According to legend, a mysterious old man only known as Mr. Lin (林先生) appeared and taught Shih how to use woven conical baskets filled with rocks called shigou (石笱) to control water diversion, as well as other techniques such as surveying terrain by observing shadows during
In recent weeks news outlets have been reporting on rising rents. Last year they hit a 27 year high. It seems only a matter of time before they become a serious political issue. Fortunately, there is a whole political party that is laser focused on this issue, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP). They could have had a seat or two in the legislature, or at least, be large enough to attract media attention to the rent issue from time to time. Unfortunately, in the last election, Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) acted as a vote sink for
This is a film about two “fools,” according to the official synopsis. But admirable ones. In his late thirties, A-jen quits his high-paying tech job and buys a plot of land in the countryside, hoping to use municipal trash to revitalize the soil that has been contaminated by decades of pesticide and chemical fertilizer use. Brother An-ho, in his 60s, on the other hand, began using organic methods to revive the dead soil on his land 30 years ago despite the ridicule of his peers, methodically picking each pest off his produce by hand without killing them out of respect