Two Asian not-so-extremes

Speaking of cannibalism and torture, they showed up in a couple of old Tsui Hark movies I watched this week. Dragon Inn and Peking Opera Blues .

Both are a weird (but cool) mix of action, drama, and comedy, set at turbulent times in Chinese history. Brigitte Lin (I love Brigitte Lin) is in both. In New (it's a remake) Dragon Gate Inn, she can tell when she's being fed buns with human meat filling...I wonder what that says about them, heh. In the movie, they, like Aunt Mei in "Dumplings" make a reference to the cannibalism in the literary classic "Outlaws of the Marsh". So there you are, it's tradition! In "Peking
Opera Blues", Brigitte Lin is captured by the bad guys and tortured. Sand rubbed into her wounds --- Ouch!

But it's only a small part of the whole. These two movies made "Dumplings" and "Audition" (which I'd watched the previous week) seem simple-minded in comparison.

In any case, a lot of these Chinese movies have segments where people are badly
beaten and/or tortured, even the comedies! (Look at some the movies with Stephen Chow, for example.) And when they show tortures and punishments actually used historically...dang. That's scary.

Asian Extremes: "Dumplings" and "Audition"

I recently watched Dumplings (a cut down version was collected in 3 Extremes) and Audition.

Both were decent movies, watchable but not great. Directors Fruit Chan ("Dumplings") and Takashi
Miike ("Audition") each take a simple idea to an extreme, but I felt that both of them dragged, "Audition" with a slow start and "Dumplings" sagging towards the middle, and came to unsatisfactory ("Was that it?") ends.

"Dumplings": "Aunt Mei" sells very expensive dumplings from her crappy apartment in Hong Kong, guaranteed to restore youth due to their special ingredient. A washed-up middled-aged TV star comes to her for help, wanting her youth and her husband back. Balking at the first bite, Aunt Mei tells her to think of the results, not the source. Meanwhile, her lecherous husband is cavorting with a younger woman and partaking of his own elixir (baby chickens still in the egg) but to less effect. Alas, he barely notices the changes in his wife. Youth is one thing, time is another. How can she recapture the happier times of the past? She can't. The acting is good, especially Aunt Mei with her old woman in a young woman's body. I liked her character: heh, am I sick or what? But she knew when to let go and live an independent life. Her comments about the thread of cannibalism throughout Chinese history and literature seemed accurate enough. And the dumpling-making scenes were lovely: authentic except for the meat filling used.

"Audition": A middle-aged widower is lonely, so his producer friend sets up an audition for a movie that will never be made, as a pretext for the widower to "audition" prospective wives. He obsesses on one girl in particular, despite his friend's misgivings, and is delighted when she seems to appreciate his attentions. But what is he about, chasing after a woman barely
older than his son? Another randy old goat, as revealed by his hallucinatory visions (lusting after his son's girlfriend, and even his secretary, though afterwards he never even gave her a look), not honest to himself or to the women. It's his misfortune that the girl he chooses has a few issues herself. She's a total psycho! Abused as a child, she now uses torture to reveal the
"truth" about her lovers. (This is hardly a spoiler, seeing as how the DVD cover shows her in Evil Pain-inflicting Mode.) So after the widower finds out a few disquieting tidbits, she captures him and the Truly Disturbing Scenes ensue (depending on your tolerance for watching various forms of torture.) And then it ends. I found it a bit abrupt.

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