21st May 2011 Film - A Woman, A Pistol, And A Chinese Noodle Shop

Hollywood never has any problems adapting to their taste stories of oriental origin. Akira Kurosawa has been adapted till satiety and up to everybody's ears. In recent years it's the Japanese terror films and now Zhang Yimou's 'A woman, a pistol and a Chinese noodle shop'. Free transposition of the 1st film of the Coen brothers 'Easy Blood'.

 

Zhang Yimou has been somewhat erratic, having quite forgotten his initial stage of the 'Red lantern' which had made him internationally famous. In recent years he had embarked on extravagant and very expensive films of aesthetically spectacular productions, mostly of martial arts like 'The house of flying daggers', and now with 'The woman ...', a mix of intrigue and comedy, period drama with touches of oriental western. Many ingredients, too many really, to tie up into a neat story.

 

The result is between a re-make, a pastiche, a joke without much sense, quite remote from the tension with the touch of black comedy in the original of the Coens. The best part resides in the translation of the story to the scenario so different but at the same time interchangeable, like that of 'Easy Blood', a lost village in the middle of a desert, in the west of China, where the identical situations are repeated: a cheated husband engages a corrupt policeman to assassinate his wife and her lover. The simplicity of the original is converted here in rhetorical and absurd humour.

 

The idea of cultural displacement is good, but Zhang Yimou had intended to do something special where it had, in the original, only meant to be an entertaining story of series B.

Tags: noodleshop, pistol

Prev: 21st May 2011 What's Going On

21st May 2011 What's Going On

Occasionally, by chance or coincidence, something I see, hear or read, would seem to urge me to write it down or write about it.

 

Last night, while I was all dressed up and with nowhere to go, because my date had phoned to say he had been delayed and wouldn't be able to pick me up for diner till an hour later, I put on an old record, one I like to listen to once in a while when I can't be bothered spending time choosing. It's Marvin Gaye's 'What's going on'.

 

This album never failed to stir up jumbled emotions in me. For 35 minutes and 38 seconds, I listened right through the 9 songs, all marvelously perfect. For the first time, I wondered when this record came out and since I still got time to spare, I consulted Internet. Here came the coincidence. 'What's going on' (without the interrogative) was first published on the 21st May 1971. That makes today it's 40th year.

 

Marvin Gaye began recording this disc some months before, when his brother came back from the Vietnam War. He instilled in all the songs his stupefied views. It's the liverish and angry gaze towards those who paid no regard to what's happening around them. The war, the ecological disasters and the social injustice are some of the themes of the lyrics, with the purpose of waking up the conscientiousness of those who listen.

 

'What's going on' first appeared as a Single, in January 1971, and was then already a success. It's also the melody that opens and closes the album where all the songs are memorable. The proof that it's one of the greats in the music history is that it's music has always been a temptation of lovers of versions. Some of the songs had been converted to hymns, like the well known 'Mercy, mercy me', or 'Save the children', which Marlena Shaw fabulously interpreted. Others are invitations for experimenting, like 'Flying high' which the Digable Planets honoured with it's Jazzy Hip-Hop. Or 'Inner City Blues' which had attracted people like Gil Scott-Heron, Etta James or Sarah Vaughan.

 

40 years today. Some would buy 'What's going on', listen to it for the 1st time, and feel these angry words talking to them with urgent force. I am afraid nothing, or very little, has changed.

 

Tags: marvingaye, yietnamwar

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