Kung Fu Chef

Today's Sunday. That's mean there ain't nothing to eat at school. There ain't nothing at home either and I was so lazy to do shopping. I headed for KFC - just before heading to my lab. I had Fish Zinger meal - containing a burger and a mesh potato.

Before I left home for lunch, I watched Sammo Hung's Kung Fu Chef. (That's why my lunch was fast food :P) The veteran Hong Kong action star is quite old now. I realized his golden days have been passed as I saw winkles in his face and his slower movements (though only a bit) compared to those in his youthful days.

That's why they say public relation and popularity are important in entertainment industry. While Jacky Chan and Jet Li are doing a lot of green screens and are featured of movies with a large budget for CGI effects, the beloved fat guy is performing stunts scenes in most traditional way.  The movie featured almost no green screen effects nor post-production touches excepted for very cheap and cartoon-like 3D effects (which are rare and short) and a few un-realistic jumps (or flys ?). 

The story is simple, common Kung Fu story arc with the cooking parts, neatly blended in. The characters are cool though not exceptional. Fight scenes are performed well. However, as a high-concept movie, its story-telling pace is something. I feel like the story-telling style is a little ruggish. I feel it a little bit hard to swallow the plot (I don't buy the story arc completely). But it's still better than Korea's Dragon Wars and AVP2.

6 out of 10!

Thinking about the movie, I feel worried as more and more movies featured innovative, cost-saving  traditional production methods less and less in preference of cool CGI effects. I like Robert Rodriguez pausing the performers to move his single camera in Once upon a Time in Mexico trilogy to simulate multiple angle shots. I also like how Steven Speilberg reduced hard-to-shoot-things to mere shadows in Indiana Jone's movies and how he reduce ET on flying bicycle scene to a thing with moon back-drop (making it both cheap-to-produce and artistically beautiful). My favorite is James Cameron's opening up of Arnold's head using twin sisters. In that shot, the audience sees, in a continuous shot, image of Arnold (actually actual actor himself) speaking in the mirror and the camera moves closer to the supposed real one's (actually, a model double's) head which has a large hole. (See that scene here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3uFUu_NBnQ). 

In contrast, Peter Jackson wasted a fortune for a King Kong remake, which is totally unnecessary because the original is already a masterpiece. Michael Bay is also wasting money, with the help of Speilberg, on Transformers series, making the chicks hotter than ever and making the robots fight like Kung Fu master. What a waste !