Last Hero in China (1993)

After three installments of Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China films, star Jet Li left the series, apparently due to disputes with Tsui and his production company Film Workshop, and promptly turned around and played the character he played in the OUATIC series, Wong Fei-hung, for Wong Jing's Workshop. This struck me a little as being like Christopher Reeve playing Superman for a lower-budget studio, but the parallel does not quite stick. Wong Fei-hung is not a proprietary fictional character, but a man who lived in the late Qing and early Republican eras in southern China, a practitioner of Chinese medicine and teacher of Hung Gar kung fu whose reputation as a nationalist folk-hero blossomed after his death in 1924, first through serialized novels and, starting in the late forties, on the silver screen. Wong is the most durable and beloved hero in Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and is also possibly world cinema's most filmed character: Kwan Tak-hing, the movies' first Wong, played him in nearly a hundred films during his career, though Western viewers probably are more familiar with Jackie Chan's revisionist take on the character in the Drunken Master series.

As the Spielberg of Hong Kong cinema, Tsui Hark brought Wong and the martial arts film into the age of big-budget blockbusters with the OUATIC series, showing Wong Fei-hung battling corrupt Qing dynasty officials, foreign profiteers and spies, and nativist fanatics while confronting the changes sweeping China at the time: Western influence, technology, manners, and ideals, and considering how these changes would affect the Chinese national character. Wong Jing is in many respects at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tsui, a screenwriter, producer and director whose taste for unabashed exploitation has earned him friends and enemies the world over, and 1993's Last Hero In China is not nearly as ambitious or as lavish as the films it apes. Jet Li played Wong Fei-hung for Tsui as a relatively youthful but serious man, full of Confucian gravity and sternness, and for Wong Jing he does essentially the same, while adapting the hero subtly to Wong's predilections for over-the-top humor and silliness.

As the film opens, Wong is looking for a new place for his clinic, Po Chi Lam, as students and patients fill the old place to bursting and a notice of a three-fold rent hike comes in. His two senior students, the doughty Foon (Leung Ka-yan) and buck-toothed So (Dicky Cheung), arrange for a spacious new building for the clinic with a man who happens to have the given name Wong Sifu, who admires Wong and would like to learn kung fu with him. Unfortunately, this admiring "Mass Tar Wong" is a brothel-keeper whose establishment, to Wong Fei-hung's embarrassment, is next door to the new Po Chi Lam. But this is the least of Wong Fei-hung's worries, as a heretical sect of monks, with the aid of a local Qing official (Chai Ngong-kau) who is actually a plant loyal to the rebellious nativist Boxer association, kidnap women and traffick them to Southeast Asia to benefit the Boxers, and children are being deafened by a poisonous patent medicine marketed by unscrupulous Westerners.

It isn't necessary to be familiar with the OUATIC series to enjoy this film, but it helps. As tongue in cheek as the OUATIC series was earnest, Last Hero In China, part knock-off, part parody, has fun with the corrupt Qing officials, profiteering Westerners, and nativist fanatics of the series, as well as Wong's upright, almost priggish character and the familiar Wong Fei-hung theme (originally a Cantonese traditional song, developed into a stirring anthem for the series), and especially Wong's famous mastery of the acrobatic spectacle, the Lion Dance: having been humiliated in a Lion Dance competition not by another lion, but by a group led by Qing Legate Officer Lui (played with Simon Legree-ish gusto by Chai Gnong-kau) dressed as a giant fire-breathing centipede and deafened by accidental ingestion of a poisonous Western patent medicine, he escapes to the country to regroup and attempt a cure for his deafness. Inspired by watching a chicken in a farmyard catching bugs, he returns for the most memorable set-piece of the film, defeating the centipede with his new Rooster Style of kung fu complete with wings, claws and beak (the Chinese title of the film is more or less literally "Wong Fei-hung's Iron Rooster Vs. Centipede").

Most of my initial exposure to Jet Li's work has been in his more or less straight-ahead action-hero roles (the OUATIC series, Bodyguard from Beijing, High Risk), roles which displayed his athletic talents but were often weak on characterization. He is capable of a boyish charm when he wants to display it, but he often comes across as being impatient with frivolity. Fortunately, I am beginning to discover the lighter side of Li, and the rooster scene, which segues into a final "drunken boxing" throwdown with Chai Ngong-kau, is a wonderful send-up which he plays to the hilt. As I go through my DVD collection, you can probably expect to read more about Li's lighter side here.

Last Hero in China does not pretend to have the resources available to Tsui in his series, and the film looks it, with the lack of lavish sets covered with that ubiquitous early-nineties style of lower-budget filmmaking consisting of wide-angle, fast-moving camerawork, saturated color and expressionistic lighting. The film does have a number of well-known names in the supporting roles: Anita Yuen plays one of Pimp Wong's girls, with Cheung Man as a young woman from the north who has come to Canton in search of her lost sister, and Gordon Liu Chia-hui as head of the monks. Action direction is provided by Yuen Woo-ping, whose penchant for wirework is given full rein here, giving the action scenes an over-the-top quality in keeping with the general madcap tenor of the film.

My Father, Harlan (1936-2006)

My father Harlan passed away on March 21, 2006, at the age of 69. He had recently been moved to a nursing home after an automobile accident in January in which both his legs and his ribcage were broken and his shoulder was badly damaged. Though stable enough to be moved to a nursing home, he was in a weakened state and was vulnerable to bloodclots and strokes, and he had a very long period of limited mobility and dependence on caregivers to look forward to. Many people who are seriously ill "give up" at a certain point when they feel that further life will be a burden to them, and I think that that might have been the case with my father, whose independence was very important to him. Consequently his death was not quite a surprise when my brother called and told me.

My brother arranged for the memorial March 30 at Patrick's, a bar in my hometown of St. Peter, Minnesota that was a constant haunt of Harlan's, and where he had assembled a group of friends who were loyal and loving. He had a reputation as a "geezer," a colorful and garrulous eccentric. He was a member of the "mug club" at Patrick's, which meant that a beer mug was kept there for his use, and this held his ashes while my brother made some prepared remarks and some of his friends told stories and shared reminiscences. My brother is a practitioner of Asatru, a heathen spirituality based on Norse mythology, and he performed a couple of Asatru-style toasts with homemade honey mead supplied by one of his friends, and general socializing followed. It was an unconventional and informal and a not at all emotionally demanding sort of funeral, and it all went very well. The mead was very good too: strong but with a delicate champagney flavor. I had not been close to my father for many years, for reasons that are rather personal, confusing and complicated, and while for all my adult life I found him difficult to tolerate and it was easier to simply disconnect from him and live my own life, I was often nagged by guilt for this, and it was heartening that he had his friends and his own de facto family, who were as close to him as any blood relations. The feelings for my father were real and profound as we said goodbye to him together.

Harlan was remembered by his friends and family especially for his hammy, performance-oriented streak. He had more or less appropriated Hal Holbrook's performances in the role of Mark Twain and performed this material a number of times for family gatherings and in a couple of small venues, and people appreciated these performances as though he had created the role himself. A video of one of these performances was played at the gathering, and a copy of a flyer and a newspaper clipping displayed. I was always slightly embarrassed about the Mark Twain thing, especially the fact that it was essentially plagiarism, but his peers found his turns as Twain entertaining, and they were clearly not being judgemental on theatrical or artistic terms.

My father was a talker, a drinker, a reader and collector of music. At one point he studied for the Lutheran ministry, but his faith lapsed and he worked a strange succession of jobs, including stints as a stagehand in Lake Tahoe (where my brother and I were born) and a disc jockey in South Dakota before the State of Minnesota, through a scheme of services for the blind (he had lifelong vision problems and was legally blind) got him started in a small business running a canteen in the Security Hospital in St. Peter, where my mother, who passed away five years ago, also worked as a nurse. Harlan was a man of varied and eclectic tastes in music and books: his record collection included what might be called "belly-dance" music, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, country music, bluegrass, a sprinkling of jazz and an assortment of other odds and ends. He liked nineteenth-century novels, history, Sherlock Holmes, movie Westerns, old radio programs, and old comedy. On occasion, he experimented with musical instruments: at various times, he owned a concertina, a banjo, a mandolin, a Dobro (a guitar with a metal resonator played with a steel), and an electronic keyboard from Radio Shack. He was not a disciplined individual, and tended to abandon these when they got too difficult. He also had a couple of pets while I was growing up, a small bad-tempered parrot named Percy and a very large, very timid and possibly not terribly intelligent dog, a mastiff named Guenevere, who I usually just called Gwenny, and who was, to her befuddlement, constantly being scolded for any misbehavior by the senior dog of the family, a mutt half her size named Tina.

My own problems with my father tended to do with his drinking and also his often rather bitter views of life. He was a great talker but a less good listener, and there was a deep and abiding sadness underneath the jokes and irreverence. I thought of him as a deeply wounded man who spent his life nursing his wounds without healing them. Many of my own flaws, as well as my strengths, I inherited from my father, and from a young age I found the darker side of his character terrifying, though not in any physical sense. He was a sensitive man from a rural working class background and he must have felt the loneliness of being an outsider in such an environment early, and I occasionally caught glimpses of his hurt, anger, and wounded pride, glimpses of what I feared I would not be able to escape myself. I shut myself off from him after a couple of alcohol-fueled scenes upset me terribly as a teenager, scenes that resulted in my parents being separated, and finally divorced. As I became older, I felt guilty at feeling I had to escape from him without being able to find it in myself to initiate any sort of reconciliation. Such reconciliation would have most likely meant, my father being the stubborn man he was, that I would have been obliged to bury, regardless of the cost to me emotionally, the real hurts of the past. Now that he is gone, the possibility for reconciliation on any terms is lost, and I am deeply sorry for that. No doubt I was not terribly fair to him myself in all this, and I regret that too.

In our home there were always books and records, and we were always free to browse them: Harlan was not what I would call an intellectual, but it was clear that culture was not a dirty word and that it was always okay to explore new ideas. Neither he nor my mother felt that their jobs as parents were to program us with preconceptions, and they did not attempt to limit our intellectual or spiritual curiosities. While they would worry about our progress in school, they were not concerned about engineering our lives into conventional paths if we did not wish to follow them. More than the parents of most of my peers, they respected us as individuals, and my brother and I are grateful that they did.

I come from a stoic Scandinavian family where the nursing of grudges and open feuding is not considered proper. Not all the things I have to say about my father are good, and out of consideration for them I am not giving his full name here, though I would much like to, since there will be no grave, no tombstone; he asked that his ashes be scattered on the farm in northern Iowa where he grew up, and as flawed an individual as he was, as we all are, he deserves to have his name somewhere, so that people may remember. I hope that my family will understand that I cannot remember my father properly, or grieve him, or forgive him, if I leave his faults, which were too much a factor in our relationship to be ignored, out of account. In me there is not only love and grief for him, but also anger, guilt, embarrassment, regret, pity, annoyance and fear, and those cannot simply be buried. Even though I loved my father often without liking him, the loss of a parent is like the loss of a moon in the sky: life is changed in a profound way without his presence.

My father was a kind, sad, often silly, eccentric and proud man who loved his children. He will be missed. My thanks to all who expressed their good wishes to me and my brother at his passing.

In other news: There are a few people out there who know about this blog that I started and have probably been frustrated that there hasn't been much added to it. My energy hasn't been very high over the past few months, and perhaps the spring will bring more activity. I have been going through my DVD collection, and I will be posting some notes about some of these films in the near future.