Giant Robot Store and GR2 News

The Chef

On September 27, Fox World Cinema is releasing two eye-popping imports with hyper-saturated colors, fast-moving edits, and overlapping plots shown from multiple points of view. Both have earned some deserved slamming for trendy style, sloppy narrative, and lack of depth, but don’t they deserve your strained eyeballs, precious time, and individual judgment?

The Butcher

The Butcher, The Chef, and The Swordsman reeks of the short attention span and glossiness one might expect from a director of commercials. But while Wuershan’s look and editing have layers upon layers of gimmickry (shifting film stocks, video game references, rock and hip-hop on the soundtrack…), the characters are as raw as can be. Liu Xiaoye plays the first of the movie’s three namesakes, burping, spitting, suffering permanent bedhead, and lusting after an unattainable hooker (Kitty Zhang from Stephen Chow’s CJ7) exactly as a Mainlander might have been portrayed in Hong Kong movies 15 years ago. The scheming, vengeance-seeking, quick-chopping middle character is played with comparable subtlety by Ando Masanobu (Battle Royale, Kids Return). As for the swordsman played by Ashton Xu, his confidence proves to be a bigger undoing than his colleagues’ inaction. That the protagonists in such a vehicle are so utterly pathetic–and not in an ironic Revenge of the Nerds manner–is actually pretty cool.  Shockingly, the three plots stand out from one another despite being intertwined and somewhat complement each other, too. And despite the world being shown as glossy, it’s also bitter and brutal. You can’t polish a turd, but Wuershan packages the shittiness of the world in a deceptively fun and underhandedly smart way in his debut feature.

Continue reading