Word: honge
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...goes to China to realize his destiny as a martial-arts master - and just from the synopsis, I'm on board with Chandni Chowk to China. For, as any video nerd-historian will tell you, the two most exciting foreign movie industries of the past few decades have been Hong Kong and India. While European filmmakers went inwardly minimalist, those teeming Asian cinemas generated robust entertainment of pinwheeling action and violence (Hong Kong) and unabashed sentiment and music (Bollywood). Different in temperament, but alike in their vigor and brio, they were both exotic and oddly familiar to their American admirers...
...through the '90s, movies houses in the Chinatowns of big U.S. cities showed Hong Kong films; and as the Desi community grew in the States, a nationwide chain of about 50 theaters played Indian hits. But Chinese and Hindi speakers mostly saw their favorite pictures the way we fanboys did: by renting them at specialized stores. Since the films were getting little official attention here, we video savants had two underground treasure troves all to ourselves. (See TIME's All-Time 100 Greatest Movies...
...tried unsuccessfully to anglicize the Indian musical. Yet there's been little foreign exchange between the two national cinemas. So far as I know, Chandni Chowk, which Warner Bros. is giving a fairly wide release in the States this week, represents the first A-budget crossbreeding of Bollywood and Hong Kong...
...oversimplify just a tad, the nods to Hong Kong culture are fun, the Indian bits much less so. Yuan, who's worked mostly in the States, has a lovely gravity otherwise missing from the enterprise. And it's always great to see Liu, who bounded onto the Hong Kong screen as the head-shaved star of such '70s action classics as Challenge of the Masters and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; his lingering impact in these roles led ex-fanboy Quentin Tarantino to cast him as a mob potentate in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and as the white-bearded...
...plot picks up narrative steam. Again, you've seen it all before - last summer, when the hero was a panda. Chandni Chowk thus has the feel of one of many Indian glosses on American films, not of something fresh and foreign. For a really thrilling amalgam of Bollywood and Hong Kong, I'm still waiting...