Word: shaolin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Stephen Chow’s critically-acclaimed hit Shaolin Soccer is about six brothers who use their Shaolin martial arts skills to revolutionize soccer and compete against the subtly named Evil Team. Along the way, there’s gratuitous violence involving soccer balls, trees and bread buns; spontaneous, off-key singing and dancing; and homoerotic consumption of raw eggs, all part of the offbeat Hong Kong style of humor. But there’s also the brilliantly choreographed mix of martial arts and soccer and a universal yet original message about the hope for integrating a modern world with...
...without the presence of its director-star, who could not get a visa in time. No matter. The audience went nuts, cheering each set piece of whirling action, choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping and Sammo Hung. The film may not break Asian box-office records, as Chow's Shaolin Soccer did. But it's much better: handsomely designed and shot, full of knowledgeable nostalgia for the old Shaw Brothers martial-arts films, and engagingly played by a cast of expert, not-so-familiar actors...
...Doting audiences have seen Zhao grow from elfin youth to cagey comedian. In the international hit Shaolin Soccer she plays a shy baker with an extravagant case of eczema who shaves her head, pulls some nifty martial-arts moves and wins the match, the guy and, in the film's last scene, the cover of TIME. In My Dream Girl, a ripoff of Pygmalion, she's a ragamuffin (but still quite a muffin) who elevates silliness into a showcase for urchin charm. She ranged further in two films she made with Jiang Wen: He Ping's Warriors of Heaven...
...Stephen Chow, her director and co-star in Shaolin Soccer, who showed Zhao she still had much to learn. "I wanted a challenge," she says, "and he really gave it to me. In China people think I'm cute; he didn't let me look cute. People say I have big eyes; he taped them down. My old characters were all kind of wild; here I was very subdued. Everything I did before, he reversed." She also learned to pay new attention to the camera. "I'd gotten so used to it, doing TV shows, that I'd started...
...martial-arts spy spoof revolving around a diamond heist. Starring Karl Maka, Sam Hui and Sylvia Chang, the film was at the time the highest-grossing Hong Kong movie ever. (At today's ticket prices, Aces would have earned about $13 million, which is nearly double the take of Shaolin Soccer, the reigning Hong Kong box-office champ.) Still, that early success never went to Tsang's head. "When people ask for my advice, I tell them I'm not always right," he says. "In fact, I tell them I've been a big loser...