Movie Review: 1911/辛亥革命

Even Sun Yat Sen looks up to Jackie Chan. Sun Yat Sen must have been really f@#$ing short.

Last Thursday night, before seeing 1911/辛亥革命, I  Tweeted “Braving #8 typhoon to watch Jackie Chan’s new film. Nesat will blow, 1911will suck. Praise the Gang of Film! #wewatchmoviessoyoudonthaveto”

We took one for the team last week. Which is odd, since we arethe team. I guess more philanthropically, we took one for the readers.

In the middle of a typhoon. So don’t say we’re not dedicated.

We knew  1911/辛亥革命was going to suck. Which is why we went to the Dynasty, the venue of choice for films that are… less than choice.

1911/辛亥革命is Jackie Chan’s 100th film. And approximately his 30th bad one.

He needs to retire before he gets to #51.

No, Jackie, wedo recognize you.

This film is supposed to tell the story of the 1911 revolution. Which, I suppose, it does. It just doesn’t do a very good job of telling it.  1911/辛亥革命 is a narrative mess for at least two reasons. One, the China style in these endeavors tends to look and feel a lot like a review sheet for a history test.

In British English, this is often called revision, but revisionism in China film is a whole other subject that I want to leave out for the time being.

Imagine speed-reading Cliff Notes on the 1911 revolution and then making a music video of the narration. There is no flow, no rhythm, and no grace. There is only a staccato barrage of places, names and events, thrown at you so fast and in such a disjointed manner that you have little time to comprehend it, much less reflect upon it.

Which makes sense; in addition to brooking no insolence, the Party neither encourages nor tolerates anything like critical thought.

Ostensibly, this works in  1911/辛亥革命, because if you stop for even a moment and think about it, you realize what a resounding and thorough failure this film is.

That pause for reflection, as well as the Party’s vehement prohibitions thereof, forms the basis for the second reason this film is atrocious.

It is obvious even to the most film-illiterate viewer that great slashing cuts were made in 1911/辛亥革命, and done so at a stage where editing, much less re-shooting, was impossible. It is apparent that certain lines of dialogue were found objectionable and excised.

Visually, this means that a character goes from standing to sitting in an instant; apparently, while in the act of sitting down, he said something that our tender ears must not hear.

It looks a lot like experimental cinema, except you know that they weren’t trying to be experimental.

Well, maybe in a Josef Mengele/Unit 731 kind of way.

The overall effect is even more jarring than the ‘full auto’ narrative delivery, so that a viewer may end up feeling as though they have been put through a cinematic emulation of an epileptic seizure.

Or maybe that was just me.

There are so many things wrong with 1911/辛亥革命that it would take me hours to relate them and only slightly less time for you to read them. Needless to say, the film is nowhere near worthy of either of those temporal expenditures. So I guess I’ll just share the lowlights.

The actor who plays Sun Yat Sen apparently speaks English fluently. Which is a good thing, since Sun has a fair amount of English dialogue. The voice actor who dubbed Sun Yat sen, on the other hand, does not speak good English.

For that matter, neither do most of the Westerners who are in the film. They don’t act well either, but then they’re probably not actors in real life.

And as long as we’re harping on language, with what little I know of the Chinese Diaspora, I’m fairly sure that the Chinese people in San Francisco in the early 20th century, as well as the citizens of Guangzhou, spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin.

But this film was made in and for China. All Chinese people speak Mandarin. They are righteous and good.

Oh, and f@#$ Taiwan.

Jaycee Chan speaks good English, but he doesn’t need it. He has a very small role in  1911/辛亥革命, which is actually the greatest gift a father can give a son; Jaycee escapes relatively unscathed. Unlike others:

**Hu Ge isn’t Jackie Chan’s son (DNA test pending).

That’s not feces, that’s1911/辛亥革命.

Well,1911/辛亥革命 is feces.**

Jaycee plays a revolutionary secret agent sent to infiltrate the court of the Empress Dowager:

Actually that’s not him. I just made that joke during the film.

Li Bingbing is Jackie’s love interest in the film.

In real life, she could be his daughter, but I digress.

Her role is essentially window dressing, as the long-suffering but staunch and reliable woman who selflessly gives of herself for the revolution.

Wow, this looks like aJapanese movie.

She becomes a nurse (or the Flying Nun, I couldn’t tell) and helps the soldiers who seek to throw off foreign domination and a corrupt Empress. All the while pining silently for Jackie Chan.

If this was a Japanese movie the pistol would be pointing straight up. And in her mouth.

Of course, she’s Chinese, so she still manages on a fair number of occasions to be petulant, spoiled, and whiny, but I digress.

Ifthis was a Japanese movie it would be called手漕ぎボートを .

Their love story is handled with the same grace, subtlety and charm that the rest of the film is.

One thing you notice about 1911-era China, or the world for that matter, is how many different places, including London, Beijing, and other cities, used the samefloor coverings and the samefurniture. It’s amazing.

Either the world was much more homogenous back then or, more likely, the producers are just so f@#$ing cheap that they simply shuffled the same furniture around the same room to use it for a different place.

Fourdifferent places, in fact. Probably more, but I stopped counting.

If I’m going to die of an aneurysm in Mongkok, I don’t want it to be at the Die Nasty.

The film does make a pretty good argument in favor of China’s seemingly lackadaisical approach to its air pollution problem.

Because you can be sure this film is always truthful and accurate in a historical sense.

It is  approved by the Party, so itmust be true.

One thing  1911/辛亥革命 teaches us is that pollution has always historically been a part of China. Even in the feudal era, before China’s industrialization, the sky was the same leaden gray that it is in 2011:

Wong Cho Lam has an uncredited cameo. And a vagina.

In the beginning of the film, we find Sun Yat Sen and his entourage in Penang, Malaysia.

Apparently, Malaysia has also historically always been a part of China, and not just because there are so many Chinese people there. There’s all that Chinese pollution too (I couldn’t find a relevant still, sorry).

I’d have thought that Penang in 1911 would have blue skies, but I’m a Westerner and therefore wrong and evil by definition, so what do I know?

I guess they didn’t actually film that part in Malaysia. I’m shocked.

Jackie Chan still reminds us, with almost every new movie he makes, how good his movies used to be.

This point is hammered home by an absolutely pointless fight scene whose only rationale would appear to be a contractual obligation.

“I’m Jackie Chan, b*tches!”“We know, we’re your stunt team!”

What good is a Jackie Chan movie without a Jackie Chan fight scene?

Well, 1911/辛亥革命isn’t any good even withone.

The film naturally ends with a title card about how Sun Yat Sen lit the flame of revolution in China but that flame of course was only fanned into victorious greatness by the glorious Party, who finally liberated China in 1949.

So, of course, the film ends up, much like its marquee star, just another fluffer for the Red Gang.

Thursday night, right  afterseeing this film, I Tweeted the following: “1911 – the # of CCP c*cks Jackie Chan has sucked to keep his career going. This film is atrocious.”

I stand by those sentiments, but it doesn’t make me happy.