Shaolin Soccer

Saw Shaolin Soccer (Thanks, Basil!) It was the source of this reaction face (if you're into that sort of thing.) It was a hilarious Chinese comedy about a rag-tag troupe of secret Kung-Fu masters, currently stuck in various dead-end jobs, who band together to form a soccer team to fight the villainous Team Evil. The comedy is silly and absurd. At one point they have a practice match against a team of street thugs. Their leader is a pencil-necked nerd who wields a ball-peen hammer on the pitch. The Kung-Fu masters, full of naive high hopes, are decimated by the evil thugs. (This is early on in the movie. They haven't had the getting-stronger montage yet.) Their leader, the forward kicker, crawls along with a broken leg, other players' feet and arms flailing around him. Bullets whiz overhead as he crawls through mud under barbed wire, calling frantically for back-up on the radio.

This kind of gutsy, free-association nonsense is exactly the kind of absurd comedy I love. There is a dream-logic to it that almost makes sense. Later on they fight a team composed of teenage girls wearing false mustaches. This is played straight and, apart from the inherent absurdity of the premise, is not used as a punchline. As far as we know, the film-makers could only get girls that day. Hilarious.

Of course there's also the typical Asian hyper-drama, but the operatically overblown emotions only serve to make this feel like a yet more surreal parody of life. There is also the apparently typical xenophobia (which I guess is a trend in Chinese movies, unfortunately.) It turns out Team Evil has been cheating by using American steroids which give them the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-style powers of flight and superhuman poise. This can also be deliciously absurd to the American viewer if you forget the relative seriousness that I believe the Chinese viewer would receive it with.

A hilarious movie with nothing more on its mind than absurdity and laughs. It is broad enough to translate well, but not so broad as to be boring. It's surprising and stupid. I liked it.