A CHINESE GHOST STORY (1997), dir. Andrew Chen

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Overall rating: ** (out of ****)

This seems more like an attempt to compete with Walt Disney than Hayao Miyazaki, and that’s unfortunate since Miyazaki’s Studio Gibli effectively set the new gold standard for hand-drawn animation during the late 90’s.

Indeed, films like “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away” sported gorgeous drawings and impressive storytelling. However, they were also characterized by ambitious, occasionally epic storylines that utilized elements of Japanese mythology, executed in a mature fashion that appealed to all audiences. And therein lies the big difference between Miyazaki’s films and this one, produced by Hong Kong action master Tsui Hark; although “A Chinese Ghost Story” does touch on some grown-up themes, it does so in a restless manner that’s heavy on the eye candy. It’s as if Hark believed success depended solely on getting children into the theater.

Based on a story that inspired a live-action film and several sequels, the main character of “A Chinese Ghost Story” is Ning, a wandering tax collector with a broken heart. He was too busy earning his way in the world to keep his lover, who is mostly shown via flashback, from marrying someone else. When night falls, Ning ends up in a ghost city, which looks normal except for all the green tentacle-bearing creatures walking around (and that the city is lit up like Los Angeles in “Blade Runner”). What also distracts him is a beautiful woman named Shine; he falls in love with her at first sight, and it’s not long before she takes an interest in Ning herself.

Little does our protagonist know that Shine, who is also a ghost, works for a powerful entity named Trunk, who needs to eat human souls to maintain her beauty. After helping Ning out of a jam, Shine starts to coax him back to her master; however, a series of events happen which thrust the pair into the wilderness and toward each other. They include appearances by rival ghost hunters: on one side, White Hair and his apprentice, who resemble traditional action heroes; versus the more grizzled-looking Red Beard, who is about 70-percent facial hair and 100-percent gristle. There is also another female ghost jealous of Shine’s prominence among their fellow spirits. Finally, Shine has to beware the daylight, which can reduce her to ash, so Ning carries her around in an umbrella.

I can’t help thinking Miyazaki would have made a charming love story out of a young man with an umbrella that turns into a woman. To its credit, the film does reveal that Shine has a boyfriend – another ghost who has been away for years – and the idea that faithfulness is a shared trait among the protagonists makes their pairing all the more appealing. But screenwriter Hark, more known for kinetic, frenetic martial arts movies like “The Blade” and the “Once Upon a Time in China” series, barely lets the characters be alone together before propelling them into another fast-paced action sequence. The film manages to end before exhausting us, but what we take away isn’t the story and characters, it’s all the gimmicks aimed at the kid set.

Like a lot of the animated American movies of the 90’s, there is a pet sidekick providing comic relief (including a timely urination joke), some forgettable musical numbers, and strange moments of anachronism, including a ghost whipping out what amounts to a cell phone. In addition, characters all seem to try solving their problems by breaking out magical weapons, shooting at one another with electric eye beams, or the coup de grace: activating a giant robot with rocket boosters on its legs, and is clearly made out of computer graphics. At best, children will ooh and aah at the tumult of stimulation, but since nothing looks particularly innovative on a design level, adults are more likely to dismiss the giant robot as an inevitable toy product tie-in, or to wish for tighter editing during the elaborate throwdowns.

Kids may get a kick out of “A Chinese Ghost Story,” but those looking for sophisticated animated fare will probably be bored.

(Note: “A Chinese Ghost Story” was directed by someone named Andrew Chen, but based on the opening credits, you’d think it was Hark. Known for using directors as vessels for his own cinematic visions, he’s gotten most of the credit for movies he’s produced. As such, it only seems fair he gets the brunt of the criticism this time.)

THE CHINESE FEAST (1995), dir. Tsui Hark

After Two Hours, You'll Be Hungry Again

“The Chinese Feast” is like a 12-course banquet dinner, which serves up a little something for every taste. Director Tsui Hark, best known for crafting elaborate wire-fu epics throughout the 1990’s, blends together slapstick comedy, martial arts, sports flick conventions, and even the “Iron Chef” TV series into one tasty fusion cuisine.

Leslie Cheung, a popular Hong Kong singer and accomplished actor (his credits include the very different “A Chinese Ghost Story,” “Farewell, My Concubine,” and “Happy Together”) plays Chui, a small-time gangster who wants to become a chef so he can travel to Canada, where his girlfriend has gone. After being disqualified from the cooking exam of a Canadian hotel chain, he takes a job at the Qing Han, the oldest local restaurant. The much put-upon owner of the restaurant, Au (Kar-Ying Law), makes Chui perform a variety of ridiculous tasks for the amusement of the kitchen staff. But the last laugh is on him, as romantic sparks begin to fly between Chui and V.V. (Anita Yuen, behaving outlandishly), the owner’s rebellious daughter.

Wacky hi-jinks involving a giant fish, followed by a Mexican standoff between Triad gangs precipitated by a gun hidden inside a straw basket, give way to a slightly more dramatic central plot: Wong Wing (stuntman/actor Xin Xin Xiong), leader of an upstart restaurant company called the Super Group, challenges the owner of the Qing Han to a battle between master chefs. The duel will take place within 30 days, as part of the third annual Qing Han Imperial Feast. While the winner will earn a sum of $60 million HK, the loser must shutter his restaurant. As an added injury, in the tradition of the martial arts flick, the losing chef must call his opponent Master.

The Qing Han’s staff convinces their boss to accept the Super Group’s challenge. Unfortunately, it turns out they have been bribed by their master’s enemies, and their subsequent betrayal causes the old man to have a heart attack. At this point, V.V., like Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear, proves to be a loyal daughter after all. She pledges to prepare the Qing Han Imperial Feast, thus saving her father’s restaurant.

Unfortunately, neither she nor Chui, who wants to help her win the upcoming contest, can so much as boil water, much less prepare a complicated series of dishes featuring truly exotic ingredients. Enter Lung (Man Cheuk Chiu), a kind-hearted local chef. He relates the history behind the event, but admits he cannot help with the actual preparing. However, he knows someone who can: Kit (Kenny Bee), a onetime culinary prodigy turned lost soul.

Kit had been a contender for Hong Kong’s greatest chef until personal tragedy struck. Since then, he has retreated into a cocoon of alcohol and regret. He works a menial job at a supermarket, and ruins his once-formidible taste buds with drink. The character of Kit is in the tradition of countless movie athletes who fall from grace, and must pull themselves up again in time for the requisite happy ending. Naturally, his newfound friends put him through that familiar staple: the training montage. Only in “The Chinese Feast,” relocating one’s Eye of the Tiger means engaging in some pretty over-the-top activities, such as being forcefed a funnel full of ice cubes, acupuncture, and even a smoke-filled “death chamber.”

Can two fledgling cooking assistants, a recovering alcohol abuser with rusty kitchen skills, and a master chef confined to a wheelchair manage to upset the supremely-confident and technologically-advanced Super Group? If you’ve ever seen a sports movie, you don’t need me to tell you the answer. However, even if you’re familiar with every gridiron inspirational or “Karate Kid”-knock-off made to-date, you probably haven’t seen their conventions presented in Tsui Hark’s particularly active style.

Also, even if you’ve already watched Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” or Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo,” “The Chinese Feast” gives the food movie a wholly different look and feel. The camera still lingers on the texture and color of prepared dishes, but Hark places particular emphasis on how his chefs do their thing. From the very beginning, they seem to possess superhuman cooking ability, the same way Jet Li and Man Cheuk Chiu had elemental agility and speed in “Once Upon a Time in China” and “The Blade,” respectively. True, Kit and Wong Wing are culinary artists, not martial artists. But the director frames them in the same bold fashion, angling the camera upwards toward their faces. It’s a point of view that flatters them, even when the angle is slightly canted. And Hark uses slow and fast-motion to make their proficiency with fire and kitchen tools akin to a master’s skill with weapons.

(Speaking of weapons, more than one signature dish is punctuated with a shot of a trembling knife. If you decide to watch this movie, keep a tally of how many times one of the chefs completes a masterpiece, then flings his knife into the cutting board, where it vibrates with exhausted power. Talk about showmanship.)

Like “Eat Drink Man Woman” and “Tampopo,” this movie celebrates food and the way it brings people together. Food serves as the link in a variety of relationships: between burgeoning romantic partners (Chui and V.V.), former lovers (Kit and the woman he is estranged from), parent and child (Au and V.V.), and ultimately, a large group of friends (everyone who teams up against the Super Group). The cast is uniformly great, and the director juggles them well enough that everyone gets at least one good scene.

It probably helps that all the central characters are motivated by redemption. Chui must learn the chef trade honestly to make up for his early cheating. V.V. must save her father’s establishment to make up for her poor behavior in the past. And Kit must win the Qin Han Imperial Feast in order to prove to his girlfriend that he can feel again. But at the same time, the film has enough off-beat humor—the aforementioned giant fish scene, a screaming contest at a karaoke bar, a car-and-motorcycle chase set to Italian opera, and some business involving particular organs belonging to a monkey—that it never veers into schmaltz.

On the contrary, “The Chinese Feast” manages to balance itself between crowd-pleasing and whimsical. Among its possible audience are fans of Asian movie stars Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen, not to mention martial arts aficionados (Those familiar with Hark’s even better 1995 feature, “The Blade,” might get a kick out of seeing Man Cheuk Chiu and Xin Xin Xiong in showy supporting roles). In turn, those with an appetite for MTV-style, rapid-fire filmmaking (only done right) are also in for a treat. So are those parties with a taste for the exotic. Meanwhile, the film’s universal themes of love and friendship may coax the not-so-brave into giving it a try.

Finally, foodies should be happy with this one. The highest compliment I can pay “The Chinese Feast” is to say that, after being amused, stimulated, and very much impressed by it, I also found myself hungry. A lot of the food cinematography is excellent, but the most tantalizing image occurs towards the end: a juicy piece of roasted meat, slowly dripping with honey. Despite the big meal of Thanksgiving leftovers I had just eaten two hours before, it suddenly felt like my only choices were “Feast” or famine, and I barely stopped myself from taking a bite out of the TV screen.

Overall rating: ***1/2 (out of ****)

THE BLADE (1995), dir. Tsui Hark

Hark (Tsui)! The One-Armed Swordsman Swings!

Tsui Hark is considered by many to be the master of the martial arts epic. But with “The Blade,” he truly outdoes himself, taking the genre to new operatic heights.

Swords, daggers, and flying kicks remain the order of the day in feudal China. But a gang of merciless horse thieves have another weapon at their disposal: Bear traps. These can puncture flesh and shatter bone between their jagged metal jaws. The horse thieves deposit them around their camp, just waiting for human prey to set a leg or an arm inside.

Ding On (Chiu Man-Cheuk), who ran away from home to find his father’s murderer, becomes their latest victim. He loses his right arm fighting to rescue Ling (Valerie Chow), a childhood friend and daughter of a wealthy sword-maker. Ding On vanishes into a foggy ravine, where he is presumably lost. He awakens in the care of an aborigine farmer (Veronique Kaneta), and has to try and rebuild his life using only his left arm.

Complications arise, however, when he discovers his father’s killer, Fei Lung (the incredible Xin Xin Xiong), in the nearby village. Then a gang of Arab marauders set upon Ding On’s new home. They string him up, beat him, and burn the farm to the ground.

Realizing that the weak are doomed in a lawless world, unless they learn to fight back, Ding On begins training with the help of a half-charred kung-fu manual. The figures in the diagrams are all missing one arm, a disadvantage for most, but perfect for him. Armed with the broken blade his father once fought with, Ding On develops a new style that emphasizes spinning around very fast.

While the one-armed swordsman prepares to declare war on all roaming bandits, Ling arrives in the village with Iron Head (Moses Chan), a volatile young man. They are here to find Ding On. But he is too ashamed to face them, having stolen the broken blade from out of Ling’s father’s house.

Luckily, her father has run afoul of the Arab marauders, who hire Fei Lung to raid the sword-maker’s factory. Sensing a chance for redemption, Ding On returns to the birthplace of his dishonour. There, he meets Fei Lung in an astonishing final battle. It isn’t a fight so much as a natural disaster; a head-on collision between two tornadoes, each lined with razor-sharp cutlery.

“The Blade” ranks with the best work produced by Hong Kong director Tsui Hark. His 1986 film “Peking Opera Blues” is considered to be a classic. During the early 90’s, he started a revolution with the “Once Upon a Time in China” trilogy. Now experiencing a revival in the West, thanks to the popularity of its star, Jet Li, these movies featured Wong Fei-Hung, Chinese folk hero, performing elaborate fight sequences, the likes of which had never been seen before in a martial arts film (but were almost immediately imitated).

Never content to be a one-trick pony, Hark cuts back on the high-flying, wire-aided stunts this time. He creates a new kind of martial arts movie with “The Blade.” Now he injects ferocious speed, using some brilliant, low-tech ideas he might have picked up while attending the University of Texas at Austin.

For some action sequences, the film is sped-up. Just as effective, however, was Hark’s idea to use doubles of Chiu Man-Cheuk. Either Man-Cheuk or his stunt copy disappear off one side of the picture, then the other quickly leaps in from the opposite side. Either method creates the illusion that Ding On is some kind of sword-wielding Speedy Gonzalez. He's there one second, gone the next. Frequently, his opponents notice the same phenomenon applies to their legs.

Physics-bending, genre-blending

If Tsui Hark doesn’t make the same martial arts movie over and over, nor does he adhere to the same genre. Over his twenty-six-year career, he has helmed a critically-acclaimed musical (“Shanghai Blues,” 1984), a sports comedy (“The Chinese Feast,” 1995), a drama (“Love in the Time of Twilight,” 1995), even a special-effects extravaganza (“Legend of Zu,” 2001). In 1980, Hark put his career into high gear career a suspense/horror/comedy entitled Diyu wu men (“We Are Going to Eat You”).

If his versatility isn’t obvious by the list of films he has directed, it might be more apparent in his producing filmography. In 1987, he produced Siu-Tung Ching’s “A Chinese Ghost Story,” which contained some pretty horrific, albeit aesthetically-pleasing moments, thanks to Film Workshop, the special effects company Hark founded.

In 1994, he produced Ringo Lam’s “Burning Paradise,” which combined martial arts with haunted house-style horror. Most recently, Hark attempted to revitalize the once-popular Chinese golden vampire movie with “Vampire Hunters” (2002), which Herman Yau directed.

Thanks to an enduring, versatile career, it is never a surprise to see Hark borrow from another genre for a particular effect. In fact, one of the best scenes in “The Blade” feels like it was lifted from horror movies:

Ding On has overheard Ling talking to her grandmother about his father’s gruesome fate. Having never heard this information, he bursts into the room, demands to know the truth. As a thunderstorm rages outside the factory, Ling runs across a corridor that is enveloped by shadows. Flashes of lightning reveal the emptiness of the room. Suddenly, we hear Ding On’s voice screaming, “Who killed him?!”

Ling turns around, looks directly into the camera. Lightning glints blue off the surface of her skin. Wind whips her hair into a mild frenzy. The room becomes dark again, then the camera does a 180-degree turn. A solid, dark mass takes up almost the entire picture. Then there is another flash of lightning, and Ding On’s face materializes, looking ominous and scary.

Among other resources the director draws on, Hark clearly knows a thing or two about the stage. It often appeared in his earlier films, and always authentic-looking when it did. The theatre was central to “Peking Opera Blues;” Wong Fei-Hung’s sidekicks shanghaid a public one in “Once Upon a Time in China.” Quite a few times in “The Blade,” Hark presents the action with what seems like an eye for stage theatrics.

During a flashback that shows the sword-maker, Ding On’s father, and other warriors fighting some bandits, the good guys stand frozen in dramatic-looking poses, looking directly at the camera. A few moments later, they start fighting the brigands. After dispatching them, they freeze into dramatic-looking poses again. According to the sword-maker’s voiceover, this was supposed to be a battle. The way Hark choreographs, however, it seems more like interpretive dance.

Like a good stage director, Hark also uses backgrounds to dramatize events or reflect his characters’ moods. The flashback scene, for example, takes place during a violent rainstorm. The raging elements mirror the bloodlust frothing up in both the warriors’ and the villains’ hearts. Later, when Ding On storms the horse thieves’ lair, he is already possessed by a rage that makes him the equal of twenty men. As a way of underlining the character’s burning anger, Hark lights the scene using only the torches and smoldering bonfires that are part of the scenery.

Bold visual touches like these help “The Blade” resonate emotionally. Few martial arts movies before or since have matched its energy and passion.

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)