July 26, 2017
You didn’t honestly think today’s movie was gonna be linked
by anyone else other than Kurt Russell, did you? I mean, I have never made a
secret of my man-crush on Kurt Russell’s INCREDIBLE head of hair. I envy the
man his coiffure. I mean, even in Backdraft, he was working a damn CREW CUT and
it looked perfect on his head. And when he grows facial hair for a movie, IT IS
ALWAYS THE COOLEST LOOK on him… no matter what version he has. It’s enough to
make a ginger like me want to spit…
I will admit, it was a challenge, though, trying to decide
which Kurt Russell movie to talk about. After much consideration, and much
wailing and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go with Big Trouble in Little
China.
I mean, let’s face it. It don’t get much better than Jack
Burton and the Pork Chop Express…
Russell plays Jack Burton, a ne’er-do-well truck driver, a
regular guy who spends most of his time on his CB radio, spouting out
platitudes on life to whomever is listening. He heads into Chinatown to spend
an evening with his buddy, Wang, whose father runs a restaurant. Wang asks Jack
to drive him to the airport to pick up his bride-to-be, a gorgeous young
Chinese girl with even more gorgeous green eyes. At the airport, though, she is
kidnapped by a gang of Chinese hoods. Jack tells Wang he will help get her
back.
Enter Gracie Law, a young lawyer who does a lot of
immigration work in Chinatown. She was at the airport picking up a young woman,
new to this country. She witnessed the entire event, and wants to help. Oh, did
I mention she also has gorgeous green eyes?
Jack and Wang, in Jack’s big rig truck, “The Pork Chop
Express,” find themselves slap damn in the middle of a gang war, stuck in an
alley while two bands of Chinese warriors duke it out with all manner of
weapons. Suddenly, a very duded-up man in full Chinese lord attire appears,
along with three of his henchmen, and all hell breaks loose.
Turns out that the Chinese lord is David Lo Pan, an ancient
warrior from the ‘motherland,” who needs
the blood of a green-eyed woman to bring him back from the ethereal plain and
make him human again. If this occurs, he can use the power of his evil magic to
take over the planet. And it’s up to Jack Burton to save the world. God help us…
It would be a week’s worth of writing to try and say why
this movie has become such a worldwide phenomenon. It didn’t do much at the box
office, but, thanks to the world of home video and HBO, it caught on and became
a cult sensation. It’s funny, it’s got action, it’s got a smart-ass hero, I
mean, what more could you possibly want??
Director John Carpenter was just coming off his huge box
office triumph, his remake of The Thing, his second outing with Kurt. Carpenter
had written the screenplay for Big Trouble as a western, but quickly adapted it
to the modern-day, and Russell signed on to play Jack. As we know now, the
combo of Carpenter and Russell was a perfect blend, no matter what the genre was.
Russell has said in interviews that, when he works with Carpenter, he feels
like he is playing John Carpenter on screen. That feeling seems to be mutual,
because the two have made great films together. If Russell feels like he is
playing Carpenter, Carpenter must feel like he is just directing himself. In any
case, it works damn well. Starting with
Carpenter’s masterful TV-movie Elvis, with Russell in the title role, they seem
to work flawlessly as a team.
The script is full of one-liners that only make Jack Burton
look, by turn, heroic, triumphant, dumber than hell, and scared to death. When
an old Chinese magician named Egg Chen, played by Victor Wong, convinces Jack
that his destiny lies in this adventure, the look on Jack’s face goes from
confidence to confusion to “where the hell is the door” in moments. Yet, Jack stubbornly
joins in the fight, if only to get his truck back from the “little guy with the
yellow eyes.”
This is also one of Kim Cattrall’s first movies. Well, one
of the first where she didn’t have to strip and howl like a dog while she has
sex, like she did as the female gym teacher in Porky’s. She shows some great
delivery of her lines and a perfect sense of timing, firing off insults at
Jack, while trying desperately hard to NOT show her attraction to him.
After multiple viewings of this film, it finally dawned on
me why the character of Jack Burton hooked so many people on this film. Jack is
me. He is you. He is the regular guy, thrown into a ridiculously strange
situation, and he reacts to the insanity like we do. He doesn’t grit his teeth
and just do heroic stuff. He freely looks at others around him and says, “What
the hell is that??” and “Aww, come on, seriously?” as magic lightning bolts and
whirling floating eyeballs fly by him. While Egg Chen and his band of fighters
just accept what is going on, Jack looks over at Wang, as if to say, “I am
going to kill you for getting me into this shit.”
I do want to throw out a special kudo to James Hong. He plays
David Lo Pan, the mystical ancient warrior. He does not play him like a
monster, but, rather, like Carpenter says in the special edition commentary of
the movie, like he is having the time of his life. And that is easy to see in
Hong’s performance. Everybody in this movie looks like they are having fun, but
Wong, playing the villain, could have played it all Bond-Bad-Guy and
super-serious. But even he has some great comedic moments, whether it’s
giggling like mad when he gets his first taste of green-eyes-woman blood, or
trying to be cool once he has his human form, talking smack to Jack Burton.
During his epic magic duel with Egg Chen, he makes some of the funniest sounds
as his force moments, the way Bruce Lee would scream out as he punched. Wong,
however, does not scream. Instead, he makes these… noises… well, I will let you
see and hear them for yourself. Safe to say, it ain’t Bruce Lee.
I don’t usually recommend a specific version of a movie when
I do recommend a movie, but, in this case, find the DVD or Blu Ray that has the
special commentary by Russell and Carpenter. Watch the film itself first, then
watch it with their commentary going. Why? There are some nice insights here and
there, but mainly, listen to the two of them enjoying the hell out of their
movie. Russell’s infectious laugh as Carpenter tells some little tidbit of
trivia, while they are watching the film is almost more fun than the movie
itself.
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