Gong fu chu shen

Some time ago, I watched a mainstream trifle called "Kung Fu Panda." The only appeal it had was the idea of discipline in ordinary things. The involvement of food was incidental and comic but it mattered.

Food is not easy to film. But it is inherently cinematic stuff, and as powerful in my experience as dance. Sometimes it literally can be a dance when we are working with the preparation.

So, what if your cinematic dance conventions have evolved around kung fu scenes? Well, then you make your food dance movie using kung fu conventions. To make the point, you'll have to have lots of dialog about the honor and skill of cooking; you'd probably want to make a big deal about knives. And because (especially in China) food is about family, you'll have a plot that somehow involves familial bonds.

Well, look no further. Someone has put all this together for you. And it really isn't bad at all if you see it as a piece of precious cinema. I suppose if you expect a kung fu movie or pop star vehicle, you will be disappointed.

Here's something. How do you show taste? Ang Lee did it by focusing on color, lingering on color and texture. Kar Wai Wong shows steam, succulent steam. Greenaway (in his kitchen movie) turned the kitchen into a divine machine. Tampopo wove a whole thing about movie genres into the taste of the noodles. Babbette by contrast with cold gruel. "Grande Bouffe" just showed obsession. "Sweet Movie" gives us taste in the form of a nude orgasmic woman drenched in chocolate made with sugar aged with the corpses of children. There are more complex devices...

Here, it is a simple matter. We see the pleasure of the faces when eating. Simple. Effective.

"The more simple the dish, the harder to make well."

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Many years ago, Sammo Hung fought with his brother for possession of the fabulous Dragon Knife; Hung's nephew witnessed the battle and his father's injury. He has vowed revenge. Now Hung has gone to work at the once fabulous but now failing restaurant run by Cherrie Ying and Ai Kago, daughters of his former master chef. He teaches Vaness Wu the philosophy and practice and great cooking. But there is a competition for Best Chef in China. Wu and his assistant must uphold the restaurant's honor, while his nephew's chefs do battle in the kitchen and his thugs threaten the sisters, with only Hung to face them.

In other words, it's half cooking competition and half martial arts movie. The jokes and gags lie in the premise, and are carried out without much in the way of comic elaboration. This is a tough thing to do, and while it is never laugh-out-loud funny, it's certainly always interesting to watch, particularly when Wu beats up on the principal of his cooking school while making fresh noodles.

Well, if you like kung-fu and food, this movie would obviously be for you... But you'd first have to get past a really simple plot, some really bad acting, and worse of all, a post prod voice recording! That how kung-fu movies were done like years ago, but come on, it's 2009! I only watch subbed movies, and here I felt like watching a really badly dubbed movie (you can easily notice the bad lip sync).

People may be annoyed with the fight scenes in between, it was annoying yes but what remained with me was that making of dishes with a beautiful voice over explaining the significance of the method used. Visuals were good, food was treated with utmost respect and everything about the food part was poetic.

Last sequence about cabbage soup and purity was captivating.

KUNG FU CHEFS (2009) brings to mind such Hong Kong cooking movies as Tsui Hark's Chinese FEAST (1995) and Stephen Chow's GOD OF COOKERY (1996), but is considerably lower-budgeted. This one incorporates kung fu fight scenes, thanks to a contrived subplot involving decades-old sibling rivalry and a nephew's urge for revenge. The fight scenes are well-staged (by two of the venerable Yuen Clan, Yuen Cheung-Yan and Yuen Shun Yi) and give veteran kung fu star Sammo Hung a chance to show he can still strut his stuff after forty years in the business, but they interfere with the cooking scenes which are the real reason to see this movie. As master chef Wong Ping-Yee, Sammo whips up quite a few mouth-watering dishes. My favorite is the scene in which he makes scrambled eggs in a fashion I wish my local diner would adopt.

The real reason I sought this movie out is the presence in the cast of Ai Kago, a Japanese pop singer known to her fans by her nickname, Aibon, and famous for being one of the legendary 4th Generation of J-pop girl group Morning Musume and, later, half of a charming duo called W, in which Aibon was paired with her equally delightful 4th Gen partner, Nozomi Tsuji (better known as Nono). In KUNG FU CHEFS, Kago is fourth-billed as Ying, the sister of the female owner of the Cantonese restaurant that becomes the focal point of the movie after unemployed master chef Sammo signs on as the head cook after beating the current chef in a one-on-one cooking competition. Kago is the one who gets to sample the competing dishes of roast duck in that scene and it reminded me of all those great bits on Morning Musume's old TV show, "Hello Morning," in which the girls got to eat special dishes provided by local Tokyo restaurants. Unfortunately, she doesn't get to eat much more than that in the course of the film. She has one food preparation scene in which Sammo coaches her in making a sauce. She participates in one fight scene staged in a supermarket and gets to do a lot of her own fight moves, although she's doubled in the more acrobatic bits. She becomes something of a love interest, although quite chaste, for Ken (Vanness Wu), the young hero, a wandering cook/kung fu expert who winds up as Sammo's assistant at the restaurant.

I enjoyed watching Kago, who evidently was instructed by the director to just "be yourself" in every scene she's in, even though, ultimately, she doesn't get to do as much as I'd like. I hope other enterprising casting directors will succumb to her charms. She's cute, spunky, full of life and vigor, and utterly adorable, even if we're denied the pleasure of listening to her own voice. Word of advice to those with the bilingual (Mandarin/Cantonese) DVD: choose Mandarin since the voice actress on that track sounds more like Kago than the one on the Cantonese track.

KUNG FU CHEFS recalls another action film that employed J-pop stars from Hello! Project. Three years ago, the Japanese film, SUKEBAN DEKA: CODENAME - SAKI ASAMIYA (2006), released in the U.S. as YO YO GIRL COP, starred H!P solo star Aya Matsuura in the title role, with Rika Ishikawa, another 4th Gen member of Morning Musume, as her chief rival. Their presence enhanced that film significantly as well.