Shaolin Soccer, Miramax, and the Question of Subtitles

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Stephen Chow is a comic genius whose films have never seen mainstream release in the U.S. That may change with the impending arrival in theaters of Shaolin Soccer (2001). A sort of Bad News Bears meets The Matrix, the film is one of the biggest box office hits of all time in Asia and should rightfully be regarded as a comic gem on the cultish scale of Duck Soup (1933) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

As it stands now, however, Shaolin Soccer is known in the West only by fans of Hong Kong cinema who can track down the imported DVD with its atrocious (but often hilarious) subtitles. Its theatrical fate remains uncertain, as the U.S. rights have been bought by Miramax, a company notorious for re-editing and dubbing classic Asian action films, and for losing faith at the last minute and dumping them (in mutilated form) direct to video.

Miramax was originally supposed to release Shaolin Soccer last fall, then it was pushed to April, and now it’s scheduled for 8 August 2003. During this time, its title was changed to Kung-Fu Soccer, then back again, and a rap soundtrack, replete with Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting,” was added, then (allegedly) removed. The decision to restore the film’s original title and score was taken, apparently, in response to online petitions from fans. But no change — announced or rumored – is certain.

Since the kung fu movie were co-opted by Hollywood via Chuck Norris, Hong Kong cinema has not always had an easy time finding its Western market. The explosion around Bruce Lee in the early 1970s made martial arts popular across the globe, but then came Jaws (1977) and a change in distribution patterns. Gone were the drive-in triple features and Times Square grindhouses, the slow travels of a few old Golden Harvest prints around the country.

Hong Kong cinema, meanwhile, continued to evolve all on its own, with the “chop-socky” epics of the ’70s leading to a new style: rapid editing, flashy colors, acrobatic gunplay, artificial-looking sets, and a pantheon of great directors like John Woo, Hark Tsui, and Ronny Yu. The U.S. audience for such films stayed to the left of the mainstream, but some Asian Americans, and those in the know hipster film fans hunted down imported videos, keeping a market alive (Quentin Tarantino being the most famous example).

For the mainstream viewer, the limits of a cropped VHS in capturing the dizzying action and fractured English subtitles could be much too daunting. It seems now with DVD that the home viewing audience for these films is rapidly expanding. This is partly due to celebrity endorsers and distributors, like Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder and the Wu Tang Clan, and partly the percs DVD offers, sharp widescreen picture replacing the confusion of pan & scan, original language tracks with subtitles as options to dubbing.

The problem is dubbing. In recent years, dubbing has gone out of fashion in the States, but mostly among European cinephiles, who consider action films crass. The mainstream adolescent audience who might appreciate the videogamey action has no patience for subtitles, claiming, “I don’t come to the movies to read.”

By contrast, hipster fans of contemporary Hong Kong cinema view dubbing with the same disdain they have for pan-and-scan, and they’re not afraid to let distributors know it. Said distributors usually throw up their hands, then dump to video. Sadly, even on video and DVD, the films come with only a dubbed English track. The alternative is to seek out Asian import “all-region” discs, but the “Changlish” (literal translations of Chinese slang and phrases) subtitles are usually pretty atrocious as well, giving only the vaguest idea of what’s going on. Thus, for an English-speaking viewer, the H.K. import DVD is fraught with contradiction: on one hand, lunatic entertainment of the highest order; on the other, unreliable picture and sound quality, convoluted plot and a very foreign culture, all made even more incomprehensible by terrible subtitles.

Surprises are rare. Yuen Ping’s Iron Monkey (1993) was “presented” by Tarantino, refitted with a new Cantonese language track and decent subtitles for its brief 2001 U.S. theatrical release. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was another such subtitled miracle, and a huge moneymaker for Sony Pictures. Tiger appealed to art film lovers as well as H.K. hipsters, with its subdued grace, clever wirework, and Chow Yun Fat and Ang Lee’s names attached.

More often, efforts to cross over to the U.S. are less spectacular. Directors like Woo, Yu, and Hark have come made films in Hollywood, with mixed results. Jackie Chan is the most obvious success story, but it took him many years to make a name in the limited, hybrid genre he essentially invented (he was trying to cross over as far back as 1980’s Cannonball Run). Most action stars have to wait for minor roles in big budget action films to be noticed, like Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4 (1988) or Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).

The most sustained success has been enjoyed by fight choreographer (and Iron Monkey director) Yuen Woo-Ping, with his signature work on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger. But he, like Jackie Chan, is the exception that proves the rule. Their films cross over because they’re full of spectacular fight scenes. Edgier, more culture-specific Hong Kong fare still flounders on U.S. shores.

Enter Stephen Chow. A popular filmmaker, comedian, and action star in Hong Kong, he’s best known for a string of fiercely irreverent but heartfelt films, freewheeling parodies of Hong Kong popular culture with plenty of action, pathos, and romance. If Jackie Chan is revered in the West as Hong Kong’s Buster Keaton, then Chow is like the Marx Brothers, fusing Groucho’s deadpan sarcasm and Harpo’s doe-eyed amorality. With his directorial debut, 1994’s From Beijing with Love, Chow was crowned king of mo lei tau (nonsense).

Beijing is, on its surface, a low budget Bond spoof, mixing cruelty with comedy. Chow plays Ling Ling Chai (Mandarin for “007”), a former secret agent turned pork vendor. Arriving in Beijing, he heads to a fancy hotel filled with gorgeous women, only to realize his reservations are actually at a hotel across the street, where a bearded woman takes him to a closet-sized room filled with porno magazines. Just when we think we’re in one kind of parody, however, the tone changes, as Ling Ling Chai and his traitorous girlfriend Siu (Anita Yuen) wind up in a John Woo-style shootout in a shopping mall. A child watches in horror as one of the bad guys coldly shoots his father in the head. This combination of tragedy and comedy works for Chow because, while he doesn’t treat his plot line seriously, he does show compassion for his characters. Pain hurts, and death is for real.

The film keeps up a dizzying pace, with plot elements zipping by so quickly that an unconditioned viewer can become lost and (due to its gore and gross-out humor) nauseous, as riding on a very rickety roller coaster. Jackie Chan’s films usually adhere to a straight, Western-friendly romance-adventure plot. Chow’s, on the other hand, veer all over the place, often stepping outside their conventions. They amuse and shock, and satirize the shock, all at the same time.

Chow directed two films in 1996, Forbidden City Cop and the classic God of Cookery. Both parody Asian culture and cinema, and Western notions of Eastern culture. Cop opens with what seems like the climax of a wuxia swordplay film, with flying warriors landing on a roof in the Forbidden City to have their climactic showdown. Before the dazzling swordplay can begin however, Chow, playing a cop, orders them off the roof. In Cookery, Chow suffers a rise and fall in the fast food business, eventually returning from the grave after attaining enlightenment at a Shaolin Monastery, which grants him the power to cook with “internal fire,” using the energy from within his body to heat a dish of noodles.

It is with this film that the auteurist motifs of “Chow films” surfaced. One is the physically disfigured romantic interest, whom Chow’s character sees as a friend, until he has some sort of painful spiritual awakening. Another motif is latent sadomasochism in men’s fascination with signs of power. Those with the right jewelry and sunglasses relish every opportunity to make their underlings kneel down and polish their shoes. Chow’s characters typically come from lower class backgrounds, enduring beatings and humiliations during their rise. Chow treats such painful moments with sensitivity as well as callousness, somewhere between The Three Stooges and, say, Rocky. Chow uses violence to create sympathy for his characters, and when they get their revenge, it’s cathartic.

Just so, Chow’s King of Comedy (1999) is a sharp send-up of the world of movies; he plays an unemployed acting coach who hangs around the set of a John Woo-style action film (they’re filming an elaborate shootout in a church filled with doves). In his spare time, he performs a stage version of Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury and coaches his love interest, a good-natured prostitute (Ceclia Cheung) how to act like a schoolgirl. When he gets his big chance to play a victim in the shootout, Chow ruins the take by staggering around, refusing to die until he feels it’s “in character” to do so. He’s replaced by Jackie Chan, who knows “how to do what they tell him.” Chan gives Chow some advice: “You can make it if you work real hard.”

Chow definitely made it in his next effort. Shaolin Soccer combines superb Matrix-style effects, martial arts, and the underdog sports team genre. In its prolonged journey to the U.S., it has become something of a cause celebre among fans. Some of the film’s difficulties are economic, specifically, Miramax angling to profit from its summer schedule. The whole subtitle versus dubbing foreign film dilemma is a difficulty that can shake a distributor’s faith in an opening weekend. They can always choose to extend the run of a film still doing decent box office in the film’s stead, pushing the opening back a season, indefinitely.

This lack of faith based on language differences turns out to be a real shame when the film is a bona fide crowd-pleasing winner like Soccer. Another film whose fate has been linked with Soccer‘s is the 2002 Jet Li vehicle, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, an art-action film like Crouching Tiger. The studio had Zhang trim his original two-hour cut by 20 minutes (of dialogue scenes), then held onto the film, unsure when to release it. When it unexpectedly was nominated for the 2002 Foreign Language Oscar, Miramax decided to release it this past April, in the slot originally scheduled for Shaolin Soccer, thus bumping Soccer to August. April came and went, and no Hero or Soccer. Now Hero is listed on the Miramax website with a “Winter 2003” release, which means nothing.

Though Crouching Tiger was a hit, it’s not difficult to see why Miramax is willing to roll back the release dates for Hero and Soccer. It’s a shifting, ever-changing market. The audience for these films may have waned or still be forming. Another “Asian” hit from somewhere else might improve its eventual reception. In the meantime, a poor dub job can be the kiss of death just as easily as subtitles, causing unintentional laughter and the dismissal of the film as “cheap.”

At first glance, Shaolin Soccer might look like the usual low-budget Hong Kong formula action-comedy, but if you stick with it, it gradually becomes a breathtaking, rousing, spectacle. Once Mighty Steel Leg (Chow) gathers up his collection of brothers for his soccer team, and they begin to remember their childhood Shaolin kung fu training, the film takes off from its humble beginnings into the stratosphere. Balls blast through brick walls, or slow down to leave ripples in the air, like bullets in The Matrix. Indeed, Chow may be “the one” who will finally smash down the wall that separates Hong Kong cinema from mainstream Western audiences.

Yankee viewers may or may not turn out for such a bizarre hybrid of a movie, but it will be a sad commentary on U.S. theatrical distribution if Chow’s film is allowed to rot on the shelf due to the dubbing vs. subtitle dilemma. If it happens to Soccer it could happen to Hero and future Miramax-distributed H.K. films, like Tsui Hark’s Legend of Zu (2001), might be regulated to that special limbo where they are forever scheduled for release “next spring.” One can only hope that Miramax will have the courage to support these great films with widespread releases, whether subtitled or not, and allow mainstream audiences the chance to broaden their horizons and discover the many pleasures of Hong Kong cinema.