WTF ASIA: All's Well, Ends Well
Well, today is the start of the Lunar New Year. And what better way to celebrate the new year than to be with your family as you watch a really gleefully stupid movie? This is All’s Well, Ends Well and it is the first and, hopefully last, Lunar New Year movie that I will be talking about on WTF ASIA. It is also a romantic comedy, so if you are looking for something to watch on Valentine’s Day, you could do worse than All’s Well, Ends Well. You could probably do better, too, but whatever.
Moon, Foon, and So are three brothers who live with their parents. That is normal in Asian society. What is not quite normal are how they deal with the women in their lives. Moon is married to Tai Sou, who has become the maid of the family and is a horrible singer. She is starting to feel as if the others are taking her for granted even without knowing that her husband has ditched their seventh anniversary dinner to celebrate his first anniversary of the affair with a former Miss HK participant named Sheila. So, basically, Moon is a horrible person. Foon is a womanizing radio host who is wooing Holli-yok, a woman who has an obsession with Hollywood movies that would make a more sensible man run away. Foon is not a sensible man. So is a highly effeminate man who seems to be the only one who is nice to Tai Sou. So keeps locking horns with his father’s much younger cousin, Mo-Seung, a butch woman with a slight sadistic streak. The parents are basically content to watch television together and eat what is provided as long as everything is in order. But order is about to be thrown out the window.
I have been informed that All’s Well, Ends Well is typical of a Lunar New Year movie, where big Hong Kong stars come together to act like loons. The movies are almost all awful and this one is no exception. It is, however, one of the more enjoyable awful movies of the bunch. Many of the jokes are in bad taste, but it is good-natured as opposed to a mean-spirited means for the creators to get their digs in at easy targets and those whom they dislike. It is not trying to be politically incorrect, but it just turns out that way. It is genuinely trying to make you laugh, not just make you feel better about your thick skin because you, unlike those lame-ass killjoys, didn’t get offended, like Movie 43. This is not an endurance test comedy; although I could have done without the shots of people sitting on toilets and the singing is deliberately terrible almost completely throughout. A lot of the humor comes not just from the horrible jokes, but the utter idiocy behind them. Sometimes, I laughed simply from the notion that someone thought to include something so stupid in the movie. It is more childlike than puerile in its attempts to offend. There is one joke about a third of the way through that made my jaw drop in its poor taste, but the presentation was just so gleeful that I could not find it offensive. On top of the actual jokes, there are so many stylistic decisions that made me think “why did the filmmakers do it like that instead of normally?” The only answer that I could come up with was “because doing it the normal way would not have been as stupid.”
Not only is the movie not supposed to make sense, but it is also supposed to not make sense. It is part of a genre of Hong Kong not-make-sense movies. The plot twists are supposed to be dumb. The morals are supposed to be wrongheaded. The characters are supposed to be unrealistic. The homages and parodies are supposed to be obnoxiously blatant. The social commentary is not really supposed to be there. The scenarios are supposed to be different from how it works in real life. The karaoke is supposed to be as horrible as I usually consider regular karaoke to be. You are not supposed to excuse the lapses in logic; you are supposed to revel in them.
There is a sense that a lot of Chinese comedies, and Asian comedies in general, rely too much on broad slapstick. In a sense, one could argue that that is true. In another, though, it is arguable that comedies like this simply like to throw everything at the audience and the broad comedy bits are often the only things that stick with international audiences because the more subtle and clever things are specific to the culture. Like movies such as Airplane, a lot of the jokes and references are not translatable, but a lot are still funny. There are few moments that are outright as surreal as Airplane, but there are a couple, including one scene about seventeen minutes in, that comes close. If you can still laugh while you are rolling your eyes and holding your head in your hand, then the movie has succeeded.
Between all of the big jokes, there are so many little moments in this film that I love. There is the overly long musical cue to show us that we are in Japan that goes on for a few seconds too long. There is the scene when Holli-yok simply walking into the house and past the parents who have never seen her before. There is the baby that comes out of nowhere. There is Sheila’s horrible scream. There is Holli-yok switching between a looking concerned and grinning maniacally. The money envelope exchange. That utterly terrible “magic of love” line.
Without spoiling the ending, I will say that the movie does not necessarily end well, but it ends happily. And a little embarrassingly. The ending is pretty much the logical conclusion of what has come before. In other words, not logical at all. Tai Sou’s story may serve as a commentary on affairs in China, and the end of So’s story could be a commentary on how the Hong Kong film industry had treated actor Leslie Cheung’s sexuality. Both arguments are stretching it, though; I think that the creators just wanted to push people’s buttons and make them cover their mouths as they laughed at how awful the supposedly happy endings were.
And…erm…that’s it, really.
The movie is available to watch here:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjgwNjQxMDgw.html
Warning: the subtitles, which can already be hard to read at times, get cut off after the 47 minute mark and don’t get fixed until around the 82 minute mark. So, you will probably want to download the subtitles from here http://subscene.com/subtitles/alls-well-ends-well-jia-you-xi-shi-1992/english/545919 and try to figure out the time difference.
If you are in the mood to see a really stupid and tasteless romantic comedy this Valentine’s Day, but are sick and tired of Love, Actually and have heard really bad things about Identity Thief, All’s Well, Ends Well may be up your alley. Or maybe one of its six sequels. Seriously, there are six of them. Maybe even seven. Personally, I have no intention of watching any of them. I would rather just watch this one again and pretend that it is one of a kind. In any case, if you want to watch something this week, All’s Well, Ends Well…is a movie. Then again, you could be like my parents and watch Chungking Express again. Pffft.
Moon, Foon, and So are three brothers who live with their parents. That is normal in Asian society. What is not quite normal are how they deal with the women in their lives. Moon is married to Tai Sou, who has become the maid of the family and is a horrible singer. She is starting to feel as if the others are taking her for granted even without knowing that her husband has ditched their seventh anniversary dinner to celebrate his first anniversary of the affair with a former Miss HK participant named Sheila. So, basically, Moon is a horrible person. Foon is a womanizing radio host who is wooing Holli-yok, a woman who has an obsession with Hollywood movies that would make a more sensible man run away. Foon is not a sensible man. So is a highly effeminate man who seems to be the only one who is nice to Tai Sou. So keeps locking horns with his father’s much younger cousin, Mo-Seung, a butch woman with a slight sadistic streak. The parents are basically content to watch television together and eat what is provided as long as everything is in order. But order is about to be thrown out the window.
I have been informed that All’s Well, Ends Well is typical of a Lunar New Year movie, where big Hong Kong stars come together to act like loons. The movies are almost all awful and this one is no exception. It is, however, one of the more enjoyable awful movies of the bunch. Many of the jokes are in bad taste, but it is good-natured as opposed to a mean-spirited means for the creators to get their digs in at easy targets and those whom they dislike. It is not trying to be politically incorrect, but it just turns out that way. It is genuinely trying to make you laugh, not just make you feel better about your thick skin because you, unlike those lame-ass killjoys, didn’t get offended, like Movie 43. This is not an endurance test comedy; although I could have done without the shots of people sitting on toilets and the singing is deliberately terrible almost completely throughout. A lot of the humor comes not just from the horrible jokes, but the utter idiocy behind them. Sometimes, I laughed simply from the notion that someone thought to include something so stupid in the movie. It is more childlike than puerile in its attempts to offend. There is one joke about a third of the way through that made my jaw drop in its poor taste, but the presentation was just so gleeful that I could not find it offensive. On top of the actual jokes, there are so many stylistic decisions that made me think “why did the filmmakers do it like that instead of normally?” The only answer that I could come up with was “because doing it the normal way would not have been as stupid.”
Not only is the movie not supposed to make sense, but it is also supposed to not make sense. It is part of a genre of Hong Kong not-make-sense movies. The plot twists are supposed to be dumb. The morals are supposed to be wrongheaded. The characters are supposed to be unrealistic. The homages and parodies are supposed to be obnoxiously blatant. The social commentary is not really supposed to be there. The scenarios are supposed to be different from how it works in real life. The karaoke is supposed to be as horrible as I usually consider regular karaoke to be. You are not supposed to excuse the lapses in logic; you are supposed to revel in them.
There is a sense that a lot of Chinese comedies, and Asian comedies in general, rely too much on broad slapstick. In a sense, one could argue that that is true. In another, though, it is arguable that comedies like this simply like to throw everything at the audience and the broad comedy bits are often the only things that stick with international audiences because the more subtle and clever things are specific to the culture. Like movies such as Airplane, a lot of the jokes and references are not translatable, but a lot are still funny. There are few moments that are outright as surreal as Airplane, but there are a couple, including one scene about seventeen minutes in, that comes close. If you can still laugh while you are rolling your eyes and holding your head in your hand, then the movie has succeeded.
Between all of the big jokes, there are so many little moments in this film that I love. There is the overly long musical cue to show us that we are in Japan that goes on for a few seconds too long. There is the scene when Holli-yok simply walking into the house and past the parents who have never seen her before. There is the baby that comes out of nowhere. There is Sheila’s horrible scream. There is Holli-yok switching between a looking concerned and grinning maniacally. The money envelope exchange. That utterly terrible “magic of love” line.
Without spoiling the ending, I will say that the movie does not necessarily end well, but it ends happily. And a little embarrassingly. The ending is pretty much the logical conclusion of what has come before. In other words, not logical at all. Tai Sou’s story may serve as a commentary on affairs in China, and the end of So’s story could be a commentary on how the Hong Kong film industry had treated actor Leslie Cheung’s sexuality. Both arguments are stretching it, though; I think that the creators just wanted to push people’s buttons and make them cover their mouths as they laughed at how awful the supposedly happy endings were.
And…erm…that’s it, really.
The movie is available to watch here:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjgwNjQxMDgw.html
Warning: the subtitles, which can already be hard to read at times, get cut off after the 47 minute mark and don’t get fixed until around the 82 minute mark. So, you will probably want to download the subtitles from here http://subscene.com/subtitles/alls-well-ends-well-jia-you-xi-shi-1992/english/545919 and try to figure out the time difference.
If you are in the mood to see a really stupid and tasteless romantic comedy this Valentine’s Day, but are sick and tired of Love, Actually and have heard really bad things about Identity Thief, All’s Well, Ends Well may be up your alley. Or maybe one of its six sequels. Seriously, there are six of them. Maybe even seven. Personally, I have no intention of watching any of them. I would rather just watch this one again and pretend that it is one of a kind. In any case, if you want to watch something this week, All’s Well, Ends Well…is a movie. Then again, you could be like my parents and watch Chungking Express again. Pffft.