Movie Review: Sex & Chopsticks

I Feel So Dirty, and So Do II saw Forbidden Legend: Sex & Chopsticks last night. I've never missed Elvis Tsui so much before in my life.

FL:S&Cis a throwback to the 90s Cat III sex romps that some of us fondly remember.

Hey, fondle your own member, you freak.

Part of me was looking forward to seeing a Cat III sex movie in a theater in Hong Kong.

Not the part you think.

I mean in the same way I was happy to seeRed Cliff, orCJ7in the theatre in Hong Kong. You know, John Woo film, etc.

I really wasn't happy about seeing CJ7afterI saw it.

So me and several (male) friends toddled off to the Dynasty in Mongkok, a place that shows Cat III movies every morning at 10:30, which seems a bit early for such prurience.

Wasn't it Chris Rock who extolled the virtues of 'a little jerk before work'?

But this was the evening show, of course. The sun was down, so it was okay.

Yeah, sure it was.

In honor of the evening, we brought our own snacks. There was beer and fish skins involved.

Better than wine and foreskins...

But not for me. I'm on a diet, so I brought oranges. It allowed me to do an Amy Yip impression before the movie started.

The old man next to me tried to do an Elvis Tsui impression on my fruits and I had to kick him in his nuts.

Once the movie started... I have never missed my remote so much.

And not for rewinding purposes.

How good can a movie be when one of it's best scenes is an homage toA Chinese Torture Chamber Story? The best thing about these movies is often their promotional material.

Or Pauline Chan. But she's dead. I found a lot of the supposedly 'best' parts of the movie tedious; I guess I don't have the requisite appreciation for large Japanese breasts that played such a big (!) role.

I realized that one draw for this film may be Hong Kong men's first chance to see these actresses without mosaics on their pubes.

Still, at least one of them was, to me, soundly unattractive, and not just because she appeared essentially prepubescent.

Besides, the first woman to get butt-@ss naked had a big scar from a navel piercing gone bad.Continuity, people...

Not to mention that their (dubbed) verbal ministrations sounded so much like whining that I half expected to hear a demand for a Gucci purse in there somewhere.

The idea that a man would get excited by a woman sounding like she's extremely uncomfortable... makesmeextremely uncomfortable. But I won't make those noises.

I always felt that the best part of these films was their comic aspect, because you can make jokes in Cat III that you can't make anywhere else. There were a few good laughs in this movie, like the recurring injury ofSamuel Leung Cheuk Moon.

Sometimes if you beat a dead horse long enough, it's still damn funny.

And you have to give it up for any movie that features the long-lost Frankie Ng Chi Hung as a midget, which he carries off simply by walking on his knees.

Then again, maybe his character walked on his knees. Hard to tell. Wasn't really paying attention after the piercing scar debacle.But there was also a lot of stuff that left me more than slightly queasy.

Which is not always an easy thing to do without shellfish. So to speak.

During a scene where the male protagonist is kissing a woman's 'bound' feet, she is obviously foot-doubled by a child. The sight of this guy putting half a 6 year old's foot in his mouth made me nauseous. It wasgross.

It almost approaches the revulsion I get from Woody Allen for essentially the same transgression.

The other thing that made me slightly uneasy is that all the credits are in English. This means the film is made for overseas markets, not the local one. Hey, great, let's reinforce a lot of nasty stereotypes about Chinese moviesandChinese people.

Because you know how those people are...

Still, I will dutifully go see part 2, because it's there and because, well, I want to.

Obviously, as agweilo, I'm the film's intended audience.

And I know howthosepeople are.