{"id":14989,"date":"2022-06-01T21:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T01:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2022-05-27T15:15:49","modified_gmt":"2022-05-27T19:15:49","slug":"chinese-odyssey-2002-jeffrey-lau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/14989","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Jeffrey Lau)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/14983\">Sammo Hung<\/a> to Jeffrey Lau this week.  After <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/1276\">Eagle Shooting Heroes<\/a><\/em>, Lau made a two-part <em>Journey to the West<\/em> with Stephen Chow called <em>Chinese Odyssey<\/em>, and a few years later, this movie has&#8230; no relation to that one &#8211; probably just a U.S. distrib capitalizing on name recognition.  <em>Heroes<\/em> was produced by Wong Kar-wai, featured cast from <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/1257\">Ashes of Time<\/a><\/em> which was being shot at the same time, and jokey references to the Wong film, which ended up releasing later than the would-be parody because Wong spends years in the editing room.  These two buddies have not learned their lesson, repeating the same trick here with <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/585\">2046<\/a><\/em>, which wouldn&#8217;t come out for two more years.  Besides the Wong refs (also a <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/155\">Days of Being Wild<\/a><\/em> joke, and people being precise numbers of meters apart) it&#8217;s got really good music, overall a snappy action-comedy.<\/p>\n<p>Princess Faye Wong escapes the palace, in part by smashing through the gate with her head, pursued by Emperor Chang Chen.  Meanwhile, Tony Leung is the most hated man in his small town, obstructing business to his beloved sister&#8217;s restaurant (she is Zhao Wei of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/11962\">Three<\/a><\/em> and <em>Red Cliff<\/em>) while trying to find her a man.  Each sibling couple falls for their counterpart, and it looks like things will work out until the Dowager Empress Rebecca Pan (Maggie&#8217;s landlady in <em>ITMFL<\/em>) denies the marriage to Tony, and Princess Faye goes mad.  As usual in Chinese movies, everyone mistakes the two lovely women for men, but this goes even further, becomes a genuinely transsexual movie when Tony and the Princess swap roles at the end.<\/p>\n<p><em>Chang and Zhao being weird:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/chineseod1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>Tony and Faye in trouble:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/chineseod2.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Sammo Hung to Jeffrey Lau this week. After Eagle Shooting Heroes, Lau made a two-part Journey to the West with Stephen Chow called Chinese Odyssey, and a few years later, this movie has&#8230; no relation to that one &#8211; probably just a U.S. distrib capitalizing on name recognition. Heroes was produced by Wong Kar-wai, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,2115,3016,549,3015,2116,142],"class_list":["post-14989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2000s","tag-chen-chang","tag-faye-wong","tag-gender-switching","tag-jeffrey-lau","tag-tony-leung","tag-wong-kar-wai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15020,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions\/15020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}