Process of a Movie

So far, the things I've talked about were those that coincided with the time period during which I remembered that I was supposed to be leaving these posts every so often. As such, they are rather random and have no unifying theme. Having had only a few sentences of instruction on this several-week-long assignment and having received no input on my progress so far, I have no choice but to continue writing whatever comes to mind.

What comes to mind this week is the movie I was watching last night, Shaolin Grandma. It is the story of an old woman who knows Shaolin kung-fu but who is thrown out of her society and experiences modern life for the first time, even falling in love and burning down a croquet field. It's a movie so bad that it's good. The main character, a nameless old woman, wears the same, emotionless expression for upwards of 95% of the film. She seems to be completely merciless, ignoring her devoted pupils (who ran away with her) and eventually killing the mail man who thought he found her dead body while delivering the mail and stayed awhile to read her life story (which she wrote down apparently). It is amazing.

In terms of what it was trying to do, the story isn't as atrocious as its delivery. Those wigs they put on the old woman to make her seem young were to demonstrate that she wasn't always an aged woman. Those stunt doubles they used were to show that she once could bend enough to touch her toes. The part where she wins her love interest after beaning his wife in the head with a croquet ball, causing her to foam at the mouth, and lighting the entire field on fire was meant to be romantic. The part where she remembered  how devoted her students were when they got the crap beaten out of them and cried at her feet like five year olds was meant to be a highly emotional, spiritual moment. The part where she describes through pictures her sexual exploits with her new-found love ("I was your first?" ~ 70 year old man) was just her finding herself (it's practically the same as those teen disney shows where everyone is exploring their sexuality except with old people). The part where she trains herself by breaking sticks, carrying buckets, and attempting not to fall over while head-butting, culminating in the most emotionless bout of cheering ever witnessed was supposed to be a Rocky moment. The movie was almost a conceptual masterpiece!

It's impossible to rule out the possibility that someone intentionally made the movie as bad as it was. Sometimes we go out of our way to fool ourselves into that kind of thing. A discussion on the various things to watch for in order to figure out the intentions of the director would be endless, like trying to figure out if someone is using reverse psychology on your or whether they just want you to think that. So I won't. Instead, human nature (the bad kind) drives me to want to believe it was an honest attempt at making a movie that simply failed in every regard.