Loving The Alien | Xu Jiao gets to know her adorable new interstellar pet in CJ7.
CJ7
Directed by Stephen Chow. Starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang. Metro Cinema. Fri-Mon, May 23-26 (7pm).
3 1/2 stars
I’ve seen some unnaturally cute, big-eyed movie creatures in my day—E.T., Gizmo from Gremlins, Zooey Deschanel—but the title character from CJ7 takes the cake.
It’s part Tribble, part Teletubby, part Tamagotchi, part Shmoo, and part Nibbler from Futurama: it has a green torso made of some kind of infinitely stretchable plastic, stubby little green legs, a brown, furry, football-shaped head like Stewie Griffin, gigantic animé eyes, and a floppy antenna that’s the perfect size and shape for blowing soap bubbles. It communicates through a series of burbles, coos, and purrs, and it giggles and wriggles if you scratch it on its belly. Your first instinct might be to scream and try to kill it, but since it seems about as malleable and indestructible as a ball of Silly Putty, you might as well give in and make it your pet.
That’s what little Dicky Chow decides to do when he accidentally comes into possession of it. As the son of a dirt-poor construction-site “coolie” (played by writer/director Stephen Chow), Dicky rarely gets luxuries like toys—he and his father are so poor, their idea of a fun game is seeing who can squash the most cockroaches on the wall of their tiny shack. With his ragged shoes (scavenged by Mr. Chow from a nearby dump), Dicky is the laughingstock of the private school his father has scrimped and saved for him to attend, but he hopes his new friend CJ7 can use its magical outer-space powers to help him finally win the respect of his rich and popular classmates.
CJ7 is an unexpected change of pace for Chow, following his exhilarating, tongue-in-cheek martial-arts comedies Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. Those films had an appealingly childlike, cartoonish quality to them, but this one is an outright kiddie movie, the performances and the gags even broader than the ones Chow usually goes for. Chow relegates himself to a supporting role; it’s left to Xu Jiao (the young actress who plays his son Dicky) to carry the bulk of the film. And she seems to be totally on Chow’s wavelength. Chow encourages her to mug for the camera a lot, but her transgender performance, which contains some quite skillful physical comedy, never slides into obnoxiousness.
It helps that Chow forces little CJ7 to undergo an almost unending series of physical abuses. The poor thing is stretched, squashed, and twisted in every direction. A dog mauls it, Dicky throws it in a trashcan, and his classmates take a saw and a power drill to it to try and figure out where the batteries go. All of this is absolutely hilarious—especially the bug-eyed look of terror on CJ7’s face as each new indignity begins.
I’m not sure who the North American audience for CJ7 will be. The subtitles make it problematic as a family movie, even though many of the gags—including a couple of wonderfully exuberant poop jokes and a slapstick fight with the school bully—traffic in exactly the kind of wildly exaggerated humour that kids adore. (Too bad a dubbed version isn’t available.) But adults may resist the bizarre images and Chow’s breakneck tonal shifts between slapstick comedy and tearjerking melodrama.
Who’s left? Childish adults, I guess, who can appreciate Chow’s loving homages to E.T. and his satire of Asian consumerism while giggling at the sight of the perfect Dairy Queen soft-serve turd CJ7 deposits in Dicky’s hand. (Even its turds are cute!) I don’t know how many of us there are out there, but if the film’s final scene is any indication, there are more than enough CJ7s out there to go around.
