the forbidden kingdom
Come with me and travel back in time to a place where everything makes me angry. Snacks will not be provided.
Hey. I’m back. The Summer movie season is now well underway, so I’ve let down everyone who relies on me for informed movie going advice via this site. That is to say, I’ve let nobody down, because as little credit as I give humanity in general, people with whom I hold sway are smart enough to have stopped relying on me for anything, ever. Kudos all around, folks. But not the kind with granola, because if there’s one thing I am, it’s inconsolably broken and irreparably destroyed. I know that’s two things. However, if there are three things I am, they are: 1)inconsolably broken, 2) irreparably destroyed and 3) stingy with granola. So step away.
As if I planned it this way, The Forbidden Kingdom is a movie where some jackass American kid goes back in time and to find himself confused and trying to remember shit that he saw in some movies. So, the writing of this post is in many ways a re-experiencing of the film itself, as long ago, when wooly mammoths walked the great desert plains of unnamed continental masses and better Summer movies had yet to be released, Cracka and I went to see the long-awaited Jet Li/Jackie Chan collaboration which promised ten minutes or so of legendary fighting for the bargain price of an entire plodding feature length film. Even though they’re getting old, those guys can still throw the fists around with competence that tenses the sphincter of a normally able person.
I was going to write a long post attempting to revisit a conversation that I had with Beezer and attempt to figure out my recent fascination with race and identity. Why was I so irritated that the poor man’s Shia LeBeouf got to hang out with an Asian posse? It never bothered me before when Ralph Macchio did it. But these days it’s not uncommon to find your humble narrator, with Cracka in tow, hanging out around Chinatown and plotting to harangue and drive away outsiders by throwing food at them (in lieu of Hawaiian shirts). Had I developed some misplaced sense of racial entitlement? Was it because my former, whole self was betrayed and forsaken by an insidious and exclusively Caucasian conspiracy, forcing me to come to terms with the possibility that The Man had set his sights on me? Was I trying to erase my banana roots and reinvent myself as someone unidentifiable to those who knew my previous cultural ignorance? Did I know that bananas aren’t a vegetable, but rather a fruit and therefore my analogy was flawed at best? Would I get over it in time to see Iron Man without bitching about the lack of Asian representation in a movie so rife with themes of engineering? Who knows. I hit my head on my door muttering lines from Pulp Fiction until I forgot everything, instead simply chalking my bitterness up to a vestigial phantom desire to have conversations I don’t get to have with a friend I’m no longer allowed to know. Because Whitey won’t let it happen.
Instead, I’ll note the fact that the photo on the above right wasn’t even in the movie, and there should have been much, much more of the girl so awesome they named her twice, Bing Bing Li. Or maybe she was mistaken for a panda at birth.