(Dumplings, Delamu, East of Eden)
Aaron may have beaten me to the punch on the whole “Yuck Cha” naming rights, but having stumbled from yesterday’s screening of Dumplings with an apparent taste of baby foetuses lodged in my throat, it occurred to me that Fruit Chan’s wicked and quite frankly unwholesome gibe at cosmetics, vanity and China’s own muddy social mores could quite effortlessly slot under any number of alternate titles. Like Bad Taste. The Goddess of Cookery. In China They Eat…. Because She’s Worth It.

Granted, there’s nothing fruity about the idea of chomping on steamed dumplings filled with still born flesh in the fraught attempt to rejuvenate one’s youth (the film’s desperate damsel, a Mrs. Li played by Miriam Yeung, speaks at least for all the discarded actresses of the Searching for Debra Winger generation), but judging by the barely contained spouts of laughter surrounding me, I wasn’t the only one content to lean on my apathy cushion throughout. Chris Doyle’s photography is a restrained beast compared to the overwrought score, but it’s the foley work of meat cleavers on babies of incest on dicing and slicing on chewing and swallowing that had me reaching for the back pocket of the seat in front (so to speak). Leave your conscience and your stomach at the door for this one.

Elsewhere, the films were more digestible. Delamu sold out suitably – its place on the Embassy screen a thing of organic beauty, tainted only by the fact that the film’s subtitles had a mind of their own. Wider still, East of Eden in CinemaScope hogged the entire real estate of the theatre – an example, if any, of why old Hollywood needed the format to keep the living room tube at bay. In the John Steinbeck-adapted, Elia Zazan directed angst-fest, James Dean does that thing with his eyes, that thing with his downcast head, and that thing where he wriggles his arms inside of his vest like he’s damaged and hurting and reeks of teen spirit. It’s all part of the act, of course, but I don’t think anyone has quite posterized the tormented body language of youth with the same expressional voltage since.–TW