If you like Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, then
Kung Fu Hustle is a fun movie to watch.
It has definite references to the Walled City.
Kung Fu Hustle and the Walled City
references from Jump Cut review
Link for full text:
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Szeto/2.html
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"Pig Sty Alley is “Chu Lung Shing Chai,” which is a Cantonese
pun on the Kowloon Walled City (“Gau Lung Shing Chai”)."
.....Pig Sty Alley and its residents are reminiscent of the Hong
Kong film The House of 72 Tenants (1972). Chow mentioned
that he created Pig Sty from his childhood experience, with the
design of the Alley being similar to the crowded Hong Kong
complexes of his youth (City 34). In the film Pig Sty Alley is set
against huge commercial billboards of local Hong Kong
businesses or products such as traditional Chinese bakeries and
herbal syrup. Despite its local connections, “Pig Sty Alley”
literally has translocal association with one of the earliest
gangster films by D.W. Griffith, The Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1912). These crosscultural references are further complicated
by the fact that the Chinese translation of Pig Sty Alley is “Chu
Lung Shing Chai,” which is a Cantonese pun on the Kowloon
Walled City (“Gau Lung Shing Chai”). In commenting on
Chow’s recoding and play on Cantonese slang, Linda Lai Chiu
-Han notes that Chow’s early nonsensical films are executed
with a “rhetoric of subversion” (as distinguished from actual
“subversion”) that opposes official discourse. The films indicate
a politics of “internal commemoration” that creates a sense of
solidarity among the local viewers that is impenetrable to those
“outside” viewers who are not part of this communal
membership (246).
.....In Kung Fu Hustle, this Cantonese reference to the Kowloon
Walled City marks out a distinct territory of word play that is
impenetrable to audiences who are outside of the Hong Kong
community. The Kowloon Walled City has a unique role in
Hong Kong's colonial history. It was China's tiny enclave in the
middle of British Hong Kong for decades, an extra-territory
within the British colonial Hong Kong that became a place of
no-man’s land since even the British colonialist did not have
sovereignty over it. It was said that as late as the 1970s the local
triads were the only real administration within the Walled City
until it was finally torn down in 1993 (Leung 34). Chow
expands his early nonsensical wordplay of Cantonese
vocabulary and slang, and in Kung Fu Hustle creates a new
source of communal solidarity for Hong Kong people who are
familiar with the history of the Walled City.
...In this case, the Walled City is a nodal point of the anarchic
social landscape of jianghu. In 1997, the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (HKSAR) enacted a Basic Law providing
those regions with a high degree of autonomy, a separate
political system and a capitalist economy, under the principle of
"one country, two systems" proposed by Deng Xiaoping.
Despite Hong Kong's political transformation from a former
British colony to part of the PRC, Chow attempts to replace the
reality of post-1997 Hong Kong and its reunification with the
PRC with his own imaginative projection of the present on to a
Kowloon Walled City/ Shanghai in which histories of British
colonialism and Chinese revolution/ socialism are to be
suspended. He also projects such a present onto a 1940s urban
gangland, which has clear crosscultural references to both U.S.
and Hong Kong gangster films. Kung Fu Hustle, therefore,
redefines China by imagining Shanghai before 1949 and
transposing it into an urban landscape nurtured in a capitalist
economy and ideology.
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