: CJ7
Director: Stephen Chow
Quirky little Stephen Chow action-comedy. Like all of his stuff, this is best described as a live-action cartoon. This is one is a bit more magical than some of his films, with much less martial arts (he, in fact, doesn’t do any). Instead the film focuses around a young boy (Chow plays his father). The boy’s dad is incredibly poor but sacrifices everything to send his kid to private school where he is mocked for not being wealthy. The boy and the dad don’t always get along, which is done in a surprisingly realistic fashion (considering other aspects of the film are a bit fantastic). One day the boy’s dad finds a strange rubber ball at a junkyard and brings it home for his son. It turns out this “ball” is really an alien creature left by a spaceship and it morphs into a sort of alien dog that is able to do magic. Or is it? The boy wants to use the “dog” (which he names CJ7) to help him out at school (cheat on a test, win at sports, etc.) but things don’t quite work the way he expected. I won’t spoil the ending but let’s just say it’s very good. The alien dog is CGI, of course, with clever and fun digital animation tricks as typical Chow. My favorite was in a school fight scene when a bully gets beat up a fat girl — she punches him and he goes flying like 100 yards and when he lands and screeches to a halt, his shoes leave rubber tire marks! Overall this is a fun and quite wonderful and touching film. It’s not E.T., as it’s got silly cartoony elements, but I liked it a lot. The most delightful thing was when the characters didn’t act stereotypical as you’d expect, but did surprising things instead. That’s very unusual for this kind of film. Fun!
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