Goofy Sci-Fi Comedy and More of those Darn Nazis

CJ7
It’s hard to resist comparing Stephen Chow’s new family-ish sci-fi comedy CJ7 to its most obvious American touchstone, the also-acronymic ET; both are works of accomplished wonder, attuned to the fragile coexistence of childhood imagination and bittersweet reality. More concretely, there’s the story: A boy befriends a mysterious creature from another world, and each ends up having a profound effect on the other’s life.

Beyond those broad similarities, however, there’s no mistaking CJ7 for Spielberg’s slow, spiritually thoughtful classic. Much like his Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, Chow’s latest is an explosion of cartoonish fantasticism, rich with sight gags, physical humor and impromptu kung fu battles.

The story centers on young Dicky (the adorable Jiao Xu, who happens to be a girl) and his father Ti (Chow), a poor laborer who works long hours to keep Dicky at a snobbish private school where even his teacher outwardly reviles his poverty.

After one of his popular schoolmates — played to delightful effect as a lil’ corporate supervillain — shows off his new robot dog, Dicky throws a fit in a toy store when his father, brokenhearted, tells him they cannot afford to buy one. Rooting around the junkyard where he gets Dicky’s shoes, however, Ti finds a strange, rubbery green ball, deposited by an enormous flying saucer he quite comically fails to notice, and brings it home under the guise of a brand new toy.

Before long, of course, Dicky and his father come to find out the ball is much more: It is indeed an extraterrestrial, and a sickeningly cute one at that. Chow’s penchant for goofy, passable CG is unabated here, and the creature is such a joy to watch, its weaker technical moments go practically unnoticed.

From there, the film takes a wonderful structural detour dividing hopes from disappointments, and then on to a predictable, manipulative finale that’s nonetheless as joyous and whimsical as what’s come before it.

Part of what makes CJ7 such refreshing family entertainment, though, may also be worth mentioning as a warning to some parents. There’s a certain darkness to the story that makes it honest beyond its wackiness. In many ways, the film bears less resemblance to ET than to Amblin peers like Joe Dante’s Gremlins. The class issues are drawn with a sharper crayon here than in most kid-friendly films, and it’s worth noting Dicky’s teachers and schoolmates don’t take particular notice when he shows up to school black-eyed and bruised.
But mixing these serious elements in with the rest of CJ7’s madcap concoction only strengthens the film, and kids are more likely to be bothered by the subtitles than the themes.

The Counterfeiters
It’s not particularly hard to see why Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters) walked away with 2007’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Even if the Academy hadn’t so typically snubbed more notable films like Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Ruzowitzky’s handsome, inessential tale of the Third Reich’s counterfeiting efforts is still just the kind of flick that usually grabs the award: palatable, prestigious and neutered by bland, Americanized cinematic traditions.

That’s not all bad, of course, and The Counterfeiters is, if nothing else, evidence of that. Based on a memoir by its lone non-amalgamated character, the film is a necessarily fictionalized account of Operation Bernhard, which saw the Nazis recruiting bankers and printmakers from prison camps into an operation to faithfully reproduce British and American currency, first in hopes of economic sabotage and later with the loftier goal of continuing to finance their doomed military struggle.

The audience’s window into this rich subject is fictional master counterfeiter Solomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics, showcasing a DeNiro-like intensity), who is imprisoned in 1936 and eventually recruited for Bernhard by the same detective — now a Major in the SS — who busted him years earlier. Heading the counterfeiting operation, Sorowitsch sympathetically butts heads with “coworker” Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a printer and political agitator preoccupied with sabotaging Operation Bernhard, no matter the cost to him or his fellow prisoners.

The Counterfeiters uses this testy, philosophically charged relationship between Sorowitsch and Burger as a jumping-off point to address some compelling ethical questions, made all the more immediate by the backdrop of the Holocaust. Are Bernhard’s participants morally obligated to undermine the force that has so harshly imprisoned them, yet now given them meager creature comforts and a chance at survival? Would their sabotage and subsequent martyrdom mean anything when a new group of prisoners came to replace them? And if they continue to cooperate, are they anything less than Nazi collaborators?

It’s a credit to Ruzowitsky’s talents these questions very rarely bog down the film’s smart pacing or considerable dramatic intrigue and that most of them are explored with surprising, thoughtful depth. But the focus afforded these quandaries also makes the lesser among them seem labored and overcooked, and thus undermines them in the end.

It’s unfair, perhaps, to ask true profundity of a film like The Counterfeiters, but it’s equally unfair that it should get our hopes up.