美国观众总算看到了周星驰最好的电影
If comedy crossed borders as easily as noodle soup or cellphone operating systems, Stephen Chow would be in America what he is in Asia: an integral part of moviegoers’ lives, the man who makes them laugh so hard that they’re embarrassed the next day.
如果喜剧可以像汤面或手机操作系统那样轻松跨越国界，周星驰在美国的地位可能会和他在亚洲一样，在常看电影的人生活占有重要的一席之地，能让人们捧腹大笑，第二天想起来简直都有点难为情。
It’s not as if Mr. Chow, an enormously popular actor and director in Hong Kong for the last 25 years, hasn’t tried. His period gangster comedy “Kung Fu Hustle” got a big American push in 2005 and grossed $17 million, impressive for a foreign-language movie. But that breakthrough hasn’t led anywhere. He’s bigger than ever in Asia — “Journey to the West” was China’s No. 1 film last year at $202 million, beating “Iron Man 3” by $80 million in that country — but here he’s going backward. “Journey” grossed an infinitesimal $18,000 in the United States.
这位过去25年来在香港红极一时的演员兼导演并非没有尝试过。2005年，他的古装黑帮喜剧《功夫》在美国大获成功，票房收入达到1700万美元，对于一部外国片来说相当可观。但这个突破并没有取得任何后续成果。他在亚洲比以往更重要——去年，他的《西游降魔篇》在中国位居票房首位，达到2.02亿美元，比《钢铁侠3》在中国的票房高出8000万美元——但在美国，他的影响力却在下降。《西游降魔篇》在美国只获得微不足道的1.8万美元票房收入。
There are obvious reasons comedy doesn’t always translate, including language barriers — Mr. Chow’s films are full of Cantonese puns and invective — and differing cultural cues and styles. But Stephen Chow: The King of Comedy, an eight-film retrospective beginning Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, suggests another reason for his relative obscurity here: Maybe we haven’t been seeing the right Stephen Chow movies.
显然，在喜剧中，语言障碍(周星驰的电影中充满粤语双关语和骂人话)与不同的文化暗示和风格并不总是能够翻译得出。但是周一在布鲁克林音乐学院举办的“周星驰：喜剧之王”电影回顾展(包括八部影片)展示出另一个他在美国不够出名的原因：我们可能没有看到他最好的影片。
The series, which runs through Sunday, includes the more recent, bigger-budgeted films that have been released here: “Journey,” “Kung Fu Hustle” and the 2004 “Shaolin Soccer.” But it also offers some prime examples of his earlier work, the anarchic, hastily made comedies he starred in and sometimes directed in the 1990s. In that decade, he appeared in more than 40 movies; since then, just four.
这个系列展映一直持续到周日，包括近期曾在美国上映过的大制作影片《西游降魔篇》、《功夫》，以及2004年的《少林足球》。但也有一些他早期的经典之作——他在20世纪90年代主演和偶尔执导的那些混乱仓促的喜剧片。在那十年间，他曾出演40多部电影，之后仅出演过四部。
Mr. Chow’s 21st-century movies retain the off-the-cuff goofiness of classic Hong Kong comedy, but they’re more polished, with comprehensible plots and expensive digital effects. The 1990s films lack the polish and coherence, but that’s no barrier to enjoyment. If “Justice, My Foot!” (1992) or “God of Cookery” (1996) had been released in America, their continuous, disorderly but inspired silliness might have found an appreciative audience in the years of Bill & Ted and Austin Powers.
周星驰在21世纪拍摄的电影保持了香港电影中经典的即兴装疯卖傻，但更加精致，有着易于理解的情节和昂贵的数码特效。90年代的片子没有这些修饰和连贯性，但并不影响它们的观赏性。如果《审死官》(1992)或《食神》(1996)在美国上映，它们当中那些绵绵不绝、杂乱无章，但又充满创意的傻气桥段或许会在《比尔和泰德历险记》(Bill & Ted)以及《王牌大贱谍》(Austin Powers)的观众中找到知音。
“Justice, My Foot!,” the earliest film in the Academy series, was directed by the great Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To, and he keeps it moving at breakneck speed. Mr. Chow plays a shyster lawyer, Sung, who wins cases by firing off nonsensical arguments at an equally fast pace, bewildering the provincial judges who try to keep up with him.
《审死官》是这次展映中年代最早的影片，由杰出的香港动作片导演杜琪峰执导，他让片子飞速发展。周星驰饰演不择手段的讼师宋世杰，他用极快的语速抛出无意义的争论，大惑不解的县官们跟不上他的语速，他便赢得了诉讼。
Sung has a problem, though: His wife wants him to retire, because she believes that every time he helps an undeserving client win, one of their sons dies in infancy. She has a point — they’ve lost 12 sons, and when Sung helps out a troublemaker early in the movie, they lose No. 13. Sung finally promises to change professions — saying that if he breaks his oath, their next son will be born without a penis — but before you know it, his wife is so overcome with sympathy for a woman who’s being forced to marry that she asks him to return to lawyering.
但是宋世杰也有自己的问题，妻子希望他退休，因为她相信每次他帮助不该获胜的主顾赢得官司，他们就会有一个儿子夭折。她的确有道理——他们已经失去了12个儿子，片子一开始，宋世杰帮助一个惹是生非的人脱罪后，他们又失去了第13个儿子。宋世杰最终承诺改行，说如果自己打破誓言，下一个儿子就生下来没有鸡鸡——但是，还不等儿子出生，他的妻子又因为同情一个被迫结婚的女人，让他重操旧业。
Madam Sung is played by the Canto-pop diva Anita Mui, who died in 2003, as a scornful, no-nonsense spouse with kung fu skills, and in most of the movies in the series Mr. Chow’s characters are paired with iron-willed women who expose the comic hero’s vanity and weakness. In the major Hong Kong hit “The God of Cookery,” Karen Mok plays a disfigured night-market hawker who helps Mr. Chow’s arrogant celebrity chef rebuild his career.
宋夫人严肃傲慢，有一身功夫，由2003年逝世的粤语天后梅艳芳饰演，展映的大多数影片中，周星驰的角色身边都有意志坚强的女性角色，她们有着漫画英雄式的虚荣和脆弱。《食神》在香港非常走红，片中莫文蔚饰演一个毁容的夜市摊贩，帮助周星驰饰演的傲慢名厨重整事业。
“God of Cookery,” which Mr. Chow directed with Li Lik-Chi, is a quick-and-dirty parody of “Iron Chef” (created three years before in Japan) in which bodily fluids, savage beatings and childish sexual innuendo play as large a role as food. But the food is there, looking alternately delicious and inedible, in hilarious cooking-competition scenes scripted and staged like the hammy battles in Hong Kong kung fu flicks. The story, which Mr. Chow also had a hand in, swerves into gangster territory and martial-arts burlesque, as the chef discovers that the mythical China Cookery Academy is actually the kitchen of the Shaolin temple.
《食神》由周星驰与李力持共同执导，是对三年前的日本影片《料理铁人》(Iron Chef)的快餐式戏仿。《料理铁人》中不仅有料理，也充满体液、野蛮的打斗和儿童色情暗示。但在《食神》中则是欢乐滑稽的厨艺大赛，台词和表演都像是香港功夫片里闹剧式的功夫场面，食物有时美味，有时完全无法食用。周星驰也参与了剧本创作，他饰演的大厨发现神秘的“中国厨艺学院”其实是少林寺的厨房，此后情节突然转向对黑帮片和武侠片的滑稽模仿。
The last film Mr. Chow directed (also with Mr. Li) before “Shaolin Soccer” was the “King of Comedy” (1999), a transitional work with a fairly intelligible story and a well-worked-out theme of performance versus dull reality. Mr. Chow plays Wan, whose day job is supervising a sleepy neighborhood rec center but who dreams of being an actor. On the set of the kung fu thriller where his aunt gets him work as an extra, he spouts Stanislavskian theory and manages to ruin an elaborate shot even though he’s playing a dead body. (“Subconsciously,” he says, “I don’t want to die yet.”)
周星驰在《少林足球》之前执导的最后一部影片是1999年的《喜剧之王》，这是一部转型之作，有着明白易懂的故事情节和精心设计的主题，是关于表演与沉闷现实之间的对抗。周星驰饰演尹天仇，正式工作是为一群昏昏欲睡的邻居们看管娱乐活动中心，但他梦想成为演员。他的阿姨在一部功夫惊悚片的片场给他找了个临时演员的工作，虽然只是饰演一具死尸，但他滔滔不绝地讲述斯坦尼拉夫斯基的理论，破坏了一个精心设计的复杂镜头(“我的角色还不想死，”他说，“这是下意识的。”)
