Best known in the US for the brutally funny KUNG FU HUSTLE (2004), Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow's family-friendly homage to E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL is significantly gentler than his earlier films, but equally offbeat.
Condemned by lack of education to a life of backbreaking, underpaid manual labor, impoverished widower Ti Chow (Chow) wants more for his son, Dicky (nine-year-old Xu Jiao, who's actually a girl), and is willing to sacrifice anything -- including his health and pride -- to send the child to the private Bo Si School. Dicky adores his father and understands that they're poor -- he and Ti make a game of killing cockroaches in their pestilent apartment and watch TV by by squatting on the curb outside an electronics store -- but the pressure of being mocked by his wealthy classmates eventually surfaces in the form of a public tantrum over Ti's refusal to buy an expensive robot-dog toy called CJ1, the status symbol du jour at school. Hoping to placate his son, Ti goes "shopping" at the local dump, where he scavenges both a newish pair of sneakers -- Dicky loves sports -- and an odd, greenish ball he fails to notice was left behind by a departing UFO. The ball eventually transforms itself into a purring creature with a rubbery body and a fuzzy, oversized head, dominated by pleading, Walter Keane-esque eyes and topped by a single antenna: The combination should be as annoying as all get out but is in fact pretty darned cute. Convinced that he's the proud owner of an alien robo-dog, Dicky dubs his new pet "CJ7" and imagines he's now found the answer to all his problems: It should be a snap for an alien robo-dog to help him get good grades, excel at sports and beat the bullies at their own game, right?
A lifelong Stephen Spielberg fan who credits E.T. with inspiring him to direct, Chow softens his usual raucous tone for this boy-and-his-alien tale. But he doesn't abandoning his distinctive love of the grotesque, witness grade-school giantess Maggie (Han Wong Jua), who nurses a discomfiting crush on the diminutive Dicky, the scene in which CJ7 peppers Dicky with a machine-gun like fusillade of poo and the repeated violence visited upon the poor little creature by children and adults alike. CJ7 is as bracingly clear-eyed as Disney classics like OLD YELLER (1957) in its understanding that innocent fantasy and painful reality are both integral parts of childhood. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
