Winking and bopping and hip-swiveling from its opening credits to its last gasp, Kim Jee-won’s lo mein western The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an entrancing study in excess. As the camera swoops alongside through 1930s Manchuria to a hurtling locomotive about to be beset by multiple heists, you can just feel Quentin Tarantino’s zipper strain. It’s safe to say this is the first Chinese western (albeit a Korean film) — not a “Chinese western” as the wuxia pian martial arts epics are sometimes called, but a western with outlaws, hired guns, frontier trains, shoot-outs, desert towns and cowboy hats, as genre-genuine as Clint Eastwood’s poncho. Which, of course, is Italian.
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On DVD: A Trailblazing Western Comes Blasting Out of… China?
