Little Trouble in Big China: The Painted Veil

Little Trouble in Big China: The Painted Veil
- D.W.F.R. by Robert Fong


F**king f**k. That’s what I said when I opened my mailbox and found out that those dip sh*ts at Netflix had sent me the wrong f**king movie again. This has been a common occurrence for me. I set up my queue and get all excited to get T2 but instead I get MC2, which is “Miss Congeniality 2” not “Terminator 2”, f**king f**k sticks. Any way, this time I had made it a point to queue up “The Natural” starring Robert Redford so I could do a review of a baseball film to go along with Dublin’s baseball entry (by the way, who has ever heard of a man getting way into baseball when they are thirty years old? That is some bulls**t). So when I open my mailbox and pull out the epic romance “The Painted Veil” instead of “The Natural” I was more than pissed, I was irate. I cursed Netflix, Hollywood, Ed Norton, the postman, everybody I could think of.

But there I was, me and “The Painted Veil” in my apartment together, eyeing each other. I’m going to be honest; the last thing I want to do on a Friday night is watch a f**king romance. It’s either a good old shoot ‘em up with some guts like “Hardboiled” with Chow Yung-Fat or it’s a porno that doesn’t hold back. There is no room for f**king romance. Especially when you are self proclaimed single like I am. What does “self proclaimed single mean”? It means I do what I want. I eat chicken nuggets for breakfast, and I smoke spliffs, and I watch “Hardboiled” and pornos and don’t give a f**king f**k what you think.

Back to the situation. There I was, looking down at the DVD of “The Painted Veil”, cursing, but having nothing to do, so I thought, alright, I need to do a D.W.F.R. (Dublin’s World Film Review) so why not do it on a film I f**king hate anyway. I pop it in, I take a puff off my one hitter, and let the jeering begin.

So, unlike a classic like “Raging Bull” you probably need a break down of the plot for this one. Let’s see: Naomi Watts and Ed Norton are traveling to a town in China where a cholera epidemic had kicked up and he’s a doctor that studies this cholera s**t so he’s going down to help the villagers if he can. She’s his wife and they are very unhappy because, well, she f**ked Liev Schrieber not that long ago and Ed is super duper p**sed about it. What’s interesting about it, he’s so p**sed it’s almost like he’s dragging her along to this village hoping they both end up dead cause he hates himself and he hates her cheating a** too.

Basically what the movie is doing; it’s beginning with an ending. We are seeing these people at the bitter end of their relationship; they know it, everybody in the movie knows it, and we know it. But what sucked me in is that this is just the beginning, even after the cheating and the lies and the threats and all that. These people are married, they are way deep in the middle of f**king nowhere and they don’t really even know each other. The rest of the movie is them finding out the truth about each other and I got to say I was moved. Its no “Hardboiled” or “An*l Pumps Part 7” but it’s well acted, well written, and breathtakingly filmed (I know my friend Darren and my friend Pete are calling me a f*g for using the word “breathtaking” but they can both eat bowl of d**k up).

Ed Norton is good at playing these period types. He’s kind of a p**sy in this movie but that’s okay because nobody can be “American History X” over and over again. Naomi Watts is pretty good too, although I would have liked seeing her go down on anther chick like she did in “Mulholland Drive”. All in all, it’s a good f**king film. But still, f**k Netflix for always f**king up what I order. Is it too much to ask??

Robert Fong is currently working on his thesis at San Francisco State University entitled “Doves and Blood: The Homo-Erotic Films of John Woo”.