{"id":18805,"date":"2020-09-06T23:11:03","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T06:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=18805"},"modified":"2020-09-06T23:12:49","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T06:12:49","slug":"mulan-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2020\/09\/06\/mulan-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Mulan (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Kam and I watched the new <cite>Mulan<\/cite>, and enjoyed it quite a bit.<\/p>\r\n<p>It\u2019s very clearly intended to be a wuxia movie rather than a musical for kids. I don\u2019t know enough about wuxia to be able to judge it as an example of that genre, but I thought it succeeded as a movie pretty well.<\/p>\r\n<p>It is much more a reimagining than a remake of the original Disney movie; it shares the same general plot, but it\u2019s very different in a lot of ways. If you go into it hoping for the same kind of live-action remake that Disney has been providing for the past few years, you\u2019ll likely be very disappointed. But from my perspective, the changes here are pretty much all for the better.<\/p>\r\n<p>For example, most of the reviews and discussion that I\u2019ve seen of it, both before and after its release, have complained bitterly about the removal of the songs and especially the removal of Mushu the dragon. Apparently many many viewers consider Mushu to have been an essential part (possibly <em>the<\/em> essential part) of the original movie. But I have always strongly disliked Disney\u2019s comic sidekicks (I think there\u2019ve only been two or three that I\u2019ve ever liked), and I found Mushu\u2019s absence in this version to be a relief. I do like some of the songs in the original\u2014especially \u201cReflection\u201d\u2014but I don\u2019t miss them at all in this movie. (And bits of an instrumental version of \u201cReflection\u201d nicely appear in the soundtrack at a couple of key moments.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Instead of comic sidekicks and songs, this new version provides lots of wuxia-style action (both combat and non-), two prominent new female characters (Mulan has a sister! The movie passes the Bechdel-Wallace test in its first five minutes!), and gorgeous big landscapes. Kam noted that, given the landscapes, the director and cinematographer must get very sad every time they see this movie on a home TV screen instead of the intended big movie screens. Halfway through, we considered pausing to write them a letter of condolence. :)<\/p>\r\n<p>The cast surprised me: Jet Li as the Emperor; Rosalind \u201cKeiko O'Brien\u201d Chao as Mulan\u2019s mother; Gong Li as the supernatural warrior\/witch Xianniang; Ming-Na Wen in a cameo. (I tend to think of her as Melinda May from <cite>Agents of SHIELD<\/cite>; I keep forgetting that she played Mulan in the original Disney movie.)<\/p>\r\n<p>One unfortunate thing about the cast that I didn\u2019t know until after I saw the movie: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2019\/08\/22\/china-is-now-using-mulan-as-a-weapon-against-hong-kong-protesters_partner\/\">the movie\u2019s Chinese-born star, Yiu Lifei [\u2026], who is an American citizen, voiced support for Hong Kong police<\/a>\u201d in 2019. :( As a result, there was a whole boycott movement, but I completely missed that.<\/p>\r\n<p>A couple more thoughts:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>I think that the writers and director are white. I\u2019m sure that Disney was trying very hard to make the movie appealing to Chinese sourcelander audiences as well as to other audiences, and they appear to have done a lot of research toward that end. But I have no idea whether people of Chinese descent were involved in making the movie. (Aside from the cast.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>I particularly don\u2019t know whether the movie\u2019s use of chi\/qi is at all in keeping with traditional ideas. It\u2019s essentially magic here; one probably-unintentionally funny line makes it sound like it\u2019s The Force. I basically considered it to be magic and was fine with it, but I don\u2019t know whether people with relevant background would be put off by the way it\u2019s handled.<\/li>\r\n  <li>There\u2019s been a lot of controversy over Disney\u2019s decision to charge an extra $30 to watch the movie. I figure that\u2019s about the price of two movie tickets around here (and it lets me watch the movie as many times as I want, as long as I have a Disney+ subscription), but also worth noting that if you don\u2019t want to pay $30 to see it (on top of the small monthly D+ subscription fee), you can wait until December and see it for the cost of a one-month D+ subscription. If you want to see it, I mean.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18805"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18808,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18805\/revisions\/18808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}