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Two mermaids talk with their torsos above the surface of the water
Screenings

POSTPONED: The Mermaid

SATURDAY DEC 3, 7:30 PM
This event has been postponed.

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Archive Talks. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

In-person: Julie A. Turnock, associate professor of Media and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The deliriously silly energy of Hong Kong writer-director Stephen Chow’s musical action comedy The Mermaid helped propel it into the history books as the highest-grossing film in China. Crucial to sustaining the madcap anarchy of its story about a band of mermaids fighting to save their ocean home from a billionaire developer is the wild style of its visual effects. Fins fly, tentacles writhe and bodies—human and otherwise—are flung about in defiance of physics–and ILM’s influence over effects aesthetics. Neither “bad” nor “wrong,” Chow’s approach offers a counterpoint to the relentless realism of the standard modern blockbuster.

(DCP, color, in Mandarin with English subtitles, 94 min. Director: Stephen Chow. Screenwriters: Fung Chih-chiang, Stephen Chow, Ivy Kong Hing-Ka, Chan Tsang Kan-cheong, Si-Cheun Lee, Ho Miu-Kei, Lu Zhengyu. With: Lin Yun, Deng Chao, Kitty Zhang.)