Big Shot's Funeral

Rating:

out of

Directed by:

Feng Xiaogang

Cast:

Ge You

YoYo

Rosamund Kwan

Lucy

Donald Sutherland

Tyler

Ying Da

Louis

Paul Mazursky

Tony

Screenplay:

Li Xiaoming

Shi Kang

Feng Xiaogang

DVD:

From Poker Industries.

Zone:

Video Signal:

NTSC

When I die, I want a drill team at my funeral!

The great director Don Tyler (Donald Sutherland) has come to Beijing to remak e The Last Emperor. He is accompanied by his assistant and interpreter, Lucy (Rosamund Kwan). Lucy hires YoYo (Ge You) to follow Tyler around, constantly filming, to produce footage for the inevitable "Making of..." documentary that will go on the DVD. Tyler has no Mandarin and YoYo has little English. Despite the language barrier, or because of it, Tyler decides YoYo is a genius, and they bond.

Expecting Tyler to die momentarily, YoYo gets cracking on the funeral. He researches other celebrity funerals, such as Princess Diana's, and he brings in Louis (Ying Da), a concert promoter to help plan. YoYo and Louis concoct such a glorious send off for Tyler the only possible venue is the Temple of the Ancestors in the Forbidden City. The rites will kick off with clips of a selection of arias from Zhang Yimou's production of Turandot, followed by a stand up comedy routine "The joke is on Tyler". That is only the start.

It comes time to start paying vendors and YoYo hits up Lucy for the money. There is none. YoYo is only briefly fazed. He and Louis start selling sponsorships (These festivities brought to you by Outback Steak House!). Local and international advertisers all want a piece of Tyler and they get it. Big Shot's Funeral builds as the funeral arrangements become more elaborate and the product placements correspondingly outre. Tyler wakes up.

Survive the draggy first act as the situation is set up and the film rolls once Tyler is out of the picture. As a satire, the film is entirely successful. The centerpiece is the obsequies but there are also the westerners acting eastern and vice versa. Ying Da's Louis is avidly capitalist. Those other criticss, who know about film and motifs and stuff like that would probably be able to say how the movie is about the death of Chinese culture and big topics like that but this reviewer just knows she was looking for a laugh or three and she found at least two.