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[Weekly Update] Swearing in Movies.
🕑 Added 2025-04-07 09:19:33 +0000 UTCSorry for the lack of update last week. In my rush to publish April Fools' video, I have forgotten to write an update. Hopefully my new medication can get my productivity back to normal soon.
CHANNEL UPDATE
Ne Zha video coming next:
Our next video will be the history of Nezha, both its religious/literary origins and cinematic history. It'll serve to provide some background context for people who want to get into the Ne Zha series.
Unlike Wukong, which stays somewhat faithful to the novel, Nezha's character changed massively over the past several hundred years, to a point where reading the book simply doesn't help much. The book is also not that well written, so... let's just save everyone the trouble and explain it in a quick video.
Bad Chinese movie video returns:
It has been a while since I last talk about a bad Chinese movie. In the past few years, Chinese bad movies no longer get the attention of the Internet. Rarely are they creatively bad. And thus, they left no cultural imprint. So, I didn't think it was right to talk about something that doesn't matter to anyone.
But the world is going crazy, and I need some levity. So, for the first May video, we'll return to this, and talk about some recent bad Chinese movie, including that deepfake movie in which Jackie Chan LARPs as his younger self. However, the video will focus on the shifting attitude towards bad movies in China, and why everything changed because of Hollywood.
Sex Lives of the Potato Men is... probably not happening:
So, I was going to cover this British film for our next bad movies world tour video, as it is very highly requested. But holy Jesus son of Mary the ass blaster WTF did I just watch!?
To succinctly summarize the film... There's this scene in which grandma asks to see a young man's penis, all while her daughter is pressuring the man into doing so. I think it's supposed to be funny but... Yeah I feel violated, man. I don't think I can make this funny, nor can it be on YouTube.
Oh god, this movie haunts me.
MEDIA TALK
I hope you enjoyed our April Fools' video on Cantonese swear words. The topic is actually way larger than what was included in the video. Swearing in film is an art, and it's pretty difficult to master. It's something you'd notice only when it doesn't feel right. And if you've watched any student films, you know what I mean.
Indeed, in film school, our professor urged us to think about the swear words in our dialogue. Being young adults, it's often tempting to throw in an f-word for style or edginess. But so often, the words are placed wrong. An example I remember is "I f#cking am gonna kill you", when it should've been "I am gonna f#cking kill you". It's a subtle difference, but you feel it when you hear it spoken out loud.
In American films, the only swear word that seem to get the spotlight is the f-word. There's a Wikipedia article listing films that contain the most f-words. People are fascinated by them. Indeed, it is a versatile word. But perhaps, it's too versatile. It's fairly rare to see other form of creative swearing beyond the f-word, which is kinda lame.
That's the other nuance I wanted to talk about in Cantonese films. Comparatively speaking, Cantonese swear words are more colorful, more varied, and often delivered in more creative ways to bypass the rating system.
Older Stephen Chow films and Wong Jing films have a lot of these examples. One that I included in the video is From Beijing With Love. In the film, Stephen Chow has a partner who's a scientist named Da Vinci. However, Chow keeps calling him Vinci, which in Cantonese means "Muff-diving", or more literally "smelling the p#ssy". It's a dirty gag that anyone outside of the Cantonese circle will not understand.
Flirting Scholar also contains a lot of similar gags. In the poetry battle between Stephen Chow and Vincent Kok, the two ends the battle with sentences that are secretly swearing. Stephen Chow says "Your family pond is full of mackerels", but it really sounds more like "Your ancestral shrine is f-cking pointless", meaning that everyone in their family is going to die and no one will be there to worship their ancestors. It's both dark, humorous, and well hidden.
Unfortunately, this kind of nuance just can't be easily translated, and I have no way of including them into a video without it coming off as super boring.
These days, this kind of word play is very rare. And even when done, it's really not that funny. I have to say, this is one of the aspects from Hong Kong comedy I missed the most. It's just something really funny when smart people finds a way to be crass.
Anyway, that's the update for this week. Work on our next video has begun, and I should have more to show soon. I'll see you in our next update!
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