Despite its less than successful release, I include the film Big Trouble In Little China on my list of guilty pleasures: high on my list. It tells the story of Jack Burton, who helps his friend Wang Chi rescue Wang’s green-eyed fiancée from bandits in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They go into the mysterious underworld beneath Chinatown, where they face an ancient sorcerer named David Lo Pan, who requires a woman with green eyes to marry him in order to release him from a centuries-old curse. [Wikipedia]
David Lo Pan is certainly not the first nefarious villain from the mysterious and inscrutable land of ultra-long fingernails and wicked martial arts. You could even include Ming the Merciless in this batch of bad hombres. But isn’t it an easy cliché to engender a fictional villain with unknown magical powers from a distant and unknown country? Remember, Lamont Cranston didn’t learn the secrets to cloud men’s minds of the corner of Flatbush and Avenue J.
I have said it before but it always holds true: when you subscribe to a publicatiion that only comes out twice a year, it’s always a surprise when that neatly packaged journal is found lurking in the mailbox. What is it? Who is it from? Zip open the cardboard container and realize that another six months have passed.
One of my favorite and most admired novels is Jealousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet. I first met Robbe-Grillet on a back-shelf at Papa Bach: the cover of the Grove paperback of Le Voyeur showing a beautiful naked woman surreptitiously through a bedroom window. I read Le Voyeur and La Maison de Rendez-vous at that time as if they were some new kind of literary magic that I didn’t understand but which I was certain contained hidden treasure.
