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Banzai Bailout: Reflections on the Movie Gung Ho
| Article
# : |
10811 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
1,159 Words |
| Author
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Douglas C. Moore
Douglas C. Moore, an internationally recognized silent-film
specialist and a former president of the National Society of
Cinephiles, is now professor of English at Metropolitan
Community College, Kansas City, Missouri. |
Gung Ho is one of the funniest film comedies to hit the screens in years. But beyond funny, it has several incisive yet painless lessons for all of us: the lessons of culture shock and cross-culture clash, beautifully resolved through tolerance and understanding. There is life, it seems, after cooperation. Although the film features Japanese workers and executives, the Gung Ho title is actually a bit of Chinese slang meaning something like "let's work together." The term itself never comes up in the movie, but the theme is evident throughout.
The film is directed by young and rising Ron Howard (yes, the same little Opie who was seen on television years ago with Andy Griffith), who recently distinguished himself by directing Night Shift, Splash, and Cocoon. Howard stars his Night Shift surprise player, Michael Keaton, opposite Mimi Rogers as his patient and supportive mate. Costarring and weighty character actor George Wendt and Japanese players Gedde Watanabe (of Volunteers) and Soh Yamamura, who is acclaimed in Japan as a National Treasure--something like a Japanese Laurence Olivier.
The time from for the film is now; the setting is a small American steel town in depressed western Pennsylvania, where everybody is out of work. People are spending their welfare checks in the bars, wondering whether the closed-down automobile factory will ever open again. Their town, near Pittsburgh, has turned into Pitsville along with their lives, and though something has to be done, nobody is doing anything beyond taking the local beer inventory.
Enter Hunt Stevenson (Michael Keaton), one of their most well-liked drinking buddies. He's brash and gutsy,
... (1999 of 7061 Characters)
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