Rush Hour
It occurs to me that the history of our love for things must be littered with all kinds of significant landmarks and milestones. Take films, for example. The first movie I ever went to see at the cinema was The Fox and the Hound, of which I have absolutely no recollection except the title poster outside the theatre. Next up is One Hundred and One Dalmations of which I again retain nothing except a vague antipathy, rooted (I suspect) not in the movie itself but in the general expensiveness of Disney products, far beyond the meagre means of my own family but easily affordable to my myriad spoilt and fat-faced cousins; a sympathetic Scorsese biopic could start with worse expository scenes of socio-political foreshadowing than of me at the airport watching my cousins scream blue murder for another He-Man figure to take on the plane to Disneyland with them; at which point Holden Caulfield’s classmates scream “Digression!!” and we resume with the first movie I remember seeing, which I had hitherto believed to be Transformers but realised yesterday, whilst lecturing my nephew on the inestimable decline of Orson Welles, must actually have been Ghostbusters. And thereby hangs a tale.
With every title listed I dally with the inevitable temptation of digression, but I think that might be exactly what I mean by this whole idea of landmarks, that what singles out a movie for the status of cinematic signpost is the fact that a story about our past starts with each one, and that the movies are not always more interesting than the stories. The first time I realised that a universally admired blockbuster movie was actually rubbish? Jurassic Park. The first time I saw movies as having artistic worth? Amadeus. My first silent movie? Steamboat Bill Jr. Tempting to think that the whole thing will turn out to be nothing more than an impressive list of all the purportedly important movies you’ve seen, until you reflect that the signal centrepoint of Movie You’ve Seen Most Often is occupied by either Army of Darkness or The Lost Boys.
But where am I going with all this? You already know the summit of the point around which I’m warily winding, and no number of distracting gestures is going to disguise the supreme act of legerdemain I’m attempting to put over on you. (Legerdemain is a distractingly recurrent word in Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, God bless him and his stilted attempts at polysyllabic English dignity and diction, which bear the same relation to aristocratic lordliness as Lurch the butler does to Wodehouse’s Jeeves. Still paying attention?) What I’m saying is that when my shuffling shell-game is over and suddenly Jackie Chan is on the table, no-one is going to look a bit surprised, so I may as well give up on circling the subject from a distance like a removal man preparing to attack a pianoforte. It all happened one Christmas night.
And the rest, I find, is silence. I try to use the revelation of my channel-hopping into Rush Hour as a springboard, but to what? Jackie Chan doesn’t belong in a world with words. And that’s the wonder of it, the sheer untranslatability of human grace – and human kindness. Yes. Whoever would have thought that it’d be harder to describe a leap through a bank-teller’s slot and a snub-nosed smile than a Schubert symphony?