What Annoys Me About The End Of 'The Golden Child' (1986)

Yes, this is another one of my commentaries on things that annoy me in second-rate movies of the past.  I was reminded of this one in a round about way.  I was watching 'The Shadow' (1994), which I enjoy as an action movie with nice 1930s styling, somewhat reminiscent of the first three Indiana Jones movies and with a superhero who is a reformed drugs dealer with simply mental powers battling a resurrected Genghis Khan in 1930s New York.  It was one of those movies in which, following on the success of the gothic-styled 'Batman' series of movies, 1989-97 other superheroes from old comic books were sought to hopefully turn into successes.  Other examples were 'Dick Tracy' (1990) stunning in terms of the style and imagery but rather dull; 'The Phantom' (1996) which was pretty poor all round and 'The Rocketeer' (1991) which was enjoyable, not least because it was an archetype of dieselpunk.  These had a 1930s-40s setting which I guess appealed more to the older members of the audience rather than the average teenager; perhaps to zenith of this trend was 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow' (2004).  More successful were superhero movies set in the contemporary world, notably the three 'Spiderman' movies, 2002-7 and the newly revised 'Batman' series 2005-8, though I found them dull.  Less successful were 'Daredevil' (2003), 'Hulk' (2003) and 'The Incredible Hulk' (2008) and 'Superman Returns' (2006), but not outright failures.

Anyway, what is the connection between 'The Shadow' and 'The Golden Child'?  Well, it is Tibet.  At the start of 'The Shadow' Larmont Cranston is an American (played by Alec Baldwin) who has managed to establish himself as drugs baron in Tibet, living a classically debauched and violent life until called to book by a local Buddhist lama.  Redeeming himself and learning how to manipulate the thoughts of others he returns to New York to fight crime in the classic superhero way.  In 'The Golden Child', Eddie Murphy plays Chandler Jarrell (all male American names now seem to consist of two surnames from somewhere else) a kind of self-funded searcher for lost children in Los Angeles.  He is employed by a Tibetan woman, Kee Nang (played by Charlotte Lewis) to search for the so-called Golden Child who is also being sought by a demon, Sardo Numspa (played by Charles Dance).  The movie is an awkward mix of fantasy and Murphy's gritty humour, toned down for a 'family' movie.  Jarrell encounters a Chinese woman who is half-dragon and Numspa travels to Hell to commune, we assume, with the Devil, in a scene reminiscent of the portrayal of Hell and travel to and from it in 'Constantine' (2005).

Jarrell ultimately travels to Tibet and through a series of tests, partly motivated by lust for the woman who recruited him, he is deemed worthy by the Buddhist monks to track down the Golden Child.  The child has magical abilities, able to subsist on single leaves and to animate a tin can into being a dancing toy.  We are reminded of the way that on the death of the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist monks would go into the community to find a child who would be seen as the next incarnation, something he would prove by selecting particular items when presented with a choice.  Led by the demon Numspa the kidnappers seem to have stepped from the 15th century, armed with a crossbow.

Despite coming between the very successful 'Beverly Hills Cop' (1984) and 'Beverly Hills Cop 2' (1987), 'The Golden Child' really began to establish Murphy's career in making rather lame movies that did not know which genre they fitted in and tried to shoehorn Murphy's loud mouthed humour into them.  After 1989/90, Murphy has been best simply voicing the donkey in the Shrek movies, (2001, 2004, 2007), though I quite enjoyed 'Vampire in Brooklyn' (1995) on a cheesy level and 'Bowfinger' (1999) was a real exception to the rule for both him and Steve Martin.  It also marked a step on Charles Dance's woeful Hollywood career.  Dance, like Tim Piggott-Smith, Art Malik and Geraldine James came out of the incredible success of 'The Jewel in the Crown' (1984) television series, though unfortunately none of them really was able to live up to the expectations raised at that time.  All four have appeared in very dodgy stuff, but I always feel very sad for Dance.  The roles he had seem to be set on humiliating him not only as an actor but as a person.  'The Golden Child' is probably the least worst of these, he brings gravitas and the right sinister level to playing a demon manifested as man.  However, it is painful to think of his role in 'Last Action Hero' (1993) and especially the utterly humiliating part at the end of 'Ali G Indahouse' (2003).  To some degree this has forced him to stick to classic upper class Englishmen and we have not seen the spread of characters that might have come in the wake of his role in 'Aliens 3' (1992).  He is great in 'Michael Collins' (1996) and is a stalwart of many British television series.

Anyway, back to 'The Golden Child' and why it riles me so much.  It is not that it is a rather confused movie or that a lot of things with Eddie Murphy in are not worth the entrance ticket price, it is the ending.  Having gone through all the trials to prove himself and to defeat a demon, Jarrell rescues the Golden Child.  The last scene is with him walking with Jarrell and Nang dressed as an American boy.  He is wearing a baseball cap and Jarrell tells him to ignore the children in the playground who tease him about having a shaven head (his head is shaven like the Buddhist monks who he grew up with) because it would soon grow back.  This ending is not a happy ending, it shows that the Devil is more adept than we might think.  The Golden Child has not been restored to his rightful place as a religious leader, he is being forcibly enculturated into American consumerist culture, so far removed from the values of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic culture he came from.

Clearly the movie makers (director Michael Ritchie; writier Dennis Feldman) see their culture as the only 'right' one that all children would love to be part of and would thrive in.  Ultimately Jarrell is as much a kidnapper of the child as Numspa was; he corrupts him as much as Numspa would have sought to have done, and is actually more successful at it.  You feel that the US audience would be blind to what is so wrong about this ending.  However, as I have noted before US movies are compelled to follow very set paths in terms of narrative in order to make them acceptable to this core audience.  This culture is so supreme that so many people cannot even step outside it to reflect on movies properly or accept ones that do not follow these paths precisely.  I know it is only a trashy comedy-adventure movie, but it irritates me and nags at me whenever I am reminded of it.  This blog is my way of getting such things at least a little out of my system.

Computer: Let Me Be!

One irritant that I have not yet tackled is the hassle with computers which seem to think they know what I want better than I do myself. They are not my servant, rather they are like an annoying salesman camped out on my doorstep, who, whenever I happen to open my front door or even look out of my window bombard me with the latest products. Even in my house, they keep changing the channel on my TV and the decor on my walls, with the arrogant attitude that they know better.

Stopping with the analogy. Every time I switch on a computer, and on average, due to my work, I use three different machines in the average week, I have to wait for all the updates from the various companies to load in, plus the ones my own company feels I need. This means it can be 2-3 minutes before I can even start work. I cannot believe that there is that much new stuff every week that they have to take over my machine to load it in. Of course if I was not firewalled then there would be all the spam and the spyware and the adware and so on. In order of priority for access to my machine, I come last. As if this was not enough, when I come to close it down I have to wait sometimes fifteen minutes for it to do all the uploads. With a PC I walk away but with a laptop I have to keep it internet connected otherwise there will be twice as much stuff to wade through. If I happen not to use a computer for a couple of weeks, then it is 30 minutes plus. Why? Surely it is inefficient if each day I am losing 15 minutes' work watching a bar move across the screen.

On my home PC somehow I got an Adobe photo album tester. I have no idea how, but now I cannot rid my machine of it. Every time I log on it asks me if I want to buy it, I say no, but it still proceeds trying to search out photos on my machine and telling me my digital camera battery is low (I do not even have a digital camera) and so on. It tries again later too. For me, no means no, why can it not understand. My house mate's son who is almost 6 and can read a little, gets bewildered when midway through a game of 'Shrek' or 'Finding Nemo' the machine starts binging at him and sending up pop-ups even when he is logged in as his own identity. What is the point of asking him if he wants to upgrade the DVD player, he cannot even understand the words?

It does not stop when you are not even connected to the internet, software is just as bad. I write a lot, and yet even when I have corrected the spelling and grammar checker from US to UK spelling it still keeps interfering, putting in bullet points when I do not need them, telling me effectively that 'which' is not a proper word and you just try typing 'fora' as in the plural of 'forum' (for those of us who use proper plurals)! If I try to write a letter, it says do I need help - no I have been writing letters longer than even Microsoft has been in existence! It tries to put 'yours truly' at the end of the letter, even though in the UK that is a sarcastic phrase and 'yours faithfully' or 'yours sincerely' which it never offers me, are the correct ones. Every machine I have go through disabling all of these interruptions.

I understand that people often need help, but as in the classroom you should be able to ask for it when you need it. I hate my computer patronising me and trying to force words and a culture on me which I do not want. A computer should be about granting you freedom to compose and to explore as you choose, but instead we are driven to behave identically to each other, and coming from a non-US culture, in a way which jars with what I know and is correct for my 'locale'. Give me a computer that treats me like an adult.