Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7) (Long River 7)

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Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7) (Long River 7)

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Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7) (Long ...

Chi Chung Lam, Jiao Xu, Kitty Zhang, Kitty Zhang Yuqi, Min Hun Fung

Ti is a poor father who works all day, everyday at a construction site to make sure his son Dicky Chow can attend an elite private school. Despite his father's good intentions to give his son the oppo...( read more  read more... )rtunities he never had, Dicky, with his dirty and tattered clothes and none of the "cool" toys stands out from his schoolmates like a sore thumb. Ti can't afford to buy Dicky any expensive toys and goes to the best place he knows to get new stuff for Dicky--the junk yard! While out "shopping" for a new toy for his son, Ti finds a mysterious orb and brings it home for Dicky to play with. To his surprise and disbelief, the orb reveals itself to Dicky as a bizarre "pet" with extraordinary powers. Armed with his "CJ7" Dicky seizes this chance to overcome his poor background and shabby clothes and impress his fellow schoolmates for the first time in his life. But CJ7 has other ideas, and when Dicky brings it to class, chaos ensues.

Id: 10854292

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Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7) (Long River 7) Recent Reviews
  • DrZeek
    September 12, 2008
    DrZeek
    Chow: I have a toy that's way better than CJ1. Do you wanna see it?

    A departure from the more martial arts centered subject matter of the Chow's previous two movies, this is a family movie, harking back to films like E.T.

    Here, a little boy, Dicky played by Jiao Xu, lives with ...( read more)his father, Stephen Chow. They are very poor, with his father literally picking supplies out of the trash to help them get by.

    At school, Dicky is constantly bullied by pretty much everyone, including one of his teachers. Soon the kids begin to get a new popular toy, that Dicky can of course never get.

    Meanwhile, with recent UFO sightings on the rise, Dicky's father soon finds a mysterious object and gives it to his son. It turns out that this object is some kind of alien toy that comes to life and fuels Dicky's imagination. The toy appears to have certain powers as well that eventually come into play.

    Let it be said that this will be a strange and weird movie for some. The narrative is a bit bizarre but it works in combining the sense of fun and cuteness in a good kids movie with Stephen Chow's style of humor.

    It also has a number of emotional scenes and a good way of handling the tone throughout. Fun soundtrack as well.

    The movie also has to rely on special effects to portray the alien toy and while the look doesn't have you believing its a real object, the way it is designed to interact with the characters does get the right response.

    A funny, different type of family film.

    Chow: I do have a problem with my body.
    Ms. Yuen: What kind of problem?
    Chow: I'm far to handsome. [laughs]
    I mean it, I am.
  • EarthlyAlien
    August 28, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "Are you from outer space? Have you come to invade Earth? I think you might be an alien toy dog."

    There's an almost unanimous assessment among most Western viewers and critics that Stephen Chow's CJ7 is substantially inferior to his last two successes, Shaolin S...( read more)occer and Kung Fu Hustle. I rarely go with the masses, but in this case I would tend to agree. CJ7, predominantly a reworking of the formula popularized by Steven Spielberg's E.T., and regurgitated in the eighties through the early nineties with several unmemorable children's fare, is about a boy named Dicky (Xu Jiao, who is actually a girl) who discovers the titular dog-like alien creature that eventually teaches him a thing or two about life and growing up.

    Photobucket

    Ti (Chow) is Dicky's father, who works as a casual employee in one of the city's many construction sites. Despite his serious financial struggle, he maintains that Dicky be provided quality education by sending him to an expensive exclusive school. Naturally, Dicky becomes the centre of attention of his teachers and bullying classmates, especially with his dirty uniform and sewn-and-resewn shoes. He imagines that his new-found pet, named CJ7 following the popular robot toy dogs, would help him get better grades but as it turns out, the alien pet is actually useless in that department, causing Dicky's grades to decline.

    What essentially separates CJ7 from the numerous similar films that were made before it is the fact that it is written, directed, and produced by Stephen Chow, whose unique brand of comedy has survived through the digital age by utilizing digital effects for brashly outrageous comic effect. Chow uses the same technique here. By mixing digital effects (including the completely digitized alien pet which looks like a cross between a Pokemon and a gummy bear) and his traditional comedy, Chow was able to rise a little bit higher than his meager material, creating a film that may not be as hilarious as his last two efforts but is at least very watchable.

    Chow has always made frankly sentimental films, although usually blanketed by his boisterous comic sensibilities. For example, that middling love angle between Chow's character and the psoriasis-infected lady in Shaolin was conveniently draped by the out-of-this-world football battles; or the melodramatic linkage between the good-for-nothing bum and the deaf ice cream vendor was made a mere side-plot in Kung fu. Despite the consistent proliferation of what is essentially kitschy and corny in his films, Chow seems always able to balance slapstick and sentiment, creating films that are oddly effective as creative outputs and products for mass consumption. CJ7 is designed similarly, although this time, Chow's sentimentality overtook his clever humour, for better or for worse. The imbalance is at first off-putting, but after a while, it gets reasonable and rather enjoyable.

    Thus, there is no surprise that Chow made this film. It was only a matter of time. It's inaccurate to say that CJ7 is a failure for the always-reliable Hong Kong superstar since there's still a bit of irreverence and wickedness underneath all of Chow's cloyingly sweet storytelling (seriously, no other filmmaker can portray the poor this comically (where cockroach-killing is family bonding time) and still come out as respectful and more importantly, funny). As I've said, CJ7 is definitely not as good as Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle or many of Chow's less-known films from the nineties, but it is most certainly miles better than the lifeless, tepid, and uninspired children's fare Hollywood has been producing through the years ever since Spielberg made that unforgettable film in 1982.
  • habitualdamnation
    February 3, 2008
    habitualdamnation
    This is a kids movie! CJ7 will undeniably push Chow's name on more foreign fronts. The rest of us, especially the older ones, will be left to rue the good old days when Stephen Chow and Ng Man Tat were still talking to each other.
  • DuncanRR
    January 4, 2009
    DuncanRR
    It's nice to see Stephen Chow wade in untested waters. The result of his experiment was a children's flick that was pretty corny, pretty preachy, but had enough chuckles and a cute enough protagonist/MacGuffin to delight even pompous, hard-to-entertain dicks like myself.

    But to ...( read more)be frank, the only real impressive aspect about this movie was that a majority of the male children were played by girls. But, y'know, I've seen worse.
  • DrStrangeblog
    December 3, 2009
    DrStrangeblog
    In order to preserve the surprises, I try to know as little as possible about a movie before I see it. Great policy in the long run but sometimes that technique backfires. Like with CJ7, I saw the name Stephen Chow attached and falsely assumed he was kicking tail in this movie...( read more)! Instead turns out this is a kids' movie, d'oh!! Probably no worse than what Disney offers these days, but I wasn't interested in continuing this CGI-reliant predictable sap beyond a half-hour. Worse, I caught the dubbed version with atrocious voice acting.
  • F0XyF0x
    December 19, 2009
    F0XyF0x
    It wasn't my favorite movie, but the whole idea was pretty funny. Chi Chung Lam was quite well picked for this part.
  • eryri
    December 17, 2009
    eryri
    CJ7 is a very amusing HK kids movie starring Stephen Chow as a poor person struggling to make ends meet. Every penny he earns on a building site goes to sending his son Dicky to a posh school even though he's teased for being so poor. One evening whilst scouring the local rubbish...( read more) tip, the father picks up a green ball unaware that it's an alien lifeform. Soon Dicky and the alien dog-like pet he names CJ7 are causing chaos at school. It's a nice change of genre for Stephen Chow to be involved in a kids movie. I thought it was wonderful. Similarities to E.T are justified. It turns somewhat sad towards the climax but the ending brings a happy conclusion to what I thought was a great family movie.
  • cristyseer
    November 28, 2009
    cristyseer
    Very strange, but every touching story about an alien pet.
  • dukeakasmudge
    November 5, 2009
    dukeakasmudge
    The best kids movie Ive seen in awhile & a great movie for people of all ages
  • quichefolle
    October 29, 2009
    quichefolle
    Un divertissement pour enfant certes mais ça reste tout mignon.
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