COW (China, 2009)
Directed by: Guan Hu
Starring: Huang Bo, Yan Ni, a cow

Ask yourself, is there anything Huang Bo can't do? And you're thinking: "He might be China's hottest new superstar, but he can't possibly act opposite livestock!" Well, jump back, haters, and behold Guan Hu's COW, the bovine-headlined historical epic featuring the coolest wall-smashing slab of beef since Takashi Miike's GOZU. Adapted from the novel by Zhao Dongling, COW took ten million in its opening weekend and a slew of Golden Horse Award nominations in its slavering jaws, including a "Best Actor" win for Huang Bo, then trotted its way to critical honors at the Venice International Film Festival. Buddy comedy, historical drama, antiwar testimonial - COW is all these things and more, its untold depths reflecting in the bloom of an explosion across the glossy surface of a cow's eye. In the harsh climate of the second Sino-Japanese War, village dunce Niu Er is saddled with a new job: taking care of the "American" cow for a retreating Communist battalion. He can't abide its strangeness but when the war comes home, Niu Er finds himself alone in a battle-scarred wasteland with no one by his side but that darn cow,whom he renames after his beloved and lost wife. As winter grows colder, Niu Er and Jiu II close ranks to fight off the Japanese, as well as former countrymen turned enemies in a ghost town teeming with land mines. As the bombs fall and the bayonets clash, Jiu II and Niu drift through the crossfire, finding a comfort in their impossible bromance that transcends this sad, scared world. As a slob with a face only a cow could love, Huang Bo's performance is a tragicomic high-wire act, perfectly balancing COW's cartoon action with its bleak humanism, while plucky Yan Ni matches him beat-for-beat as his wife, Jiu I. But the real star of the film is Jiu II, played by multiple cows with amazing expressiveness and a droll comic timing no script could invent. Painted by director Guan Hu in lush scenes of gorgeous desolation that flip backwards and forwards in time, COW makes you laugh from the belly then shivs you in the gut, facing the futile horrors of war while retaining a strident, resolute grace that makes it the screwed up cousin of Masaki Kobayashi's anti-war epic, THE HUMAN CONDITION. No matter how bad things get, as we watch Niu Er draw strength from Jiu II's impassive stare a single fact remains: someone should give this cow an Oscar.