Dead Horse Interchange

Yeah, if you can't make something fly convincingly, you might want to edit that shit out.

I've watched a few films in the last few days, so I'll give a quick rundown of them:

Five Shaolin Masters

I didn't find this one very enjoyable. The whole movie is an extended fight scene. I usually like to see at least the barest framework of a story. The main characters do the typical "we're not his match, we must go train" thing, but it doesn't really make sense how they get better. Their solution to being weaker than the bad guys is to go punch the air for a year or so and then come back and win. There's no teacher character anywhere in the movie who helps them get better. They're just kinda.... Remembering shit and then punching bamboo for a while. That's not usually how martial arts skill works. Without a teacher or some skilled practitioner there to correct mistakes, they could easily have come out of that year of training worse than they went in. But eh, story in kung fu. The only good fights in this one are the final set of 5 vs 5. I do have to say though, I think 5 leading men is too many. The final 10-man melee has more cuts between unrelated action than Return of the Jedi's finale.

I know this one is loved by many, but I'd consider it a middling example.

The Brave Archer

This one is also not amazing, but for totally different reasons. It's an attempt to condense some 30 chapters of a Jin Yong novel into a 2 hour movie. Do I even need to say that it fails to do so? For what it does provide, it's entertaining. But if you're not familiar with the novel, you won't have any idea who these fucks are or what they are talking about. Characters weave in and out of scenes at a breakneck pace and Chang Chech blasts past major plot points before you can finish reading the subtitles. Although the film is called "The Brave Archer," there is no archery anywhere in the movie and only one shot of the main character holding a bow. The name is a reference to "The Condor Heroes" aka "Eagle-Shooting Hero" which is the name of Jin Yong's novel. Many of the major plot points of the novel are reinterpreted or ignored completely.

This film has the opposite problem of 5 Shaolin Masters. 5 Shaolin Masters has no story. Brave Archer has way, way too much story. Even with all of this abridging of Jin Yong, there are another 2 films just covering the original book material. Brave Archer 2 and Brave Archer 3. I probably won't bother to watch those. But I will say the romance between Guo Jing and Huang Rong comes across as genuine, if a bit innocent. Chang Cheh never uses female characters and barely ever employs romance in his stories, so it was interesting to see him try. Ku Feng as the Old Beggar was the highlight of this movie.

Dragon Inn

It's shit. Another movie with basically no story, where the entire film is a fight scene. Except this one is worse, as nobody of any import dies until the end. So they're just slapping at each other limply with swords from the start until the end. The bad guys have limitless supplies of extras to chop up. This is a swordplay film and not a kung fu film, so don't expect any spectacular martial arts. I found it thoroughly dull. At least five shaolin masters can be appreciated as a demonstration of kung fu.

I know, I know. King Hu is a big shot auteur. I love Come Drink With Me and one other (see below,) but this one was not good. Beautiful cinematography but poor characters, action and story.

Raining in the Mountain

Fantastic! It's not really a martial arts film, however. It's closer to a movie about Buddhism. Or an examination of humanity. I don't wish to spoil it. Raining in the Mountain reminds me of Kurosawa's Rashomon, or Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff. This is a film that asks us to examine ourselves and the institutions of power around us. To discover which are truly pure, and which wear religion as a false face. What I love so much about this movie, compared to Dragon Inn, is that here we have substance paired with style. King Hu's films are always very beautifully shot. But this one is about something. It has a reason to exist.

I still have a few more films to get to. Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Executioners from Shaolin and Martial Arts of Shaolin. I've seen bits and pieces of both Executioners and Martial Arts of Shaolin. Big ups to Executioners for a character who can lift his balls up into his body to protect himself from groin shots. And a bride who uses crotch muscle kung fu to prevent the groom from getting any action.

I liked Dragon Inn ok - but I think Touch of Zen is the one to go with.

There's a new Sonny Chiba Blu-ray boxset coming out:
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Sonn ... ay/323048/

And another Sonny Chiba movie this month, though this one is more of a samurai epic than a straight out action film.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Shoguns- ... ay/317618/

Flag of Iron

Breddy gudd. A nice tale of double-crosses, corruption and the lust for power. Features the Venoms cast again. So far, I haven't found a "venoms" cast movie that was better than 5 Deadly Venoms. I know some people think Crippled Avengers is that movie, but I prefer the OG.

Anyway, Flag of Iron is a vehicle to show off "flag kung fu" and it's kinda cool. For all some of these movies, I think the director had an idea about some kind of eye-popping martial art and they just made a movie around it. Many of the martial arts sequences in Flag of Iron have more than a touch of the circus about them. When wrapped up, the flag is just a spear. But unfolded, it becomes a spinning cloth banner which is used in many showy, impressive ways. But none of them are practical.

So if you want to see the flag equivalent of gunkata then check it out. I'd rank this movie slightly above average. It can't touch 36th Chamber of Shaolin, but it's not garbage.

88 Films has been releasing a shitload of blurays recently. I really hate conSOOMing new media, but if they have recorded new commentary tracks from people like Tony Rayns then I might have to pick some up.

Still better than relying on streaming shit. At least those bluejays will last and can't get bawleeted by outrage faggots.

Definitive releases with lots of extra features also seem to hold their value over time better. Go price check some criterion dvd packages for Kurosawa films, for example. Long after DVD is completely dead (if it ever is, which I think unlikely,) there will be people out there hunting for those collections. If only because of the special features unique to those packages. Most of which cannot be found easily online.

I finished watching Martial Arts of Shaolin with Jet Li, but found it rather unremarkable. I don't regret seeing the film, but other than the "shaolin" theme song, nothing about it stood out.

Edit: Finished Mad Monkey Kung Fu. It was a pretty gudd time. The standout performance here was Lau Kar-Leung himself (director and fight choreographer) in a starring role. (un?)Surprisingly, he can act and he can act well. He was the best character in the movie. The "young guy" main character was less interesting. My favorite part of the film was the first section, where Lau's character is tricked into maiming himself by a lecherous businessman.

The actual kung fu parts of the movie were impressive visually. However, I watch Lau Kar-Leung movies to see "real kung fu" and parts of this "monkey fist" were not very realistic. Much of it amounted to circus performance. The best kung fu was at the beginning of the film, when a drunk Lau Kar-Leung demonstrates his style.

As a film, this was a good movie. As an exhibition of kung fu, I was left unsatisfied.

Why is Michelle Yeoh getting all these roles and awards now? I would have liked to have seen her in more things 30 years ago when she was young and agile. It kind of irritates me.

Because she apparently married a dude with the magnificent name Dickson Poon and retired from acting.

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 13, 2023 5:54 pm

Because she apparently married a dude with the magnificent name Dickson Poon and retired from acting.

Hell you talking about? She divorced that guy in '92. She did Tomorrow Never Dies in '97. She's been in films long after her brief retirement