Archive for the ‘Martial Arts’ Category
Thursday, January 25th, 2024
Chen Kaige is an acclaimed Chinese filmmaker I have no familiarity with. Too classy for me, I guess. Now I finally watched one, but not one of his famous ones from the ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s his 14th film, a straight up kung fu movie from 2015 called MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. And the reason is because it’s based on a book by Xu Haofeng, who wrote Wong Kar Wai’s THE GRANDMASTER and directed THE SWORD IDENTITY, JUDGE ARCHER and THE FINAL MASTER. I adore his style and his themes and his two most recent (THE HIDDEN SWORD and 100 YARDS) aren’t available here yet, so I’ll take what I can get.
This is a good one but totally different from those other movies I mentioned. The ones Xu directs have a very artful economy and restraint to them, the compositions and camera movements are often very classical, the fighting styles are uniquely straightforward, often based around quick, simple movements rather than flying around all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love flying around all over the place, but I like how distinct this other approach is.
MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN is not that. Nor is it a TV movie starring Tony Shalhoub. It’s a big show-offy kung fu fantasy, with lots of digital FX, some of them pretty goofy. It was released in 3D Imax, and (unlike American movies, which are too cowardly to do 3D stuff in 3D movies) you can tell. And it’s often comedic in a broad, muggy kind of way. Xu’s movies tend to have a much dryer humor. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Kwok, Chen Kaige, Danny Chan, Dong Qi, Fan Wei, Jaycee Chan, Ku Huen Chiu, Li Xuejian, Lin Chi-Ling, Pinocchio, Vanness Wu, Wang Baoqiang, Wang Xueqi, Xu Haofeng, Yuen Wah
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 3 Comments »
Monday, November 27th, 2023
SAKRA is Donnie Yen’s 2023 passion project, which he stars in and co-directed (with Kam Ka-Wai, second assistant director of IP MAN 1 and 2). It’s a wuxia story based on a famous novel with the tough-sounding title Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong.
Yen stars as Qiao Feng, an orphan raised by a couple in the Song Empire. He grows up to become the leader of the powerful Beggar Gang, whose legendary badassness is introduced in one of those classic scenes where somebody is being an asshole in public and our guy is quietly listening for a while and then gets inolved (see also: Blue Eye Samurai). A monk (Tsui Siu-Ming, KUNG FU KILLER) comes to this restaurant dragging a cage he says contains an “unruly” person he’s going to sacrifice, and Qiao Feng is sitting at a table on the balcony of a whole different establishment across the way when he starts loudly talking shit without even looking at him. The monk is like “What the fuck – is that guy talking to me?” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cheung-Yan Yuen, Cya Liu, Donnie Yen, Kam Ka-Wai, Kenji Tanigaki, Ray Lui, Tsui Siu-Ming, Wu Yue, wuxia
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 17 Comments »
Thursday, November 2nd, 2023
JUSTICE NINJA STYLE is a shot-on-video but very enthusiastic independent action picture made in 1986 in the town of De Soto, Missouri (population 6,449 as of 2020), that came out on an extras-packed blu-ray earlier this year courtesy of the Vinegar Syndrome partner label VHShitfest.
Most of the regional movies like this that I’ve come across have been horror, and usually if those aren’t shot on film I turn them off, but I’m glad I gave this one a chance. It has the right balance of amateurishness, lack of self consciousness, underdog competence, and capturing of a particular time, place, and group of people, to be a fun one of these. And it soars by in 70 minutes (though the blu-ray includes a 15-minutes-longer alternate cut I didn’t get a chance to watch called NINJA THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Missouri, ninjas, regional action, shot on video, VHShitfest
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 19th, 2023
KOWLOON WALLED CITY (2021) is a diverting and pretty stylish period martial arts movie I found on Hi-YAH!. It takes place I believe in the early ’70s, mostly in the titular Imperial-Chinese-military-fort-turned-enclave-between-Kowloon-and-British-Hong-Kong. But it begins somewhere to the north with its protagonist, the gruff street fighter A’neng (Xing Yu, IP MAN, IRON PROTECTOR), storming through a gangster gambling den and into an opulent bath house to confront a fellow student he blames for the death of his master.
We don’t know who he is yet but he drags people around by their hair and fights through an army of men (and one woman) wearing only towels. Great attention is paid to knocking people through walls and doors, cracking heads on multiple sinks, crunching various ledges and tiled walls with people’s heads, sliding bodies across the wet floor, faces jiggling from the power of fists, bones banging against other bones, making loud thuds or crunching sounds. A’neng carries a small tombstone-shaped tribute to his fallen master, which his opponent kicks in half. A’neng beats him until he’s begging for his life and then stumbles out into the snow, where a drunk man’s singing inspires him to go to Hong Kong. Never underestimate the power of music. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 10th, 2023
SHAMO is a weird 2007 manga adaptation that I stumbled across on DVD and gave a chance because it’s from Cheang Pou-soi, the excellent director who later did MOTORWAY and SPL 2: A TIME FOR CONSEQUENCES. This one’s basically an evil version of a karate competition movie. It has many of the beloved traditions of the format, with an underdog finding a mentor, training hard, and getting an unlikely shot in a crooked sports organization. But this is not a good person – he’s introduced as a kid who snapped and murdered his parents, he learns to fight in juvenile detention, he seeks acceptance but not redemption, he gets his way by behaving very dishonorably, including to his loyal friends. I know some people would hate it for that, but to me it makes it a compellingly uncomfortable viewing experience. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annie Liu, Bruce Leung, Chau Ka Sing, Cheang Pou-soi, Dylan Kuo, Francis Ng, Izo Hashimoto, Masato, Pei Pei, Ryo Ishibashi, Shawn Yue, Terri Kwan
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts, Sport | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 27th, 2023
As a serial discusser of movies, I often run into this thing where I find that other people put a way higher premium than I do on things being logical, or realistic, or believable. They complain about characters making a bad choice or a strange choice or not doing the obvious choice. They seem to think it’s better for characters and stories to be normal, or sane.
Yeah, sometimes, occasionally, maybe, in moderation. Sure. But there are also times when it’s an intentional artistic approach, and clearly a great one, to depict the way the world works, and the way humans behave, in a heightened manner. It can be way more interesting for characters to be extreme, to act unreasonably. It can even be more true to show life how it feels, instead of how it actually is. Or it can just be way more fun to show life how it’s not.
Case in point: LONE WOLF AND CUB: BABY CART IN THE LAND OF DEMONS (1973), the fifth of the six LONE WOLF AND CUB movies. As always it’s a story about traveling assassin Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama, THE BAD NEWS BEARS GO TO JAPAN), a.k.a. Lone Wolf and Cub, being hired to kill someone. Usually people hire him by leaving money at a shrine. This time there’s a much more complicated method. A guy gets his attention by walking around wearing a veil with ox-head and stallion-head demons painted on it. When Ogami asks him about it the guy pulls out a sword and quickly loses a duel to him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akira Yamanouchi, Goseki Kojima, Hideji Otaki, Kazuo Koike, Michiyo Okusu, Minoru Oki, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Yoshi Kato
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts | 3 Comments »
Monday, June 5th, 2023
From what I’ve read, “SHIN” can mean new, true, or God. SHIN KAMEN RIDER – which I saw at a Fathom Events screening last week, and it’s playing again tonight only, check local listings – is the third and (as far as we know) final movie in the “SHIN” series by Hideaki Anno. Best known as the visionary director of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, Anno kicked off this live action thematic trilogy with 2016’s SHIN GODZILLA (which he wrote himself and co-directed with Shinji Higuchi). It was a strikingly reimagined Godzilla with memorably bizarre monster work (as Godzilla evolves through multiple stages of development) and the best and most detailed portrayal ever of a government bureaucracy tackling the problem of a giant monster.
Next was SHIN ULTRAMAN, directed by Higuchi and written by Anno. I haven’t seen that one yet because I skipped it when I realized the second night screenings were dubbed, and it doesn’t come out on disc until next month. But the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” concept is just meant as a brand name for merchandising, not an MCU-style shared universe, so I knew whatever happened to the new true god Ultraman in his movie would have no bearing on SHIN KAMEN RIDER, and I made sure to read the fine print on the listings this time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Hideaki Anno, Minami Hamabe, Mirai Moriyama, Shinya Tsukamoto, Sosuke Ikematsu, tokusatsu
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023
While Ronny Yu was promoting FEARLESS, he talked up his next movie: a live action adaptation of the 2000 anime BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE. So, a Hong Kong director in Hollywood remaking a Japanese movie originally made mostly in English because many of the characters were American. When Yu mentioned it while talking to Martial Arts Entertainment the interviewer asked if it was “sort of a wuxia movie.”
“Maybe. Sort of. You’re right!” Yu said. “It’s sort of cross-cultural, because the whole thing takes place in a U.S. Army base in Japan. Yeah. It’s like a cross-cultural wuxia.”
Alas, it was not to be… exactly. Instead of Yu it was made by French director Chris Nahon, known for helming one of Jet Li’s English language films, KISS OF THE DRAGON (2001). Yu was credited as a producer, but I’ve found no evidence of him staying on during filming in, say, a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg capacity. I suspect he left but got the credit because he’d done so much of the pre-production that Nahon built off of. Yu is not mentioned or shown in a 20 minute making-of featurette on the DVD and blu-ray, but I think it’s reasonable to assume Nahon kept a decent amount of what he put into place, since the sole credited writer Chris Chow and the cinematographer Hang-Sang Poon are both holdovers from FEARLESS. Yu was also still reported as director when Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun, credited as Gianna, was cast as the main character, Saya. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allison Miller, Chris Nahon, Colin Salmon, Corey Yuen, Jun Ji-hyun, Khari Payton, Koyuki, Larry Lamb, Liam Cunningham, live action anime, Ronny Yu, vampires, Yasuaki Kurata
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Martial Arts | 3 Comments »
Monday, May 1st, 2023
“First level is the physical contact. Use your physical skill against your enemy. That’s most action films doing this kind of genre. The second level is use your knowledge, languages, strategy, everything you could before physical contact to stop your enemy. Third, use your honor, belief, your love, show to your enemy. Turn your enemy into your friend. I tried to share those three levels in the movie.” —Jet Li on FEARLESS
After the success of FREDDY VS. JASON, it seemed like Yu might continue his relationship with New Line Cinema, making the sort of slick studio b-movies both parties were pretty good at in those days. As I mentioned in my review of THE 51ST STATE, Samuel L. Jackson tried to reteam with the director for the company’s weirdly anticipated goof SNAKES ON A PLANE. But Yu believed Jackson’s star power would outshine the snakes, so he wanted his character to be swallowed by a python in the middle of the movie.
“Now the audience is intrigued. Now everyone on the plane will group together and kill the snakes,” he later told Blackfilm. “That’s the way I thought it would be interesting. Of course, they said ‘Take a walk!’”
So walk he did – all the way to Shanghai, China. And there he met up with Jet Li, a fellow Hong Kong cinema export who’d made even more of a go of it in Hollywood than Yu had. Since the handover Li had been the villain in LETHAL WEAPON 4 and then starred in the English language films ROMEO MUST DIE, KISS OF THE DRAGON, THE ONE, CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE and UNLEASHED. (He had also made 2002’s HERO in China, so this was not his official return to Asia like it was for Yu.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony De Longis, Brandon Rhea, Chen Zhihui, Chris Chow Chun, Christine To Chi-Long, Collin Chou, Dong Yong, Hou Yuanjia, Jacky Heung, Jean Claude Leuyer, Jet Li, Li Feng, Michelle Yeoh, Nakamura Shidou, Nathan Jones, Qu Yun, Ronny Yu, Scott Ma, Somluck Kamsing, Sun Li, Wang Bin, Yuen Woo-Ping, Zhigang Zhao
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 12 Comments »
Thursday, April 20th, 2023
Somehow I, a person fascinated with both Ronny Yu’s kangaroo kung fu movie WARRIORS OF VIRTUE (1997) and the medium of unlikely DTV sequels, lived for many years unaware of the existence of WARRIORS OF VIRTUE 2: RETURN TO TAO (2002). Once I did learn of it I found it in a DVD collection called “6 Family Fantasy-Adventure Movies” along with the other Miramax library titles PINOCCHIO (2002), NEVERWAS (2007), A WRINKLE IN TIME (2003), THE NEVERENDING STORY III: ESCAPE FROM FANTASIA (1996) and, in a strange coincidence, MERLIN’S APPRENTICE (2005), directed by Yu’s frequent editor and BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR 2 director David Wu. They also released it as a double feature with that version of BEOWULF starring Christopher Lambert. It has no Ronny Yu involvement and, worse, no kangaroo involvement, which I’m sure is why nobody ever heard about it. I mean, if there’s a movie where April O’Neill is trying to find the Ninja Turtles and when she does they “lost their powers” so they’re just people wearing different colored headbands then I never heard of that one either. Though I kind of want to.
But obviously it is my professional and ethical duty to extend my tangent from the actual Ronny Yu movies until such a time as I have reviewed this DTV spin-off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dennis K. Law, Kentucky Robinson, Kevin Tod Smith, Michael Vickerman, Nathan Phillips, Nina Liu, Rex Piano, Shedrack Anderson III
Posted in Reviews, Family, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 6 Comments »
