Detective Dee and the Out of Context Clues

Don't have time to give Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame the review it deserves, but this is well worth seeing, Tsui Hark brings that old wire-fu magic yet again. The translation is good enough that I could follow the plot, but not SO good that I was denied classic HK moments like the above. Perfect.

Raging Phoenix

Most of us here were pretty big fans of Chocolate, so the second starring vehicle for that actress (they should really settle on a name for her one of these days) has been on our radar for a while.
This is very much a movie of two halves. The first half is a highly entertaining plotless drunken capioera/break-dancing kung fu show reel, and the second half is the most embarrassing implosion into nightmarish suck since Dog Bite Dog.
They had a good thing going with the minimalist plot; after being targeted by kidnappers, a girl reinvents her ruin of a life by joining forces with a group of drunken fu dancers who are out for revenge. Had enough of a character arc on her to make us buy in; a touch of comedy, a touch of backstory for the guys, and a lot of really entertaining fighting.
Then the plot demons set in, and it turns out some women give off a pheromone so powerful it makes people obsessed with sex and the kidnappers have sniffers on the street to target women with this pheromone so they can make them really sad and harvest their tears to turn into perfume. Sex perfume.
Not content with jumping the shark the movie then gets eaten by the shark, in a dizzying whirlwind of CG brick slides, sets from National Treasure that make no sense and don't even work well as settings for increasingly boring and incomprehensible fu fights, and a villain doing her best Grace Jones imitation, in tights that make it painfully obvious when her stuntmen take hits for her.
At one point during the meltdown I yelled, "Fuck you, Thailand" at the screen, and meant it. Fuckers didn't even have the courtesy to include a god damn outtake reel.

Fuck it, let's just make the entire stunt team movie stars

High Kick Girl

Ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered the Ed Wood of kung fu movie directors. High Kick Girl is such a stunningly inept movie I simply could not take my eyes off it. I refused to believe it had actually been allowed to exist.

I think I may have gone into this with a number of false assumptions. I had assumed that this was a professional studio film intended to make a star out of Rina Takeda. Instead, it appears to have been a show reel a couple of over the hill martial artists put together, one with delusions of being a movie star, and the other with delusions of being a writer-director. They seem to have filmed a bunch of fights, retconned in a narrative about a heroic karate teacher saving his student from a group of people you can tell are evil because they only wear black, and then stumbled across a cute girl in one of the auditions, and realized they could actually land distribution if they pulled a con job on audiences and studios and pretended like she was the star of the movie and the movie was in any way about her.

So we get her in two big action scenes early on before the movie abruptly becomes entirely about her teacher, played with one facial expression by a guy who clearly can fight, but makes Sam Worthington look like Peter O'Toole. Presumably after a rough cut was screened they realized the audience might be mad if the heroine spent the rest of the movie as a damsel in distress, so they give her a particularly terrible extra fight, and then reshoot the final fight a little bit so she can finish off the main bad guy after the teacher has already finished him off once.

River City Ransom had a less obviously ad libbed story. Fucking Double Dragon was The Wire compared with this shit. There are literally entire scenes with several minutes of everyone standing around apparently waiting for somebody to figure out a way to advance the completely arbitrary plot. In awesomely unspecific fashion, the entire plot is driven by something the teacher did fifteen years ago, which the evil black clothed karate faction has been angry about for all the time. Apparently too lazy to look in the yellow pages.

I'm unsure if the director was also the choreographer, but he might be a halfway decent one if he had the slightest idea how to direct or edit. I will grant he avoids being astoundingly incoherent (see Donnie Yen's unwatchable directorial efforts) but he does this by filming everything in extreme slow motion, occasionally replaying not particularly great shots in even slower motion. I presume the intention was to show us that he's a fucking idiot and did everything full contact even though we have a hundred years of figuring out how to make fights look like they're real even though they aren't to avoid filling hospitals with battered stunt men. (I seem to recall a Twitch article about angry stunt men complaining about this, the first sign that the trailers were a lie.) But the actual effect is to make everything look really staged, since shit moves so slow you can see dudes waiting for a hit, or just standing around waiting for their cue. Special shout out to the baffling editing, which often doesn't bother cutting away from slow motion footage of nothing happening at all -- maybe at the beginning of the shot someone falls down, and at the end, that person gets kicked in the head, but in between is a full minute of them lying on the floor doing absolutely nothing in slow motion! Jesus Christ! Coupled with such astounding cinematic techniques as long shots of clouds or stock footage of city exteriors to indicate transitions between scenes, and you have a non-stop laugh riot!

I do hope a lot of these fighters manage to land further work in decent movies. Even the world's worst karate teacher -- the entire plot hinges on him being such a terrible fucking teacher he couldn't control his hotheaded student or even be fucked to explain what the point of the shit he was teaching her was -- would probably be an effective stunt double. Everyone involved deserves better than to be in this heap of shit. Good god, I hope the director never works again. But he's so singularly clueless is it almost inevitable, even if he films it himself with the camera he bought from whatever misguided foreign licensing deal led to this showing up on Netflix streaming.

It's not often that a movie peaks during the opening credits

Congratulations, you've just seen the conceptual high point of Geisha Assassin, originally and much more misleadingly titled Geisha vs Ninja; there's only one real fight with ninja and the geisha aspect is peripheral at best.

This movie only barely has a story-- it's your standard "loner bent on vengeance" plotline, brutally shorn of almost everything you'd consider plot or characters. Almost every minute is the heroine either kicking someone's ass or silently walking to the next place asskicking shall commence. While I appreciate this progressive-minded refusal to waste time on a half-baked plot, the parts of the movie they did film aren't all that great. The travel scenes are tedious, and the fights just aren't good or outrageous enough to carry the entire film. The unarmed fighting is actually much more interesting than the swordplay-- the choreography isn't exactly improved, but they're a lot more visceral, just people brutally whaling on each other until the other guy stays down. We also get to see the rare irony of someone throwing a smoke bomb to escape FROM ninja.
I mainly watched this because director Go Ohara's next film is a collaboration with the always crowd-pleasing Yoshihiro Nishimura. Hopefully that'll be a bit more memorable.

Ong Bak sequels

Ong Bak 2 is one of the most bafflingly bad films I have ever seen. I am the last person on earth to hate a kung fu film if it manages to have a sufficient quantity of great fight scenes, but Ong Bak 2 was just so fundamentally misconceived that it managed to undermine it's own action. Between having Tony Jaa's character played by a child actor for LITERALLY half the movie, and the Tinkerbell ending...
I should probably not be looking forward to the sequel.
But here's the trailer, and it looks like it at least knows how stupid it is; since they're clearly never letting Tony Jaa direct again, perhaps it won't be paced like mud trickling down the back of an elephant's corpse.

Ip Man

Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip appear to be hell bent on reviving the entire martial arts genre by their damn selves. If we just forget about the incoherent second half of Dragon Tiger Gate, they've done a pretty solid job.

I'm the first to scoff at fools who give a shit about anything but the fight scenes in a kung fu movie, but occasionally a movie comes along that absolutely delivers the fu, and gives a shit about the story, and actually has the script and restraint to pull that story off. It's a bit hard not to compare this to Jet Li's Fearless, a movie that has more or less the same plot -- one kung fu master inspires China to kick out the Japanese -- and may have had more spectacular fight scenes, but was a dreadful, sappy, incoherent, embarrassing mess otherwise. An opinion only strengthened by seeing Ip Man do it so much better.
I used the word restraint for a good reason; histrionics are pretty much inevitable in Chinese movies, but Ip Man more or less avoids them, and when it does indulge, it makes damn sure it's earned them. Which is not to say Donnie Yen doesn't completely blow the one really emotional beat the script hands him, but you're willing to overlook that in the context of a performance that completely drops all traces of his usual ego-maniacal self-absorption and finds the cool in always being polite, cultured, and able to fights swords with a feather. I was particularly impressed with Ip Man's relationship with his wife, which manages to find a new angle on something I think everyone else pretty much gave up on finding new angles on.
Got to admit, I kinda wished I'd waited to see it in theaters, though. It better be coming.

...and more elephants

I still haven't seen any Tony Jaa movies except the original Ong Bak, a situation I should probably correct, but blame the lack of Netflix streaming.

Tekken: The Movie

I was half expecting them to flash THEY FIGHT IN THE DARK.
What the fuck at fight choreography by the kung fu cop from District B13.

They just don't make 'em like they used to

It's always nice to rewatch something you loved and have it be just as great as you remember, if not moreso.



Swordsman II is pretty much the archetypal wire-fu movie; it has all the hallmarks of the HK New Wave of the '80s and early '90s that made me fall in love with Asian cinema, and I gotta say that I enjoyed rewatching this more than any new fu film I recall seeing in the last several years. There is a Swordsman I, but I've never seen it; I'm told it's not nearly as good as SII, and doesn't even star Jet Li. There is a sequel/spinoff; The East is Red is often referred to as "Swordsman III", and Brigitte Lin reprises her role as SII's scene-stealing villain, but frankly I don't recall it being nearly as good-- in fact, I barely recall it at all, which definitely ain't a good sign.



SII, on the other hand, I recalled in fairly good detail. There's a whole bunch of clan warfare going on, which is exacerbated by the arrival of some Japanese mercenaries, who end up being hired by fantastically named evil androgyne Asia the Invincible to back hir play to seize power. A wandering do-gooder and his pals 'n' gals get embroiled in Asia's blatant naughtiness, and from there it's all flying sleeves and knitting needle kung fu and pretty much the best movie ever. Jet Li gets to play massively against type as the titular swordsman, who's actually a lusty, lazy kung-fu drunkard. He has a hell of a lot of fun hamming it up (and playing the similar Fong Sai Yuk in that series), and it's a shame pretty much everything else he's ever done has him playing stone-faced stoic types.



Man, Tsui Hark and "Tony" Ching Siu-Tung really knew how to make a movie. Swordsman II basically has it all; awesome aerial fu-battles, copious melodrama and corny "humor", gorgeous sets and cinematography, and a plot that's random enough to be amusing but not enough to be confusing, unlike some recent movies I could name.



A slightly bad translation can add to the ambiance; Tai Seng's DVD has different subtitles than the version I saw back in the day, as I don't recall any reference to "Japanese gypsy soldiers". That delightfully stilted language particular to HK subs can often reach a kind of poetry. There's a nice Ric Meyer commentary track if you'd actually like to have more than a cursory grasp of this film, but honestly that wouldn't get in the way of your enjoyment; it sure didn't spoil mine any.



So basically, this movie is kind of my Platonic ideal of fu filmmaking. There's just so much insane, jaw-dropping zest in every frame. Perhaps I've been spoiled and shouldn't expect every movie to be this good-- and lord knows there were more than enough turds even in the golden age of which we speak-- but it does break my heart a little bit that this kind of gonzo filmmaking has largely gone out of style. But hey, I'll never stop looking.

District B13 Ultimatum

First film was fucking amazing. Hope it lives up to it.
Not sure where the B went...

Motorcycle vs. Cavalry

Vampire Hunter D - sassy hand + sailor suit =

Today's slice of wire-fu features a Korean actress starring in the French-directed live-action remake of a Japanese anime with stunt direction from Hong Kong. Sadly, Blood: The Last Vampire is less a shining beacon of international cooperation than a bloody effing mess. And I never even liked the source material. The first half or so is a remake of the original anime (presumably Blood+ is a separate license), and then from there it strays off into random period wire-fu as the script completely collapses.

To be fair, this movie does have two things to recommend it. First, the awesome mean-girls-from-the-kendo-club hazing sequence, which is far too amazing a concept to be wasted on this movie. Second, the bit where Saya's mentor single-handedly wastes like twenty old-school, earth-tunneling, tree-rappelling ninja (who are presumably also vampires). This scene also teaches us that Saya has been specifically trained to hang upside-down from a tree trunk and stab someone's eye out.



Sadly, these are mere pinpricks of enjoyment drowning in a sea of nonsense. It's so fundamentally incoherent that it reminds me of Transformers 2; characters are constantly acting on information they have no reason to have, and all kinds of plot elements get introduced during the scene in which they are resolved. The movie ends when Saya and her American sidekick drive into a giant canyon right outside of Tokyo, which turns out to be some kind of timegorge that literally dumps them into a flashback where they kill the big bad, which apparently traps Saya outside the flow of normal spacetime for the sake of a last-minute Alice in Wonderland reference.

Yes, really.

Most unforgivably, the final cut removes all trace of the blacula fight that was the only reason I had any interest in seeing this. It's just kind of a sadly underachieving movie, on the whole; Corey Yuen's stunt direction is smothered in gratuitous quick cuts and sped-up footage (you'd never believe the same guy did Fong Sai Yuk or even New Legend of Shaolin), and the usually reliable Clint Mansell's score is so unmemorable that I can't recall a single piece of music. I've seen worse movies, but that's still no reason to recommend this one.

Mm, 3D Kung Fu

Been a while since Yuen Woo-Ping directed.

Playing catch-up

Ah, the eternal conundrum-- if I spend all my time watching anime, then I have no time to blog about it.
Watched three episodes of Letter Bee so far-- two broadcast and one I'm guessing was an OVA teaser. It's kind of a textbook "missing the point" anime adaptation; the main draw of the manga is the art, which has an interestingly lush style that's almost entirely absent here. The plot & characters are also not doing much for me, but then the first 2 chronological-order eps are almost pure exposition and setup, and the OVA is a random "power of friendship" story that wasn't quite heartfelt or original enough to penetrate my cynical defenses. I'm still willing to give it another couple eps to pick up, since it looks like underage Millia Rage is about to join the cast.


Also halfway through Haruhi season 2. I wish Kyoto Animation hadn't made K-On between seasons, it seems to have infected their overall art style. Endless Eight is hilariously, unbelievably ballsy, but it's probably a lot easier to appreciate if you burn through it in one or two sittings instead of doing the week-by-week drip... which is exactly why I usually don't watch anime weekly, really.


On the other hand, that means I do things like finish Bakemonogatari way too late to make any constructive comments on the old posts. I enjoyed it, but SHAFT was definitely showing some Gainaxian time crunch problems on the last, oh, five episodes or so, and aren't nearly as graceful under pressure (speaking of which, watching Evangelion 1.0 was kind of odd, since most of the directorial style I think of as distinctively Eva comes from working around budget restrictions, which isn't really a problem with the new movies). I liked the last episode, but I hope the upcoming OVA episodes will actually provide something resembling closure on all the supernatural goings-on. Then again, I fear just how pedo SHAFT might get when freed from broadcast standards.


Also been (re)watching some old HK flicks. Man, the '80s and '90s were a magical time over there. At least one of these deserves a post to itself, but I don't have all that much to say about New Legend of Shaolin beyond "Well, that certainly was a Wong Jing movie". I mean, the man is committed to pure entertainment, but he's equally committed to just being completely random. Which is, of course, part of what makes his films so entertaining. Even dubbing it (poorly) as "Legend of the Red Dragon" didn't kill it. Arguably, it is made even more entertaining by trying to figure out which jokes are in the original. I can totally see Wong Jing making Jet Li crack jokes about not wearing underwear, but I somehow doubt "If we're going to fight the evil empire you're going to need your potassium" was in the script. It's also nice to see a movie with lots of spear fighting; seems to be one of the lesser-loved fu weapons.

And to go off-topic, I started introducing a pal to The Prisoner. I haven't seen this series in over a decade, which was enough time to forget that the opening theme and sequence are possibly humanity's greatest achievement.

A remake of Enter the Dragon?

...Starring Korean pop-star Rain?!
As if the remake by itself was not bad enough news.
Fuck you Warner. Fuck you for shitting all over Bruce Lee's grave.
I was going to refrain from making another post and go to bed quietly, but now I'm up in arms.
It's going to be called "Awaken the Dragon." And it's supposed to be a "noir-ish" reboot. Who the fuck gave this project the go-ahead? The writer, some nincompoop named Kurt Sutter, has the balls to say that "This will be more ‘Raging Bull’ than ‘Crouching Tiger’ in its viciousness,” in regards to the project.
Again, why Rain for the love of God? Great, not a white guy, but at least get somebody with a lick of martial arts experience.
Christ, I hope I wake up tomorrow and find that this was a prank.

Until then, motherfucking shit.





Source

Can I Take Nothing for Granted, Dragon Dynasty?

So much for the Criterion of Asian film.
Cheerily awesome two films a month initial schedule quickly gives way to one a season; promises of never before seen quality soon turn out to be piss poor transfers and frequently unintelligible subtitles, but fuck it, you were putting out a bunch of movies that made a big impact on me for cheap, and I was happy to go back and collect them.
At least they were uncut and had the original language tracks, right?
Apparently not any more.
Finally got around to watching the DVD of Jet Li's THE ENFORCER (My Father is a Hero, possibly his best work) and...there's only the fucking shitty English dub they did several years back.
While I'm not surprised they'd suddenly stop bothering - Weinstein has film blood on his hands the way Kissinger does political - I am surprised to have discovered this on my own, several months after release.
Twitch, at the least, should have been in an uproar. But I guess nobody really gives a flying fuck about old kung fu movies, which is probably why they never get treated the way they should be.
I hate the world, and I'm going to bed.

A new Raging Phoenix trailer already

Significantly crazier than the first.

Raging Phoenix trailer

New movie with the girl from Chocolate, however she's spelling her name this time.

"May the Force be with you."

Thailand is really coming along, eh? I mean, they're no Nigeria, but they are crankin' out a bunch of decent-to-excellent fu flicks, at the very least.

In the best fu movie tradition, Mercury Man's plot basically makes no sense. We get an explanation of the hero's super powers that totally fails to address the other superdude running around, a conflicting Engrished technobabble explanation that actually removed information from my mind, and then finally it takes the bad guys the entire movie to think of the most practical use for their magic amulet.

But who needs plot when you have spider fire magnetic arbitrary powers? This movie is heavily indebted to Spider-Man, and apparently they were really worried no one would notice the similar black outfit or the way he magnetically "web-slings" around town, so they make sure to explicitly reference him and his catchphrase in dialogue, and show TWO DIFFERENT pieces of "Hi Spidy" graffiti (a la the "Spielberg, Lucas, let's do it together!" set decor from Ong Bak).

However, MM is no Peter Parker. For one thing, he is completely irrelevant to the climax of the movie. If you're getting shown up by the comic relief character, you got some problems with your heroing, though this may have been foreshadowed when the elephants kung-fu double-teamed him.

Another sign that he may not be a very good hero is that he will straight up murder people. I'm not sure this is intentional, either on his part or the filmmakers', but as depicted, no one could survive the mangling he hands out to getaway cars, and we don't see anybody get out either.

So what I'm saying is, this movie isn't "good" by conventional human standards, but it's certainly watchable. If for nothing more than a cadre of Engrish-spouting villains and transsexual fashion designer "big sister" kung fu battle against frosted-hair mad scientist.