GoldenPigsy's Gilded Trough

Forging the Swords (Zhang Huaxun, 1994)

2012-01-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

Forging the Swords is one of the least appreciated films that Tsui Hark produced in the eighties, at least in part because it is the rarest and therefore the least viewed. The Hong Kong Film Archive screened it years ago as part of a Tsui Hark retrospective, and a single English review by YTSL appeared on the web.

The description provided in the review was enough to pique my interest, but the combination of its scarcity – the film was not screened in Hong Kong until 2001, nearly seven years after its premier in Mainland China – and my having read the short story by Lu Hsun from which it was adapted made my search for it all the more desperate, as did the fact that Ding Shanxi’s rather dull fantasy film, The Magic Sword, is apparently based on the same legend.

Lu Hsun’s story initially appeared in Old Tales Retold, a collection which featured old legends and folk stories processed through Lu’s sensibilities and modernistic literary style. I am less than prepared to discuss any of the social commentary that Lu undoubtedly hid in his tale, but I can attest that the film by Zhang Huaxun follows the same plot, albeit in something of a roundabout manner, although according to his own vision. This is Lu Hsun’s story, but it is most certainly Zhang’s film.

The film is set in the early days of the Zhou dynasty, in the kingdom of Chu, where the king has placed his faith in an idolatrous religion based around the “spirit bird.” He orders a master sword smith to create the best possible sword from an iron deposit. The sword smith’s wife suspects that nothing good can come of an order from a debauched ruler, and when the sword smith finishes his masterpiece – twin swords, male and female, forged with the essence of the sword smith and his wife (their hair is used in the smithing process) – hides the more powerful “male” sword.

And sure enough, the kind not only kills the sword smith, but orders the destruction of his town and family. But a soldier who had befriended the sword smith allows his wife and newborn son to escape. Years later, when his son has come of age, he receives his father’s masterwork, and leaves to seek revenge.

But the boy is meek, and cannot manage to kill the king himself. His benefactor, the soldier who spared his life when he was an infant, seeks him out, takes his sword and his head, and proceeds to use both to depose the king.

For those who know the story, it will come as a surprise that the film renders the soldier’s revenge against the king quite faithfully. It is easily one of the most bizarre sequences to be seen in Chinese film. In fact, the visuals in general reach for a sort of mythic resonance quite unlike the typical wuxia or historical films made in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. The arid desert landscapes immediately call to mind the disenchanted wuxia films made by Hong Kong film-makers at roughly the same time, like Billy Chung’s The Assassin or Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time. But Forging the Swords evokes something almost apocalyptic with its visuals, where dream and myth and brutal reality all seem so closely entwined that they cannot be easily separated.

And in a manner similar to Ashes of Time, or Tsuir Hark’s own disenchanted wuxia film, The Blade, Forging the Swords tells its story out-of-order. The temporal distortions, combined with strange dream sequences and even stranger fantastical events, makes for a sort of grotesque baroque. Forging the Swords is somewhat puzzling for a viewer so far removed (geographically, temporally, and socially) from its intended audience. I have no doubt that there is political commentary here that flew over my head like the King of Chu in one of his fever dreams, just as it likely did in Lu Hsun’s story.

It would be tempting to place Forging the Swords in context as a film in the Tsui Hark oeuvre, or as part of that short lived wave of disenchanted wuxia pictures in the early nineties, or as the continuation of the relatively less fantastical Mainland Chinese action films started by He Ping. It’s all of those, but none of them exclusively. It is firstly a visualization of myth, even if it is at least partially invented myth. And it is one of the most gloriously brutal films made in Mainland China. Worth watching, certainly – its rarity is unfortunate.

Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land

2012-01-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

I know that I posted this little piece of “criticism” on my review of The Dark Spire to illustrate the view that game journalists on the console end of the industry held of dungeon crawlers. I’m posting it again, here, because it is both fitting and because it shows just how much has changed over the past decade or so.

From EGM 151: “Back in the old days, there was a certain sub-genre of RPGs that has all but died out – first-person dungeon crawls. Dispensing with years of progress, [Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land] ascribes to this timeworn tradition. Thankfully, there are a lot of touches that elevate the game above its ancient kin… [But] the truth is, though, there’s a reason this sub-genre has all but perished. All Wizardry really has to offer is a lengthy maze… Everything is built upon a rotted foundation. I find it difficult to imagine that anybody wants an endless dungeon crawl in this vein anymore…”

There are so many bad things about this review. Back in the old days, dungeon crawlers were hardly a sub-genre; they were all that was available as far as computer based RPGs were concerned, and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, was the progenitor in both the West and in Japan. And as for the reviewer’s doubts as to whether anybody wants games of this type, the recent success of the Etrian Odyssey games on the DS begs to differ. The fact that Atlus even bothered to localize Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a testament to the staying power of the sub-genre wrongly assumed to have died out.

And that is all to ignore the relative presence of dungeon crawlers on the PC made by American and European companies when EGM published their review of Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land in 2001.

Granted, it would be six years before Etrian Odyssey made its way into American stores, and even then, the gaming press was underwhelmed. Not whelmed at all, if Game Informer’s review (written by the evidently incompetent Joe Juba) is cited. And even then, games in this style appeal only to a niche, a tiny minority of gamers who either do not like the direction of mainstream RPGs from Japan and the West, or who willingly play anything so long as it is actually good.

Either way, the players who enjoy this sub-genre, such as it is these days, should look into getting a used copy of Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, as it is one of the best of its kind, and, from my perspective, even one of the best games on the Playstation 2.

Game starts with character creation. The player’s character is quickly pared off with three other adventurers, a human warrior and ninja, and an elvish priestess. You can choose to create your own party members and leave these behind, but you’ll miss out on some melodramatic, if rather amusing, dialog if you do. I kept them in the party, and added a hobbit thief and human mage to round out the team.

After creating the party, a nameless swordsman leaning on a broken sword leads the player into the dungeon, a deep tunnel created after the flash, a cataclysmic event that killed a large portion of the local town, and reduced the castle to a heap of rubble on top of deep labyrinth. He instructs the party to make it to the bottom of the dungeon, to figure out the cause of the flash, and to utilize “allied actions,” tactical movements that utilize multiple members of the party, by building trust between the members of the party. After introducing the basics of the game, the player is then on their own in the labyrinth, free to accept quests at the local inn to bring in money, equipment, and experience, fighting in turn-based battles and leveling up the party as he or she proceeds down the labyrinth.

In other words, it’s a typical dungeon crawler, but its novelties add a great deal to an otherwise rote genre excursion, the “allied actions” in particular, as they make battles into strategic puzzles. Say that the player encounters a mob with multiple spell-casting enemies and a tank-like physical attacker. If carefully selected, the allied actions can end the battle early, with minimal damage to either the front or back rows of the party. By utilizing the “spell cancel” action, the “double slash” action with two characters capable of critical hits, and an individual spell from one of the party’s mages, all three of the enemies can be taken out in a single turn.

The mobs seem to have been carefully planned out in advance to allow the player to find the right combination of allied and individual actions. This makes almost every encounter a “puzzle battle” so to speak, usually a convention that the Japanese developers only employ for boss battles. It does not mean that the battles are always easy. Aside from some trial-and-error in finding the best strategy for dealing with a particular enemy group, the enemies in Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land actually pose a consistent threat. Ninjas, particularly high level groups of them, can decimate the party with instant kill critical hits, and, when throwing projectiles from the back row, can hit every member of the party, regardless of their placement. Ghosts can de-level a party member with a special attack, and large groups of spiders (as many as twenty, by my count) can throw enough poison to status-effect the entire party.

So along with battle-by-battle planning with the allied actions (not to mention taking into consideration the available spell points, hit points, item inventory, and player statistics), careful pre-dungeon planning also proves considerably important. It is important to gather materials and find special recipes so that spell-casters and priests have access to the abilities that will save a party from being completely poisoned or paralyzed. It is equally important to make sure that at least one of the warriors has an enchanted weapon to deal damage to undead enemies who are resistant to physical attacks.

And just as the battle system is a complex of moving parts, so too are the dungeons. Most of the dungeons are pre-planned mazes, usually with traps or secrets or events of importance, although there are randomly generated floors of the labyrinth. Usually large and containing (only slightly) hidden short-cuts, each segment of the dungeon can become dangerous if the player tarries, as the grim reaper will appear, hunt down the party, and kill one of its members, who can only be revived at the town’s sanctuary.

This is the sort of challenge and complexity that aficionados crave (and I have not even mentioned the party trust and moon-phase systems). More than an “endless dungeon crawl” it offers a great deal of customization, optimization, and challenge that was all but absent in the majority of JRPGs on the Playstation 2 at the time, and just as absent in the Bioware developed games that were developed for, or were eventually ported to the Microsoft Xbox.

One thing I find particularly irritating about that EGM review is that it implies that the game has no story or characterization. This is incorrect; expository sequences and dialog are sparse, and somewhat overwrought, I admit, but they are doled out appropriately and, when combined with the graphics and presentation, add quite a lot to the experience. While the graphics themselves are nothing special, the expert art direction helps to create a distressed atmosphere. The town covered in fog and snow (or ash), the warm and earthy colors of the inn and the pub. Even the art style strikes a healthy balance between googly-eyed anime and a more western fantasy aesthetic, for the information of the Nipponfobic out there.

Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land is an underrated gem from an underrated developer. Racjin (aka Racdym – they changed their name to “be more pronounceable.” Lol) also developed the charming Snowboard Kids (and its sequel) for the Nintendo 64, as well as the excellent Trap Gunner for the Playstation. Recently, they made the Nintendo DS remake of SaGa 2, better known here as Final Fantasy Legend 2, which was sadly not localized for the English market.

With the release of a new Wizardry game for the Playstation 3 and IOS, and with the whole of the dungeon crawling genre gaining renewed interest and respect, hopefully a little bit of retroactive appreciation will be given to this unfairly maligned game.

Return of the Bastard Swordsman (Lu Chin-Ku, 1984)

2012-01-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

At the end of Lu Chin-Ku’s previous film, Bastard Swordsman, the titular bastard swordfighter, Yun Fei Yang, had rescued the Wudang clan from certain doom, won the heart of the lovely Lun Wan Er, and made a promise to the wicked Dugu Wu Di that they would fight using their signature styles – Yun’s Silkworm Skill against Dugu Wu Di’s Invincible Palms – in the inevitable sequel.

Return of the Bastard Swordman picks up where the first film left off in the manner of a television serial (fact: the two films are adapted from a television serial). Wudang is in trouble again, with both Dugu Wu Di planning to attack the Wudang temple and an interloping group of martial artists from Japan waiting in the background to take on whichever martial clan remains intact after the ensuing battle between the Invincible Clan and the Wudang.

The Wudang clan dispatches a student to find Yun Fei Yang, who has retreated to a life of contemplation and companionship with Wan Er, so that he can set everything right. Illiterate and lost, the pupil contacts the fortune-teller Li Bu Yi, who foresees a great deal of turmoil in the martial world. And sure enough, the Japanese fighters ambush Wudang while they host the leaders of the other martial sects, killing them all, and framing Dugu Wu Di in the process. Angry and bereaved, Yun Fei Yang decides to duel Dugu Wu Di before the appointed date.

Dugu Wu Di, seeing one of the Inivincible Clan’s strongholds in ruins, with a corpse signed in blood by Yun Fei Yang, agrees, although his advisors warn him that the perpetrators of the assault were likely foreigners and not Fei Yang, a suspicion later confirmed when one of the Japanese warriors attempts to ambush the Invincible Clan in disguise.

The duel takes place. Animated rays, wire-work, and blistering fast fight-choreography take flight. And the duel ends inconclusively with Yun Fei Yang injured and Dugu Wu Di coughing blood. Li Bu Yi sees his fortune, and warns Wu Di that he will die unmarried and childless, at which Wu Di scoffs. Given that the film has established the efficacy of Li Bu Yi’s divinations, this seems like a bad move. Sure enough, the Japanese fighters ambush Wu Di while he is ill and kill him.

Meanwhile, Li Bu Yi and Wan Er transport the incapacitated Yun Fei Yang to receive treatment from the legendary physician Lai Yao Er. But Lai Yao Er needs a ginseng root that has aged for a thousand years to treat Yun Fei Yang, and the only person who has one is Ghost Doctor Lan Xin Zu, who had previously thrown his lot in with the Invincible Clan. They fight, and Doctor Lai gets the ginseng. So Yang Yun Fei and Li Bu Yi set out to right the wrongs committed by the Japanese fighters, facing off against the “Vital Skill” of their leader, Mochitsuki Soryu Han.

The fight against Mochitsuki is the showpiece of Return of the Bastard Swordsman, and given the chaos of the preceding fight sequences, it has a lot of show to stop. And it does. This fight showcases some of the strangest visuals in Lu Chin-Ku’s considerably strange career at Shaw Brothers. Mochitsuki makes himself invincible by controlling his heart beat, utilizes ninja tricks that involve costume changes, explosives and tumbling; and when he really gets going with his special skill, his whole chest begins to expand and contract with his heart beat. Li Bu Yi attempts to distract him by beating drums asynchronously to his heart beat, while Yun Fei Yang shoots darts and flies about on wires, conjuring animated silkworms.

The fight choreography in this scene holds up under the prodigious use of visual effects, and, like the film’s less fantastical set pieces, is well performed. If Lu Chin-Ku and Yuen Tak had set out to make a standard wuxia film in the style of, say, Chu Yuan, their action design would more than adequately compliment the film. As seen in the first film, as well as the same year’s The Lady Assassin, Lu Chin-Ku could easily utilize the classical style of Shaw Brothers martial arts films while synthesizing newer techniques pioneered in films produced by rival studios.

My review of Bastard Swordsman asked the question of why, with films like these, which bridged much of the gap between the staid and conservative production style which built the Shaw cinema empire and the wild creativity of the young new wave headed by directors like Tsui Hark, the Shaw Brothers studio eventually imploded. I think now, even more so than earlier this year, when I reviewed Bastard Swordsman, that the reason must be more complicated than somebody so removed from the situation can grasp.

But it is true that even with Lu Chin-Ku and Yuen Tak’s astonishing creativity in both shooting and choreographing their films, and even with the appropriation of editing and cinematographic techniques from the new wave, Return of the Bastard Swordsman still looks very similar to the old style of Shaw Brothers movies. It reuses the familiar sets and costumes; the principle members of the cast, like Chen Kuan-Tai, Norman Chu, and Lau Wing, were hardly fresh faces in 1984.

Even though I would rate the film’s fight choreography at the same tier as, say, Ching Siu-Tung’s Duel to the Death, Ching’s film simply looks, for lack of a better description, more real. Its location shooting outmatches the sometimes garish look of the Shaw sets, which had already appeared in countless films since the late sixties. Even the costuming in Duel to the Death, though hardly exemplary in this sense, is more authentic – particularly when it comes to the depiction of the Japanese characters – than that of Return of the Bastard Swordsman.

But if there is any real problem in the film itself, not as a symbol of where its studio failed to go, but in and of itself, it is that Yun Fei Yang is so powerful that the script has to sideline him until the finale in order to generate any tension. The first Bastard Swordsman was tightly plotted; Return of the Bastard Swordsman is bloated, first with the Wudang pupil wandering about, then with the flight to Doctor Lao, then with the conflict between Lao and Ghost Doctor Lai.

That said, it’s still coherent, at least, which puts it ahead of Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain on one account. And for its problems, Return of the Bastard Swordsman is still one of the looniest wuxia films that Shaw Brothers ever cranked out. Taken together with Bastard Swordsman, it is the perfect blend of fun characters, byzantine plotting, and old-school fight choreography mixed with then-new school special effects. Easily required viewing for fans of the Shaw Brothers and wuxia films.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake (Tony Ching Siu-Tung, 2011)

2011-12-12T15:10:00.000-08:00

Although it is generally known under the title for The Sorcerer and the White Snake, the title card for Tony Ching Siu-Tung’s latest film has the English title “Its Love,” which sounds not a bit unlike a really cheesy telenovela – the kind which my mom used to watch on the Spanish language television networks, much to my dissatisfaction, when I was a kid. Like “Asi el Amor” or something. It’s actually a fairly appropriate comparison, as The Sorcerer and the White Snake features enough soft focus and lingering close ups of beautiful people casting longing looks just past the camera to fill a week’s worth of episodes of the goofiest Mexican soap opera.

It’s the latest cinematic version of the White Snake legend, a story about a snake demon who takes human form after a thousand years of meditation, falls in love with a mortal man named Xu Xian, and marries him. As this violates the natural order, fanatical Buddhist Fa Hai seeks to split them apart. Motion picture renderings of this legend run the gamut from the quaint, like the Shaw Bros. Huangmei styled Madame White Snake, to the utterly bonkers, like Phantom of Snake, which places the story in 2000 AD Hong Kong. They vary about as widely in quality as well.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake is one of the growing number of made-for-China films from old-guard Hong Kong film makers. Like Jingle Ma’s Butterfly Lovers and Frankie Chan’s The Legendary Amazons, Ching’s latest film covers well-worn material. And while I cannot speak to The Legendary Amazons as I have not seen it, I can say that Butterfly Lovers and The Sorcerer and the White Snake aim for the same audience of teenaged Chinese girls. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And Tony Ching has made a better film than Butterfly Lovers in all respects. It is considerably better written, better acted, looks much less low-budget and etc. But it does as much for me as Butterfly Lovers did. Other versions of the tale have aged quite gracefully. The Japanese film, Love of the White Snake, is pretty close to timeless. Tsui Hark’s Green Snake is one of my favorite movies; for all of its dated pre-handover commentary, there is a meditation there on love and destiny and human nature that is unusually deep for as commercial a director as Tsui.

So what of The Sorcerer and the White Snake? I don’t know. It seemed to me like an easily forgotten exercise. The computer generated effects, which dominate every part of the movie, are hardly impressive compared to western films, and there is neither interesting design nor thematic weight to hold them up. Jet Li is on hand to play Fa Hai, whom the script portrays as essentially well-meaning, but his athleticism means quite little when CGI chaos floods the screen. He showed himself quite capable of handling dramatic roles in Ocean Heaven, but his character has none of the depth seen in Tsui’s Green Snake. He is well-meaning throughout, and that is all we know of him. There is no unresolved doubt, no hypocrisy, and no sexual tension with his sworn enemies. He’s one note.

Likewise with Xu Xian. Raymond Lam is competent enough in the role, but we only know that he likes to help people with his herbal medicine and that he loves Bai Suzhen. He finds no moral dilemma in her deception (she does not tell him that she is actually a snake demon), nor in their breaking of natural law. He’s one note too.

That we know so little about these characters beyond the intensity of their feelings makes the climax fairly dull, unnecessary even. There is nothing to be resolved; it’s a light show. Spectacular, yes, even with less than impressive cgi, but it is still an empty display.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake is a showcase for pretty people and often ugly computer effects. It is inoffensive, and likely to entertain its intended audience with its talking cgi animals (mice, bunnies, and turtles). There’s nothing especially wrong with it, and it is clearly the film that Tony Ching intended to make. But it seems to me that it does nothing that I could not find in any other film of its type. Ching Siu-Tung was once a director who pushed visual boundaries with his fight choreography and wire-work. Now he’s directing family film pablum.

Or maybe I’m just burnt out on cgi filled costume films.

The Entropy of Fairy Telling

2011-11-28T13:42:00.001-08:00

Lightwing23 e-mailed me the other day, fresh from seeing the splendorous absurdity of Immortals, to inquire about my thoughts, which I provided. I’m sure my readers are shocked.

He also mentioned that he wanted to see more of Tarsem’s work, recalling the adulation I heaped on his previous film, The Fall, but that the trailer for Tarsem’s upcoming Mirror, Mirror dissuaded him. In his words: “There aren't enough bad things to say about that trailer… [It] looks like such crap that my colon actually responded, like ‘hey, speaking of that, I need to, you know, unload.’” Ouch.

He contrasted that with his reaction to the trailer for that other Snow White adaptation, the Kristen Stewart vehicle, Snow White and the Huntsman, which he also thought looked terrible but appreciated the possibility of seeing it as a crossover between Twilight and Marvel Comics’ Thor (Chris Hemsworth plays the role of the huntsman).

I think they look awful in complimentary ways, although I must admit to being far more ambivalent towards Snow White and the Huntsman and its awful following of a truly awful fad. The attempt to take old stories and rework them for contemporary cinema has taken a particular tack which can be summed up as such:

1) Insert large-scale battle scenes.

2) Incorporate sub-Tim Burton surreal imagery.

3) Make it grim/dark/grimdark.

4) ????

5) Profit!

This method can be seen in a number of recent films, but not so clearly as in Tim Burton’s own imagining of Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland. Burton’s inventiveness has declined over the years, to the point that his films now resemble bland computer driven theme-park rides. His Alice in Wonderland is a pastiche, yanking elements from both its literary namesake as well as Carol’s Through the Looking Glass and "Jabberwocky," with a dash of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia to embitter the pot.

We have the cowed Victorian stereotype Alice learning about herself and picking up a sword and armor to do battle with the Jabberwocky in a toothless cartoon world presented to the audience as a dangerous jungle of phantasms. It plays on current trends (action-gurl being the most obvious), as though the original source could benefit from a twenty-first century sensibility and still maintain its integrity. The film could not any more miss the point.

Snow White and the Huntsman looks to follow in its footsteps, albeit without the whimsy that made Burton’s film bearable. The trailer opens with ominous music and narration, the voice of the evil queen. The trailer treats us to images of such startling originality as creepy forests, milk baths, and clashing armies. And, most impressively of all, we see Kristen Stewart, the eponymous character, in a suit of armor wielding sword and shield, sans helm or helmet.

Wondering what possible service a tiny young woman like Kristen Stewart could serve in a massive melee is deafened by the consideration of what purpose massive battle set-pieces could serve in a film based on a fairy-tale like Snow White. It seems almost inspired by Catherine Hardwicke’s recent bomb, Red Riding Hood, another supposedly gritty reimagining of a fairy-tale in which everyone’s skin and hair looks nothing less than perfect, even when chased through the woods by a marauding were-creature.

Films like these are vapid entertainment, which fairy-tales, the most humble folk literature, were most certainly not. I recall a passage from Gene Wolfe’s Castleview:

"They kissed, and it was not (as Mercedes has always heard it was supposed to be) before she knew what was happening. She knew perfectly well what was happening -- that a whole world, new and strange, terrible yet wonderful, was unfolding for her. She understood, when their lips touched, exactly why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty has been awakened by a kiss, knew what those old grandmothers of eight hundred years ago had been trying to tell her, and knew that they had told her, their coded message coming clearly across the years, and that those dear old grandmothers--the bent crones at the firesides--had triumphed, their word not lost with the crackling of the sticks in their fires. That she and Seth or some other like Seth would someday ride on one white horse, laughing in the sunshine."

I’m also reminded that when Seth and Mercedes uncover a book and sword in the illusory castle of Morgana le Fey, Mercedes forgets the book, preferring the sword.

The ultimate purpose of fairy-tales is to transmit those truths about life which the young cannot know because they are young, to assure them of a magic that is not that of occultists or (as it must now be said) generic fantasy novels and video games. They tell children – and remind the teller – of true magic; they tell us that the entropic world in which we live, a world of the arbitrary cruelties of circumstance or fate, is not the whole of things.

What films like Snow White and the Huntsman do is ignore the book for the sword (I hope Mr. Wolfe would forgive me for appropriating his words). The finality of the tale might be similar, or even the same, but its audience leaves with quickly forgotten images of pandering simplicity: girls in armor, clashing armies, and eroticized evil.

If Snow White and the Huntsman looks likely to fail as a cinematic fairy-tale, Mirror, Mirror looks likely to fail as anything but an unwitting parody of Snow White and the Huntsman. While the former follows the trends of Burton and Hardwicke, the latter marches down the trail blazed by Shreck.

Shreck’s message – that you are fine no matter how grotesque, smelly, annoying, disgusting or objectionable you or your actions are – is an ugly reversal of the fairy-tale that compliments the grating insouciance to which most mid-tier children’s films of recent vintage aspire. Mirror, Mirror is similar in that respect. “Snow White?” one of the dwarves exclaims in the trailer, “Snow Way!”

The best I can say for Mirror, Mirror is that it might provide a little amusement, much as Shreck did, with knowing performances and pop culture references. Tarsem’s expert visual sense certainly could not hurt it. But for all of the minor amusements of the movie itself, probably the best thing about Mirror, Mirror is that it seems almost to have been an unwitting parody of Snow White and the Huntsman. At least it seems to realize that it is itself ridiculous, even if its writers mistakenly took their source material for being ridiculous too.

David Gaider is a Virgin: a review of Dragon Age: The Calling

2011-11-22T13:32:00.001-08:00

I do not usually make predictions as I read – I have no inclination to do so and hardly believe that anybody who reads for pleasure does – but I knew immediately what I expected to happen at some point in Dragon Age: The Calling when Fiona, the elf mage, gets into an argument with King Maric of Ferelden. She accuses him of being a poor father. He gets angry and tells her that she doesn’t know the first thing about him.

And all I could think was: “Oh no. He’s going to fuck her.”

Dragon Age: The Calling is the sequel to David Gaider’s debut novel, Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, which was awful. The Calling opens with King Maric, who successfully expelled the Orlaisian occupation and regained his kingdom in the first novel, holding court with the Grey Wardens, an order of warriors dedicated to fighting the darkspawn, considered irrelevant by the major political bodies as the darkspawn are quarantined in the underground ruins of the Dwarven civilization.

Maric agrees, with the flimsiest of reasoning, to accompany the Grey Wardens on an aimless quest into the Deep Roads based on the questionable visions of their new leader. And off they set, meeting with mages, fighting with darkspawn, slaying dragons, and making stilted conversation. If The Stolen Throne used fantasy plot #5, The Calling is written according to fantasy plot #1: the dungeon crawl. This plot is the bread-and-butter of licensed fantasy fiction, a travelogue through a particular location often interrupted by interminable battles and sex scenes written by people who do not seem to have ever been in a fight or a woman.

As readers of The Stolen Throne will recall, the Deep Roads were already the location for the most boring portion of David Gaider’s first novel. They are the setting for the majority of this novel. It is safe to say that plot is not Gaider’s strong suit, and he attempts to make up for it here by narrating incidents. The plot itself is just substantial enough to fill a two-hundred page paperback. The Calling is just a bit shorter than my hardback copy of Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardour.

At 440 pages, the narrative structure of The Calling shakes under the weight of all the incidents Gaider packs onto it, especially when so much of the narration is on the order of “he thrust his sword into the darkspawn.” I could easily forgive the contrivance of Maric accompanying the Grey Wardens on their quest in the Deep Roads if those incidents were not so similarly contrived, described in such beige prose.

I previously praised Gaider for having moved on from his reliance on adverbs. It seems I spoke too soon, as we get such descriptions as: “The water was littered with bits of flotsam that pooled at the edges, lapping wetly against the stone…” How else would water lap? Particularly grating is the statement that “Fiona was glad to be getting out of there finally.” Say that out loud; every time I do, it comes out as “thud.” And it follows – somewhat less gracefully and grammatically – the same formula as nearly every sentence from The Stolen Throne. X does Y, Zly.

The childish humor also makes a return. When talking about dreams and visions, Maric, King of Ferelden, confides in the Grey Wardens: “I once dreamed Loghain brought me a barrel of cheese. I opened it up, and there were mice inside. Made of Cheese.” When faced with an insurmountable horde of opponents, one of the Grey Wardens mentions that he has very few arrows, to which another replies “I’m running out of clean smallclothes.” I cannot roll my eyes enough.

Probably the worst of the extraneous bits is the encounter with the demon, which traps Maric and the Grey Wardens in dreams tailored to their deepest wants. Maric realizes first that he is trapped in an illusion, breaks free, and travels across the Fade (Gaider’s term for the world of dreams to which the consciousness travels when asleep) to help the others. Only Fiona, the elf-mage Maric will so obviously boff at some point, has a bad dream. Maric and company find her tied up, her back whipped raw by the demon’s avatar, a handsome gentlemen from Fiona’s memory. The sexual tone of this scene is patently obvious, and it sets up what I can only refer to as the fantasy maiden’s mating call.

The fantasy maiden’s mating call is when the fantasy novel's masturbatory object signals to the protagonist that she is ready for him to fuck her by telling him about some sort of horrific abuse she survived as a child. It could be sexual, physical, or supernatural, but the telling of it always ends on the tip of the protagonist’s erection. Fantasy authors (and writers in other genres, to be fair) mistake this as good characterization; the characters share important details about their pasts which lead to mutual affection. Unfortunately, its not only a cliché, but somewhat creepy.

Fiona, who has just physically and mentally relived the sexual torture she tells Maric that she experienced from the time she was seven until she was fourteen years old, informs Maric of her past. He tells her about his – he saw his mother killed in front of him. Granted, he eventually avenged her, regained his kingdom, and now rightfully presides over it, but both he and the narrative seem to think that this is a rough equivalent to the torture that Fiona underwent. And it puts her in the mood. They do it only a few feet from where their fellow spelunkers sleep.

Now, as a straight male, I am not one to speak about women’s issues. It is not my place. But even then, I find this scene offensive; not even so much for its subtext, but for its utter contrivance. It rings spectacularly false, from the moment it starts until the actual sex ends in (thankfully) abbreviated fashion.

The fetishization of the elf mage becomes even more blatant when Maric, knocked unconscious during a battle, looks up at Fiona, who is cradling him in her arms. “He looked up at Fiona’s face and thought only how beautiful she was. Those dark eyes had seen so much suffering.” So she’s covered in “black ichor” as Gaider redundantly puts it, bruised all over, and has confided in Maric a past fraught with horrific abuse, and Maric, thinking he will soon die, leaving his very young son in charge of a kingdom, can only think of how hawt Fiona looks, that he wants to comfort her, and tell her that things will be okay.

I cannot continue to read or write this review; I cannot see. My eyes are so permanently rolled.

My review of The Stolen Throne received numerous comments to the effect that I set my standards too high for a fantasy novel, particularly a licensed one. Putting aside the ability of supposed fans of the genre to denigrate it as a whole with their low expectations, I have to point out that I am only judging Gaider’s writing according to his own metric. In a recent interview at the New York Comic Con, Gaider said about Dragon Age as a whole: “It's also character-driven, and thus concerned more about the human condition than it is about being epic.”

That statement is utterly gob-smacking when juxtaposed to The Calling, which is the very definition of plot-driven and ham-fistedly characterized. It is the apotheosis of tie-in literature, the quintessence of all those malignant aspects I previously enumerated. The Calling, and its author, have nothing to say about the human condition. They trade in only the worst kind of fantasy; neither entertaining nor escapist, but dull and imprisoning in its rote plot and tortured prose. It is the sort of fantasy writing that does not evoke the imagination; it does not challenge the reader. It is not fantastic in any sense. The Calling panders.

A little bit of humility would behoove a writer who is fairly new to prose fiction, but it occurs to me that David Gaider is not, and likely never will be a writer a prose fiction, nor humble about his position. He is a pretentious writer of game books. The Calling is a Fighting Fantasy book or a D&D campaign in which the player makes no choices, builds no characters, and participates in no adventure. We only read Gaider’s fantasies as told to himself, relevant only to those who share them.

Immortals (Tarsem, 2011)

2011-11-16T13:08:00.001-08:00

I left Tarsem’s newest film, Immortals, thinking that it was the best bad movie of the year (Ebert called it “the best looking bad film you will ever see). Its advertising campaign proudly referred to it as coming “from the producers of 300,” as sure a sign of its quality as any. Supposedly based on Greek mythology, it tells the story of Thesus, a bastard peasant, as he helps to save Greece from the schemes of King Hyperion, who searches for the Epirus Bow in order to free the Titans.

Theseus, for those who do not know, was not a bastard or a peasant in Greek Mythology; he was jointly sired by Aegeus, king of Athens, and Poseidon, each of whom slept with Aegeus’ wife, Aethra, on the same night. The Minotaur was not a giant man wearing a bull mask, nor was the labyrinth a temple gravesite. Hyperion was a titan, not a warlord who tried to free the titans. The titans, generally speaking, were not depicted as blue skinned monsters with animalistic tendencies, nor did the gods follow a “Star Trek” style prime directive in their relationship to mortals. Zeus frequently states that mortals must rely on themselves, that men have limitless potentials and etc.

Immortals makes use of the “digital backlot” technique popularized by Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City, its heavily stylized visuals reminiscent of 300. The aesthetic here is that of a comic book adaptation, with everything that entails. The cast was chosen, as best anyone can tell, based on their looks. And not necessarily whether or not they look right for their parts as ancient Hellenic warriors and priestesses and Olympians. It seems a distinct possibility that casting was done according to how good each member looked in a costume.

But Eiko Ishioka designed those costumes, so, yeah. And if Immortals rests entirely on visuals (and it does; the plot and dialog are either formalities or excuses) those visuals, for once, carry the movie. If a town etched in a cliff side, whose distance from a deadly drop could be well measured in feet seems like a geographical and technological improbability, and obviously a computer generated façade, it is also an image of extraordinary romance. If the action sequences which make use of Hong Kong style fight choreography, with spinning fighters and whipping chains, seem like anachronisms, they are at least visually pleasing and compellingly so. If Micky Rourke, Frieda Pinto, and Henry Cavill’s acting leave something to be desired, their faces and bodies leave nothing outside of visual satisfaction.

Immortals is the work of Tarsem, director of The Fall, The Cell, and the upcoming Mirror Mirror. Ecstatic visuals are his modus operandi, and Immortals, he admits, was a willing departure from the tableaux visuals of his previous films, in which he used photographic tricks to create his vision. It is true that Immortals bears his trademark sensibility – from the early depiction of the Titans hanging from bars by their teeth, to visions of an Olympus free of clouds and sunlight, the audience knows that this film is not a retread of previous cinematic versions of Greek myth – but it is also true that reliance on computer generated images diminishes this vision. For all that the images appear unique; it is abundantly clear how those images were created.

Some would place Immortals as a descendent of 300, or of Clash of the Titans, or of the Ray Harryhausen films of a bygone era, as a special effects showcase and a shallow, if not outright misuse of mythic sources. I think the real antecedent would actually be Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World, another work of a true auteur and dynamic cinematographic virtuoso. Like that film, Immortals is well worth viewing for its style alone, but is similarly forgettable for every moment that its characters speak rather than act.

Immortals is obviously less personal than Tarsem's other films. It watches very much like a summer blockbuster, in fact. But it would be a wonderful turn if summer blockbusters could actually attain this level of visual splendor regardless of their hackneyed scripts.

The Eight Immortals (Chan Hung-Man, 1971)

2011-11-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

I probably should feel somewhat remiss that before I watched this movie (and subsequently perused a Wikipedia entry) my only knowledge of the eight Taoist immortals came from Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master, where he plays a young Wong Fei-Hung who learns “eight immortals drunken boxing” from Beggar So.

The Eight Immortals is an anthology film, telling traditional tales of the immortals before bringing them together for an action-packed finale. The film uses a framing device to tie them together – a pair of itinerant story tellers in contemporary (for 1971) Taiwan entertaining their listeners with music and banter. They begin with the tale of Lu Tung-Pin, who helps a woman to reunite with the man she loves. Then there is the tale of Iron-Crutch Li, whose crutch turns into a peach tree, which bears fruit with curative properties. And it goes on from there.

The film’s raison d’être begins about half-way through, after introducing the eight immortals and the incidental characters who will be reunited for the finale – an assault on the manor of the evil “red demon from the Chinese mainland.” The red demon kidnaps women, extorts enormous amounts of capital from the peasantry, and is actually a pig-demon in disguise, whose queen is a rat-demon. It is not difficult to guess that this is intended as a thinly disguised dig at the PRC.

This portion of the movie is also relentlessly grim, and contrasts starkly with the introductory scenes in which the immortals sing and crack jokes while helping ordinary people with their ordinary problems. The first part of the film resembles the sort of whimsical fairy-tale films of Alexander Ptushko, while the second part is like a Harryhausen effects show-case by way of Chang Cheh. The Red Demon not only rapes the kidnapped servant girls, he eats them, and the film graphically shows the latter. One servant girl – the now married young woman helped by Lu Tung-Pin in the film’s first segment – is tortured and branded on camera. When the eight immortals succeed in killing the red demon’s queen, her true form is revealed with a cross-fade from the actress to a dead rat. A real dead rat – with its head crushed in a pool of blood.

The cognitive dissonance caused by the whiplash between the lackadaisically paced introductions of the immortals and the brutal finale is the result of the film’s production origins and era. 1971 was the year of Chang Cheh’s The New One-Armed Swordsman, easily the most violent and bloody Chinese language film of its time, and a considerable financial success. Hong Kong and Taiwanese genre films had grown increasingly violent since the beginning of Shaw Brothers’ “New Wuxia Century,” which brought the sensibilities of Chang Cheh to the forefront of a genre normally reserved for child-stars and cute teenage starlets like Fung Bo-Bo and Connie Chan, respectively. The violence and sadism in The Eight Immortals is clearly intended to keep the movie relevant, as far as violence and sadism can be characterized as such.

While the general zeitgeist of early seventies genre film explains the finale, it is the involvement of Taiwan’s CMPC production company that explains the earlier sequences of the immortals and their interactions with the mortal townsfolk. The Central Motion Picture Corporation was the Kuomintang’s subsidized film unit which introduced ideologically tinged films and film movements, such as the wave of “healthy realism” melodramas from the 1960’s. The introductory sequences usually serve the purpose of “promoting morals,” like respect for elders, rendering fair service, reciprocity, etc. Even the story-teller framing device can be read as the promotion of humble means of entertainment during a time of modernization.

But it’s fairly obvious that the major selling point of The Eight Immortals was not the inculcation of national values, but a wacky, violent, special-effects driven fantasy. And the effects can get very, very weird. Miss Ho, the lone female immortal, at one point attacks the red demon with a giant peach, which opens up to reveal a huge pig’s head, which spits a dart out of its mouth. Iron-Crutch Li uses his crutch as a flamethrower. The demon-queen, fearing an immanent loss to the immortals and their army of angry peasants, lifts up her shirt and shoots poison gas from her belly-button.

The long and violent action sequence will probably be of most interest to the audience to whom Fusian tried to sell The Eight Immortals, and that audience will probably yawn for the first half of the movie, if not balk at all of the singing (and there is a lot of singing). But I actually quite liked the first half for all of its quaint whimsy and old-fashioned moralizing. The barely concealed political posturing is funny too, and if the action is sparse for the first half, the assault on the Demon King’s manor is a masterpiece of absurdity. The Eight Immortals is a fun movie in the same vein as the stupendously silly Monkey Goes West series from Shaw Brothers director Ho Meng-Hua.

Ling Huan Shao Nu (Wang Cheng, 1992)

2011-10-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in my review of Drunken Dragon, I review things out of order. In keeping with the season, I’m watching horror movies, or at least horror-tinged movies. And as much as I would love to write an overview of the whole Hello Dracula film series, I can neither find the movies nor information about them in English and even the Chinese Wikipedia page is, perhaps understandably, less than comprehensive.

The Hello Dracula films are Taiwanese, jiang-shi (hopping vampire) themed children’s films. Taiwan’s film industry produced a gaggle of fantasy movies in the eighties, of which Hello Dracula is one of the best, in part because it is one of the oddest, and one of the least appropriate for its intended juvenile audience by western standards. Ling Huan Shao Nu (灵幻少女) is the final film in the series. The movie I previously reviewed, I believe, is the second, although I reviewed it under the impression that it was the first. There are six films starring Liu Chih-Yu as Ten-Ten and Gam Tiu as her grandfather, and another film (3-D Army) with a different actress playing the part of Ten-Ten.

Ling Huan Shao Nu opens with Ten-Ten chasing her grandfather, who has abruptly left, into the woods, where hopping jiang-shi vampires accost her to the iconic theme of John Carpenter’s Halloween (this will not be the last time that it plays, nor the only bit of music pilfered from a western film). Ten-Ten wakes up, suddenly, accidently punching her adopted sister Yuan-Yuan in both eyes. Grandpa dispatched Yuan-Yuan to bring Ten-Ten to the altar, where they, and fellow disciple Ah-Tsun, will pay homage to their deceased elder. Cue goofy dance routine – a staple of the series – here.

Grandpa charges Ah-Tsun with clean-up duty after the ceremony finishes, but Ah-Tsun decides that he will practice his Daoist magic instead. He lets a spirit loose which makes a bigger mess than what he initially had to clean. Ten-Ten helps him contain the spirit, and Yuan-Yuan tattles on them, and then leaves them to clean the mess up themselves.

Ten-Ten and Ah-Tsun plot revenge using an out-of-body spell that allows Ah-Tsun to possess the body of the visiting Mr. Chen to torment Yuan-Yuan. If you are wondering if this is headed anywhere, the answer is no. After punishing Yuan-Yuan for telling on them, it’s off to Mr. Chen’s home, where a malign spirit haunts the Chen family. Using the same out-of-body magic to confront the ghost, Ah-Tsun gets separated from the battle. And while Ten-Ten and her Grandpa fight the evil ghost, Ah-Tsun meets Orchid, the ghost of a beautiful young girl who wants to reunite with her lover in the afterlife, but is betrothed against her will to the King of Ghosts. Ten-Ten, Ah-Tsun, and Grandpa then beat up the King of Ghosts, saving Orchid from an eternally unhappy marriage.

With the Chen family safe and the King of Ghosts out of the picture, Ten-Ten and Ah-Tsun try to help Orchid, who, having missed her opportunity to reincarnate, is destined to wander the earth as a lonely ghost. Ten-Ten uses Daoist soul-transference to send Orchid on her way. What this means, I have no clue. But it apparently awakens Grandpa’s old nemesis and fellow student Jomoro. Jomoro plans to kill Grandpa and Ten-Ten, but Grandpa uses the last of his magic to teleport Ten-Ten away before he dies, with Ah-Tsun’s soul transferred into the body of a turtle and Yuan-Yuan killed in battle -- nobody bothered to transfer her soul into a barely sentient animal. And then the Daoist family's home explodes, and the credits start to play.

Like the other movie in the series that I have actually seen, the goofy comedy slowly descends into bloody morbidity by the end of Ling Huan Shao Nu, and the worst part is that there is no resolution to the conflict. This was the last film in the series released. But unlike the previous movies, which had clear indicators of a temporal setting (such as the Republican army troopers led by Boon Saam), Ling Huan Shao Nu seems completely unconcerned with verisimilitude or internal consistency. The jiang-shi vampires only appear in the opening dream sequence and the ghosts and evil spirits Ten-Ten fights wear costuming straight out of Tsui Hark at his nuttiest.

It is that lack of concern with not only believability, but historical and mythic precedent that makes Ling Huan Shao Nu quite fun to watch. Rather than jiang-shi, the Daoist team has to fight horse riding ghosts in suspiciously European armor and skull faced villains and ambiguously gendered warlocks. Cheesy special effects fly all over the place, the young lady who plays Orchid seems to channel Joey Wang as she flutters about on wires, and the actor who plays Ah-Tsun wears a vest of exploding fire-crackers as punishment for tormenting a procession of ghosts. He walks away without a scratch, much less a second degree burn.

And if the final film moves at an even more break-neck pace than its predecessor, it’s also easier to follow. And thanks to the cast being older, it’s also less unsettling when they handle dead bodies or flirt whilst surrounded by dead bodies. But even so, the final scene is so bloody that I cannot comprehend what sort of kid could watch this movie without scarring his or her psyche. And that too is kind of what makes Ling Huan Shao Nu fun. It presents the macabre as a joke, but that last scene is kinda horrifying.

Axing of the Coffin (Fu Ching-Wa, 1969)

2011-10-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

When it comes to legendarily silly re-titles, Crash Cinema actually beat Dimension Entertainment for the title of “best ever.” This 1969 supernatural melodrama, the first film of director Fu Ching-Wa, found its way onto DVD through some rather fortuitous circumstances. Some guy, recently returned from a trip to Taiwan with a bunch of film reels, posted on what was then the “kung fu fandom” message boards, wanting to know what he should do to sell his newly acquired film legacy. Somebody wanted to know what he had, and he posted an impressive list of titles, all obscure, with some, like Pan Lei’s The Sword, thought to be lost in their original format.

I’m guessing that the movie I just finished watching was on that list under the title Chuang Tzu Tests his Wife. But that doesn’t sound so cool to the sort of customer who buys DVDs at the brick’n’mortar, and, although the reel has embedded subtitles, it has no on-screen English title. So Crash Cinema, one of the companies to which the individual who posted at “kung fu fandom” was directed, could rename Chuang Tzu Tests his Wife whatever they wanted when they released it on DVD. And they chose an attention getter, I have to admit. Axing of the Coffin: it sounds like the title of an Iron Maiden tribute album.

This movie is actually a remake of the very first movie filmed in Hong Kong in 1913, and the very first Chinese film production internationally distributed. Chuang Tzu (in pinyin: Zhuangzi) marries a young woman, and decides to test her loyalty by faking his own death. While his wife prepares funeral arrangements, a young man comes to call on Chuang Tzu for tutelage, but takes an interest in the young widow, which she reciprocates, forgetting the funeral arrangements and enjoying the new courtship. When the young man reveals himself to actually be Chuang Tzu, her shame and embarrassment lead her to suicide.

Axing of the Coffin apparently follows the plot of the original film, which I have not seen, but makes additions, such as the villainous Chi Hsuan who attempts to take the young woman by force before Chuang Tzu marries her. Saved from the advances of General Chi, Szu Chin enjoys a happy marriage with Chuang Tzu, frolicking in a garden playing with butterflies. Chuang Tzu’s occupation as a travelling sage takes him abroad often, leaving Szu Chin lonesome for his company. A meeting with a woman who refuses to leave her husband’s grave. The encounter gets him to thinking about his wife’s loneliness and need for companionship, and inspires him to test her loyalty to him.

The original story sounds sadistic enough, but the update further supplements its exploration of Chuang Tzu’s jealousy with a sequence where he tests his wife by disguising himself as the Chi Hsuan and threatens to rape her. Szu Chin passes this test handily; threatening the apparition of Chi Hsuan with her own death should he touch her.

His second test is even more elaborate, as he fakes his own death, disguises himself as a younger man who courts Szu Chin, and fights Chi Hsuan who returns, for real this time, to try to marry Szu Chin. Chuang Tzu, still in disguise, kills Chi Hsuan and marries Szu Chien, but pretends to fall ill to a strange disease which only a concoction made out of fresh human brain tissue can cure. The only fresh source of human brain tissue, unfortunately, is in what Szu Chien believes is her dead husband’s coffin. So she proceeds to pick up an axe and try to extract Chuang Tzu’s brain herself.

At this point, the goes into full out horror mode, with Chuang Tzu rising from his grave and floating around in optical printing effects and spooky blue lighting. He chases the confused and terrified Szu Chien about their home, demanding to know why she would be so disloyal to him.

As his magic disappears and Szu Chien realizes that it is morning, Chuang Tzu appears behind her in the flesh. Ashamed of herself, Szu Chien flees into the woods, Chuang Tzu chasing after her, and hangs herself. Chuang Tzu realizes the grave sin he has committed against his wife, and holds her body, calling her name.

In some versions of this story, Chuang Tzu turns himself and his wife into butterflies, and as they flutter away together they slowly turn into dust as they fly away together. The film seems to set this up in scenes where Chuang Tzu and Szu Chien admire butterflies together. This sort of mystical ending would put Axing of the Coffin in line with other fairy tale-esque horror films of the time, like the Korean film The Thousand Year Old Fox, but the ending as it is strikes an appropriately melancholy note.

Axing of the Coffin is actually more unsettling in its premise than its horror segments. The supposedly wise Chuang Tzu really seems to get off on toying with his wife’s emotions, and I wanted her to actually run off with a good-hearted young scholar by the end of it. But, I have to admit that the horror sequence is an entertaining showcase of late sixties effects work and cinematography. The sequence benefits from an effective performance from the lovely Sam Juet-Jam. But the standout is Tung Lan as Chi Hsuan. Often cast as a villain in Shaw Brothers films, he snarls his way through the scenery like its just delicious.

This movie probably is an interesting little curio, but it is difficult to imagine that there is too much of an audience for faintly misogynistic, mystical Chinese tragedy these days, especially given that it features none of the outrageous grotesqueries of later Taiwanese and Hong Kong horror films and strains to create the sort of atmosphere seen in similar films, like Bao Fang’s Painted Skin or Li Han Hsiang’s The Enchanting Shadow.

My Blade, My Life (Chen Ming-Hua, 1982)

2011-09-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

Pearl Chang receives a lot of attention from cult movie sites because her most seen movies – the ones widely circulated with English dubs – are more than a bit crazy. She’s an interesting character: a female director and producer in a segment of Chinese language film where the only other women to play major roles were Mona Fong, Kao Pao Shu, and occasionally Hsu Feng; an actress so uninhibited that she very often goes so far over the top that she leaves the rest of her often wild films well below her.

The Pearl Chang movie that everybody, it seems, sees and reviews on their blogs is Wolf Devil Woman, occasionally asserted to be a very loose adaptation of the Liang Yusheng novel that would eventually inspire Ronny Yu’s classic The Bride with White Hair. If this is true, the film itself provides little evidence to believe it. Everything that has been said about it is true. Pearl does slay an innocent bunny, the villains really do dress like Klan members, and the direction is all kinds of brilliantly awful. And Miss Chang’s direction is rivaled only by her performance, a snarly, foaming at the mouth performance.

Pearl Chang’s other widely seen films – widely seen, I would assume, because they received English dubs – are less wild, although they seem to lie well outside the mainstream of even the more fantastical genre films from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Matching Escort, I believe, is meant to be semi-comedic, but the rubber and foam decorated sets are trippy by any standard. And Miraculous Flower, while nowhere near as bizarre as Wolf Devil Woman or Matching Escort, contains some of the most audacious wire work seen outside of a Robert Tai film.

But Chang’s oeuvre is hardly one-note. Her television work, serials like Bodyguards and Angry Sword Kang Hua, would hardly give one the impression that this is the same actress who would grab a defenseless crab, break it open and eat its guts as she does in General Invincible (Cheung Pang-Yee, 1983), more or less in one take. Pearl plays somber characters, respectable swordswomen and proud martial artists, just as capably as she goes over the top. This versatility can be seen in her films too, as in China Armed Escort (Chen Ming-Hua, 1975), King of Fists and Dollars (Chen Ming-Hua, 1981), and in the morose, spaghetti-western and chambara influenced The Elimination Pursuit (Cheung Pang-Yee, 1983).

It is this sort of performance that we see in My Blade, My Life, a wuxia picture in the mode of the more action-oriented Gu Long adaptations. Pearl plays Lu Du Shing, a travelling sword-fighter whose only goal is to kill the famous swordsman, Peerless Swallow.

Unfortunately for Lu, Peerless Swallow is in absentia from the martial world. Everybody is looking for him, including his pretty fiancé, the heir to a wealthy manor and nominally the leader of its martial arts clan. Without Peerless Swallow around to police the martial order, the less respectable elements raise no small amount of chaos. Peerless Swallow impersonators attempt to wrest control of rival organizations, an apparently religious “Yin-Yang sect” attempts to forcibly convert the unwilling, and the jealous Cheng Chien-Sheng hatches a bizarre scheme to marry himself to Lu’s fiancé to gain wealth and power.

Lu really just wants to kill Peerless Swallow. Dressed as a man and treated as such (although, in the wuxia film tradition, the disguise is rather transparent to the audience), Lu finds herself in the company of a stranger who calls himself the representative of Peerless Swallow. He is an excellent martial artist, and the only friend that Lu has made in the entirety of her journeys. But he is also sick, poisoned from a previous battle. And as they travel together, his true identity is exposed. He is Peerless Swallow, which will be obvious to the initiated viewer because perennial wuxia hero Ling Yun plays him.

My Blade, My Life plays out very much like a Gu Long pastiche – its plot is much less baroque than the way it is presented – and would be very much typical except that the Pearl Chang plays the lead. As mentioned, her acting is far more subdued than in her more infamous films, but she still gives a strange and – I can think of no better way to express it – uninhibited performance. Her demeanor here is icy, and the character she plays has given up her identity as a woman in order to take revenge. Pearl walks with an unexplained limp, hobbling around until a fight breaks out. Her character is so quick that her opponents die after a single stroke, but when she fights a skilled swordsman, the limp inexplicably disappears, and she bounces off of out-of-frame trampolines or flies about on wires.

The frigid demeanor recalls roles played by Hsu Feng or Angela Mao, but quiet moments between her and Ling Yun’s Peerless Swallow, the sometimes exaggerated limp, and the occasionally brutal fight scenes (Pearl shoves chopsticks into a random mook’s face, in one of the most memorable), bring her character to a more human level than the sort of idealized woman-fighter-in-drag often seen in wuxia pictures of this vintage. Pearl is such a dynamic presence without the snarling and wild gesticulating seen in her other films that it’s almost hard to believe that those are her best known roles. I honestly like this subdued Pearl Chang quite a lot.

Pearl Chang is not the only actor to play against type. Yueh Hua, Chen Sing, and Tsung Hua get roles as minor villains; Lily Li is a ditzy little girl who can’t fight; Cliff Lok plays a jealous, mendacious swordsman – quite a departure from his goofy sub-Fu Sheng comedic heroes.

And My Blade, My Life, for all that it presents a less wacky Pearl as its lead, still puts out a suitable portion of weirdness for those specifically attracted to it. The Yin-Yang Sect’s lair, for example, takes the Yin-Yang motif to highly improbably ends. Not only is the interior evenly split between stark black and stark white, but its members costuming is bisected as well. The leader, played by Yueh Hua going against type, carries the motif to his eyebrows.

If that description does not make it obvious, the makers of My Blade, My Life imbue far more creativity into their product than what is typical in Taiwanese genre-films, and they have a budget to match. Produced by I Film Co., at least a couple of sets will be familiar to fans that have seen the Yueh Hua starring Drunken Swordsman (Cheung Git, 1979). The cinematography from Yip Ching-Biu – who also filmed The Whirlwind Knight (Sek Kin, 1969) and The Dream Sword (Li Chao-Yung, 1979) – is familiar, if less interesting than his previous work.

My Blade, My Life is a really good wuxia picture. That it stars Pearl Chang engenders expectations that differ from its goals, but it is likely more in line with what Miss Chang’s fans expected from her at the time of its release. Those of us who watch these movies as a hobby (and given the effort it often takes to acquire them, it is very much so) often forget that their makers never thought that people on the other side of the world would watch them thirty years later, let alone write about them on a giant information database. Our perspectives become a bit skewed by this distance. My Blade, My Life will serve as a testament to this fact for some, but for others – and I suspect for the audience for whom it was initially made – it is just a really fun little genre excursion.

And boy do I love Pearl’s costume.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

2011-09-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that most of my game reviews start out with a recollection of a conversation with my good friend RockManXZ24. We talk about video games a lot; it was a common point of interest when we met in the sixth grade; it continues to be a common point of interest now that we’re adults.

Our most recent conversation about video games occurred just after I finished Persona 4 (which I’ll review later), and just as I was about to finish The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. He had just finished playing through the demo of Dragon Age 2, and we talked while he plowed his way through twelve-year-old n00bs in Halo 3 multiplayer. Our topic: are Japanese otaku more intrinsically sentimental than American nerds? Our conclusion: possibly, yes.

Few games convey that sentimentality better than The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, with its gentle J-pop theme song and its teenage heroes dancing around their veiled romantic feelings for each other. It is a game cast in the familiar JRPG model, concerned more with telling its story than with introducing the player to complicated game mechanics or micro-managed character progression. This seems, to me, slightly unusual for developer Falcom, as even their recent games, in spite of their cutesy art style, employ fairly sophisticated game mechanics. On the other hand, The Legend of Heroes series began with a fairly rote Dragon Quest clone.

But while the Falcom of old often experimented with their game design – look at their early action-RPG Sorcerian for a wild mixture of side-scrolling action with Wizardry-esque character/party building – the development team now focuses mostly on polishing conventional gameplay to mirror sheen. Ys 7 feels like it could be a remake of a classic Playstation era game, and I mean that as a compliment. Trails in the Sky, while originally released for Japanese PCs in 2004, feels like a classic game that has aged extraordinarily well.

That doesn’t mean that the gameplay is dated – far from it, in fact. The battle system is turn-based, laid out on a grid, much like a tactical RPG. It reminded me a bit of the Korean game, Astonashia Story, or NIS’ Rhapsody (as it was originally released on the PS1), only done properly. The turn system uses random bonuses, and the player can manipulate turn order with carefully timed magic and special attacks to utilize the bonus turns. It makes the battles far more interesting and involved than many turn-based JRPGs.

On top of that is the orbment system. The orbment is part of the character set-up, and it decides which magic attacks the character can use. Equipping a fire or earth element quartz to a character’s orbment will allow them to use a fire or earth spell, and it will also raise their attack or defense, respectively. This allows the player to make a character an attack or support unit as he or she sees fit, and it also helps to mitigate the necessity of buying the sometimes prohibitively expensive equipment available in the game’s shops.

While playing through the game, the player can choose to complete side quests which award money, experience, and items; particularly if the job is well done, as the game grades the player’s performance. But the player can easily forgo the extra quests and focus specifically on the main plot if he or she so wishes. Since fighting enemies awards materials more than experience, it eliminates the incentive to grind, although level-grinding is an option, however tedious.

But, again, the real focus of Trails in the Sky is its story, its characters, and its setting. The very Japanese aesthetic will turn off those who find anime style art and story-telling anathema – it is actually rather trendy to complain about games being “too Japanese” right now – but Falcom has done a great job of evoking that aesthetic without pandering to a certain questionable contingent of Japanese consumers, quite unlike certain other Japanese developers.

The story follows two teenage kids, Joshua and Estelle Bright, respectively the daughter and adopted son of military legend Cassius Bright, as they become initiated into the paramilitary/mercenary organization known as the Bracer Guild. As they start their careers as junior bracers, Cassius suddenly disappears, and Joshua and Estelle undertake their journey around the continent of Liberl to become full-fledged members of the guild, running into a planned coup against the reigning Queen of Liberl and helping to foil it.

It is actually a very typical plot for this type of game, in which the protagonists start off on a journey of personal interest that eventually folds into a larger conflict with clandestine forces of unmitigated evil. Trails in the Sky does a very good job, it must be said, with not letting the plot get away from itself. The conflict here is local, and stays that way. Too many JRPGs play their cards too quickly and leave the player wondering why a couple of kids are the only ones who could possibly save the world. Here, it is two teenagers with specialized training foiling a plot of national importance with the help of veteran mercenaries and, it is explicitly stated by the protagonists, a lot of good fortune.

And, of course, there are budding feelings of the two main characters. Most of the narrative is played from the perspective of Estelle, a tomboyish type who prefers action to introspection, who is confused by her feelings for her adopted brother. Joshua is cool and level-headed, and more than a bit mysterious. He obviously has feelings for Estelle too, but in typical Japanese fashion, the two can hardly be arsed to actually speak up and tell each other how they feel until the very end of the game. It is to the writer’s credit that the characters do not realize their feelings for each other because Estelle gets kidnapped and Joshua has to save her. In fact, Estelle is never really imperiled; she’s competent and capable, in spite of her hot-headedness. The game treats her and her relationship with Joshua respectably.

That the characters are likable, their banter well written (and excellently translated, thanks to American publisher XSeed), and the pacing well planned help immensely. Fans have often compared playing Trails in the Sky to reading a book, which the game invites not only with heavy amounts of text, but by segmenting its narrative in chapters.

And did I mention sentimentalism, yet? Everything about the game is so sweetly realized that I didn’t want it to end, and since the game finishes on a cliff-hanger it didn’t. I can only hope that XSeed will find an available avenue to publish the next two games (possibly the PS Vita?), as the story here is the main draw, and for once it is actually worth the effort to sit down and read. Trails in the Sky is a great example of the story-telling that made JRPGs so much fun to play when I was younger, an example of the story-telling that the sub-dungeons and dragons western RPGs always lacked. It’s a cheerful journey, rather than a grim clash of good’n’evil.

Trails in the Sky is also a good indication that the JRPG is hardly as stagnant as some have said. It is one of a few recent JRPG releases where I have not tapped through the dialog without paying attention, a high-quality, story-driven game which rewards players for smart playing. I loved it. Falcom is one of the most underrated developers outside of its small, but growing fanbase, and I hope that their development for the PS Vita will garner more attention. Major thanks and good vibes to XSeed for their excellent work in bringing attention to this oft neglected dev team.

The Eleventh Son by Gu Long

2011-08-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

If you want to read professionally translated wuxia fiction besides the work of Jin Yong and are not Chinese literate, you have two options: the almost laughably verbose Blades from the Willows by Huanzhulouzhu, or Gu Long’s The Eleventh Son, which is written almost entirely in short hand. Gu Long was a contemporary of Jin Yong, and while Jin Yong adaptations ruled the wuxia film and television offerings of the nineties, Hong Kong and Taiwanese film makers of the seventies and early eighties adapted Gu Long with wild abandon. Shaw Brothers studio director Chu Yuan set off the Gu Long spree with successful adaptations like The Magic Blade, Killer Clans, and Swordsman and Enchantress. The last is an adaptation of the subject of this book review.

The plot centers around Xiao Shiyi Lang (literally “The Eleventh Son” of the title), who gets mixed up in a plot to steal the “Deer Carver” saber, an extraordinary blade in the care of the “Six Ideal Gentlemen.” But the real meat of the story revolves around the love triangle built between Xiao, unfairly referred to as the “Great Bandit,” Lian Chengbi, the leader of the Ideal Gentlemen who have it in for Xiao Shiyi Lang, and his beautiful wife, Shen Bijun. Xiao absconds from the search for the blade before it is recovered, and in the process ends up saving Shen Bijun from the villainous “Little Mister,” who not only stole the blade, but killed one of the ideal gentlemen and burned down Shen’s ancestral home, framing Xiao for the whole mess.

After saving her life multiple times, Shen finds herself caught between her duty as the wife of the cultured and respected Lian Chengbi and her sense of justice. Lian and his associates intend to kill Xiao Shiyi Lang regardless of his innocence or his efforts to save Shen’s life. Her growing feelings for Xiao, his barely concealed feelings for her, and the quickly revealed corruption of the leaders in the “martial order” complicate Shen’s situation further.

Gu’s themes are drawn rather broadly and he has no problem interjecting himself in expository passages. The story makes Xiao into a sort of martyred free spirit, a noble vagrant victimized by the hypocrisy of an upper-class in the martial order who seek to control everything through duty, coercion, or simple lies that nobody bothers to question. We witness Shen Bijun caught in her duty to her husband, who is as close to true gentleman that anybody described in the novel seems to get, and her love for Xiao Shiyi Lang, to whom she owes a degree of loyalty and not just because she loves him. Lian is not a horrible person, but he is neglectful and a part of the unjust confederacy of martial artists that wants to do away with the righteous Xiao because he is powerful enough to endanger their schemes. But Shen’s own sense of righteousness will not allow her to be unfaithful to her husband or to abandon Xiao.

And besides the personal drama, Gu draws a martial order controlled by a sub- Nietzschean puppet master who fancies himself beyond not only conventional morality, but humanity. He claims to be a god, and the novel spends an extended interlude illustrating one of his ludicrous methods of controlling people and conditioning their behavior. There’s a sort of free will versus determinism argument happening in these chapters, which reflect a similar conflict happening in the rest of the plot: the conflict between Xioa’s free-spirited wandering and the duty of the martial world, between Shen Bijun’s duty and her feelings.

It’s a shame that Gu’s characterization falters after the first act. Xiao, who Gu casts very well as a lovable rogue in the early portions of the story, is a sad-sack drunk for much of the rest of the novel, and is thoroughly unlikable. Shen is much too fragile and helpless, which, when contrasted against the other female characters in the novel, is presented as something of a virtue. Xiao seems to enjoy her neediness; it’s almost seems to be what he loves about her. I’d consider that a character flaw, but Gu sentimentalizes helplessness and victimization -- alcoholism too.

Gu Long was famously alcoholic. Drank himself to death, in fact. He also had notorious affairs and two illegitimate children. I find it difficult not to read Xiao as a stand-in for the author, a handsome, impossibly stoic, unusually intelligent, superbly masculine, painfully misunderstood stand-in. The author is tied up in knots of self-pity regarding women and duty and alcohol. It seems we’re reading his wish-fulfillment fantasies. This leaves something of a bad aftertaste, as it becomes increasingly clear that it is the author, rather than his protagonist and narrator, who is tied up in knots about women and sentimental about his addictions.

The plotting gets a bit unclear as well. As soon as Xiao abandons the search for the Deer Carver, the narration does too, although a careful reader will realize that the plot-line is actually wrapped up once the villain and his motives are revealed.

But for all that, The Eleventh Son is fantastic entertainment, owing much to Gu’s idiosyncratic style. I mentioned the film adaptations of Gu’s work, and it seems to me that his writing style lends itself well to cinema.

Watching Chu Yuan’s adaptations, and the Taiwanese films of directors like Cheung Paang-Yee, I thought there would be a touch of Mervyn Peake in Gu’s writing. Chu Yuan makes the martial world a sort of urban-wonderland, thanks to the artifice of Shaw set design and studio shooting, in which ancient China seems like a giant urban sprawl beset by occult martial clans and mad schemes concocted by conniving mad geniuses hiding behind the scenes. Of course, there’s also the films of Li Chia, in which Gu’s martial world is one driven by interpersonal drama loosely hanging on the machinations of conniving mad geniuses, set in a quaint, bucolic Chinese countryside.

Both are actually valid interpretations, as Gu draws everything in short-hand. His setting is a barely defined ancient China, of which era I couldn’t rightly tell you. There are no sprawling descriptions of scenery or internal monologues. The narration takes place in short paragraphs of equally short declamatory sentences. A typical example:

"Shen was so outraged that her fingertips went cold. She couldn’t keep from lifting her head—

She had been too embarrassed to look at Xiao, but when she looked up, she naturally turned her eyes to his face.

She found his face ghostly pale, his eyes full of pain, and the corners of his eyes twitching uncontrollably.

Xiao was clearly enduring serious anguish.

He wasn’t a man who would reveal his pain easily."

If it seems like this is a “see spot run” style of writing, take my word that it belies a pretty sophisticated sense of pacing. The style makes for a very quick read, and the short-hand also works when characterizing minor characters, with which Gu demonstrates a real flair. I don’t know what it would look like in the context of the setting, but when Gu describes a character as “dressed like new money,” it gets the point across.

Less impressive are authorial intrusions which offer “insights” into human nature. “Dying is a painful thing for most people,” Gu informs us. Well yeah. Most examples are about on this order. Very often Gu uses the authorial position to extol the virtues of drinking, about which I think I’ve already rendered my opinion.

If I sound like I’m down on this novel, I assure you that it’s actually very entertaining. The best aspects are the good bits of characterization, the wacky prose style that works in spite of itself, and the bizarre plot points that tie themselves up in a round-about manner. And if there is something pitiable in the nature of the melodrama, it is equally heartfelt, and therefore compelling, so long as the reader can muster his or her sympathy. The Eleventh Son is an odd thing. It clearly fits into a generic category, but it is also a very personal and idiosyncratic. I have a feeling that “idiosyncratic” is the best available word for Gu Long, his style, and his work.

Sadly, this is still the only Gu Long novel available in English from a mainstream publisher (there is a self-published translation of Gu Long’s The Flower Guarding Bells, available from Lulu). I’d really like to read more of Gu’s work, as I don’t get the impression that all of it is so transparently masturbatory. Rebecca Tai’s translation is actually very good compared to the amateur work available on the internet, and I have heard from those who have read Gu Long in Chinese that she very well captures his style. I’d love to read the sequel to The Eleventh Son, as this volume ends abruptly, and right when the characters start to become interesting again.

Of all the wuxia that I have read (admittedly not a lot) this is easily the most personal and the most uniquely expressed vision of the martial world. And that curries a lot of favor, in spite of my misgivings. I devoured it in two sittings.

Drunken Dragon (Chui Chung-Hing, 1985)

2011-08-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve a habit of reviewing things out of order. Drunken Dragon (aka Exciting Dragon), one of those wonderful movies that became available thanks to Toby Russel’s defunct Rarescope DVD label, is something of a coda to a series of movies orchestrated by the Yuen Clan. For those not familiar with the expansive world of Hong Kong genre film, the Yuen Clan refers to the progeny of the great Simon Yuen, a Mainland Chinese immigrant and Peking Opera practitioner who made a name for himself in the film industry as a performer and fight choreographer in the golden age of Cantonese language serials, directing action scenes in Wong Fei Hung movies and playing a villain in countless films. He used his position to place his sons in roles as stuntmen and bit-players, and they eventually worked their way up to leading roles and action-directing positions in the seventies and eighties.

The most famous member of the clan is Yuen Woo-Ping, world-renowned now as the action choreographer for influential American action films like The Matrix. But before he became the go-to guy for Hollywood’s ersatz martial arts cinema, he directed a series of classic kung fu movies, pushing the boundaries not only of traditional, old-school fight choreography in a series of films starring Jackie Chan and Hwang Jang-Lee; and he pushed the limits of wire-work, good taste, and sanity with a four-part series of mostly unrelated films starting with The Miracle Fighters.
These films (The Miracle Fighters, Shaolin Drunkard, Taoism Drunkard, and Young Taoism Fighter) feature more or less the same elements: broad slapstick and situational comedy, Taoist magic that figures heavily in the fight scenes, bizarre imagery that usually combines practical effects with virtuoso physical performance, and Woo-Ping’s brother Yuen Cheung-Yan in drag as an old lady. While the majority of the production work on these movies was done by Yuen family, a certain Chui Chung-Hing worked on the script for Shaolin Drunkard, his first writing credit. Chui worked mostly as a stunt-man and actor up until this point, usually in small parts in classically styled kung fu movies. I assume that it was his experience with the Yuens that inspired him to direct his own film, and Drunken Dragon, his first directorial effort, is an unofficial addition in the genre that can only be described as Yuen Clan movies.
The film starts with a gang of villains, Tung Fu (Phillip Ko Fei in a fright wig) and his two minions, attacking a Buddhist monastery in search of some sort of magical McGuffin. The priest guarding the item defends it from inside a boat that he rows across the floor, apparently crippled in a previous fight. Tung Fu’s assistants, a big guy with a flame-throwing candle on his head and squirrely guy who likes to throw saw blades around, transform themselves into a sort of human go-cart, with the saw blades acting as wheels of death and the flame-throwing candle as jet propulsion system, and proceed to kill the monk by sawing through his boat and his leg-stumps at the same time. Tung Fu thinks he has what he came for, but the chest in which it’s contained is locked, and trapped, and only the Seven Star Armor can protect whoever tries to open it. So Tung Fu sets off to find the Seven Star Amor.

At this point, the movie shifts to a new location, where Gao Jia (Suen Kwok-Ming) and his Granny (Chiang Sheng in drag, playing the part normally reserved for Yuen Chueng Yan) await the arrival of Gao’s fiancé, Miss Tiger (the... uh, rather full-bodied Chow Mei-Yee). Miss Tiger arrives and is roughly twice the size of Gao Jia, pugnacious to a fault, and prone to solving problems by beating the crap out of the offending party. Miss Tiger manages to make an enemy of the town bully, who nearly botches a magic ritual Granny performs while trying to cure a townsperson of a magic poison. But Granny’s Seven Star Armor protects her, and the ritual comes through as a success.
Unfortunately, Tung Fu has already arrived in town, and finds out about Granny’s secret possession. Gao Jia, meanwhile, is getting tired of his friends teasing him about being a kept man. He is a talented practitioner of martial arts, but Granny is better, and Miss Tiger more frequently employs her own considerable kung fu. After losing a brutal fight with Tung Fu’s gang, Granny sends him to train with her old classmate, Ko But Lee.

Ko holds a grudge against Gao grandfather – he was in love with Granny, but she didn’t choose him. He’s less than willing to train the grandson of the man she chose, but after hearing that Gao’s grandfather is dead, he thinks that he can win Granny’s affections, and relents. So Gao Jia begins training with Ko, whose home is outfitted with odd almost steam-punk (bamboo-punk, in this context?) style technological innovations, and whose training methods involve reflex training with huge wooden mallets, strength training involving the breaking of rocks with a sledge-hammer, and endurance training involving a cart which is reigned to Gao, and on which Ko sits, reading and smoking his huge pipe.
Gao Jia returns to town for Granny’s birthday, only to find that Tung Fu has already killed her, although he hasn’t found the Seven Star Armor. That’s because Gao Jia took it with him for training. Tung Fu, Gao Jia, and Ko But Lee fight it out, but Tung Fu bests them. So Gao Jia returns with Ko for more intense training, and Tung Fu comes for the armor. Revenge is taken; the end.

The interesting thing about Drunken Dragon is how it sort of shifts from its initial Yuen Clan inspired weirdness to a standard, if especially brutal, kung fu movie. By the point that Gao Jia actually starts to train seriously for revenge, the film plays out like a condensed version of the typical Hong Kong kung-fu pic: train, then fight. And while The Miracle Fighters climaxes with orgiastic weirdness, Drunken Dragon’s final fight scene is typical of the era, with fast-paced fighting and dangerous looking stunt falls through furniture and staircases, no Taoist magic or tricky gadgets or even wire-work in sight. It’s a great fight, but it’s almost a let-down given the wild creativity on display in the film’s opening.
While the film does showcase some mean-spirited humor – when Miss Tiger runs to great Gao Jia, the film jump cuts to a POV shot of a pig running at the camera – there’s some sweetness there too. Gao Jia confides in Granny that he really loves Miss Tiger, and doesn’t really mind that she’s so big, since she loves him too. And Leung Kar Yan as Ko But Lee effectively renders his character’s love for Granny, even though the majority of his performance is scenery chewing and mugging. It’s a reprise of his role in The Miracle Fighters, and he’s as gloriously over the top as he was in that film.

But I think that Drunken Dragon can best be viewed as an experiment for Chui Chung-Hing, rather than a Yuen Clan rip-off. Chui would go on to be a major player in the glut of Taiwanese made fantasy movies of the eighties, directing Hello, Dracula, action directing Chan Jun-Leung’s Child of Peach, helming its sequel, Magic of Spell, and capping off the movement in 1990 with his ludicrous fairytale film, Twelve Fairies. All of the visual panache of those films has its roots here, in Drunken Dragon. And even without that, there’s some brilliant fight choreography happening here, which should sate the action hounds out there.
Worth a watch, this one, and the DVD can be had for cheap.

Conan: the Brobarian

2011-08-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here’s my real problem with Conan the Barbarian: it’s called Conan the Barbarian. I find this problematic, as the title immediately recalls the John Millius film from 1982, but more importantly, I find the title problematic because the film only barely resembles the literary creation which it purports to adapt. This too reminds me of the 1982 film.

But I was expecting that, and entered the film hoping that it would at least be a fun diversion, like the movies that came in anticipation or in the wake of the Millius Conan -- movies like The Sword and the Sorcerer. In that respect, I think that a lot of people will like this film. It’s gratuitously violent and self-consciously politically incorrect. The film is intermittently silly; so silly, at points, I suspected its tongue firmly planted in somebody else’s cheek.

Conan the Barbarian features a non-plot comprised of premises borrowed from other fantasy films – not even from other fantasy stories or novels. Its narrative events are set-pieces, all. Dialog, what little of it is there, is often badly conceived and delivered worse. Visual elements are lifted whole-sale from other films. Khalar Zym and his daughter Marique, the film’s villains, travel in a boat carried across the land by slaves and elephants, in a similar manner to what Werner Herzog staged without the benefit of cgi in Fitzcarraldo. The Cimmerians have a race where each contestant holds an egg in his mouth and tries to reach the finish line without breaking it, as also seen in the Kevin Reynolds directed Rapa Nui. A forest set carriage chase is set up and plays out rather like a similar chase scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A character is tied to a wheel like the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, again, with similar results.

It’s all familiar. It’s all stuff that people generally like.

Imagine if somebody tried to make a Conan film based on a few plot synopses of Howard’s stories, the knowledge that the character had become a comic-book staple, and a few viewings of the classic with AH-Nold. That’s what this is like in terms of fidelity to the source texts. The less said about the disparity between the literary Conan’s treatment of women with this film’s Conan, the better.

Does this sound less like an actual review – that thing in which I tell you what was in a movie, and then tell you what I thought about it – than it does the ineffectual ranting of a wanky fan? It does. But please understand: I never intended to write a proper review of Conan the Barbarian. I meant to write something like what Theodore Dalrymple did in 2009 on the occasion of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, and again in 2010 with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

I intended to write a tribute to the author. It would explain his importance to the fantasy genre, how his life reflects certain aspects of depression era Texas, how he understood something about civilization that was as pertinent in the twentieth century as it is in the twenty-first. And I would illustrate that last point with a quote from Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What’s Left of It: “The fragility of civilization is one of the great lessons of the twentieth century.” I really, really wanted to end with an assurance, as Dalrymple did, that no movie, however bad, could sully the writing of so accomplished an author.

But I can't. The writing may not be sullied, but it does little good when people use a bad film adaptation as evidence for why they shouldn’t bother reading it. I cannot assure anybody that this Conan the Barbarian will not perpetuate stereotypical complaints made about Robert E. Howard's supposed sexism, no matter how different this movie is from his writing, or how different his writing is from those people's assumptions. People will use this film to further push Howard into the ghetto of critical antipathy, labelled, at best, as puerile "for-boys" wish-fulfillment. At worst, that ghetto also bears signs that say "racist" and "misogynist."

Did I like anything about Conan the Barbarian? Yes. I though Jason Momoa did a fine job with a bad script. At some point during the re-writing process, somebody saw fit to sneak in references to actual Robert E. Howard stories. We find out, for instance, that the events of the film happen after the events of “The Tower of the Elephant!” A couple of bowdlerized lines from some of the stories can be heard. And as far as dude-bro entertainment goes, this hits the right notes. As in: there’s blood’n’titties.

Call it something else, fellas. Bronan: As on the Tin. That’s my pick.

Those Were the Days (Dick Cho Kin-Nam, 1997)

2011-08-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

Between 1995 and 2000, six different Hong Kong films used the same official English title. “Those Were the Days” indeed.

It seems odd to me that this particular Those Were the Days would be so under-seen. I’d think the presence of Shu Qi would be a selling point. But the film’s subject is rather arcane to most western viewers, whose familiarity with Hong Kong films usually starts in the seventies and very often ends there to boot.

Those Were the Days boasts an inspired premise. Wong Ching Wai, a famous “post-modern” HK film director, attends an awards ceremony and reunion in honor of the region’s old Cantonese film industry. He then proceeds to insult the honored guests, saying that the sixties were the “dark ages” of Hong Kong film. The God of Movies takes exception to his remarks; as punishment, he sends Wong back to the sixties. The God of Movies instructs Wong that he must make a film that at least one person actually enjoys if he wants to make it back to the nineties.

Law Kar Wing as Kwan Tak Hing; The genuine article on the right (courtesy of Kung Fu Cinema's Electric Shadows)

Wong finds himself in a studio, lassoed into acting as an extra in what is obviously a Wong Fei Hung serial shoot. After screwing up a take, a mortal sin in a time when films were made with a single camera and shot entirely in masters, he gets chased around the studio. After hiding in a dressing room, he stumbles into a fast friendship with up-and-coming Cantonese actors like Lee Kei, Tse Yun, Ching Bo Chu, Siu Fong Fong, and Walter Ngau Tat-Wah. Wong, with his knowledge of the future, manages to push his new friends in the direction of success, with the help of his VCD player and pirated movie discs.

The little details the movie captures are part of its appeal. (Image courtesy of Electric Shadows)

It’s pretty obvious that Wong Ching Wai is an analog for Wong Kar Wai, and that Ching Bo Chu is Connie Chan Po-Chu and Siu Fong Fong is Josephine Siao Fong Fong. Depending on how familiar the viewer is with the breadth of Hong Kong cinema, the humor is either baffling or uproariously funny. Everything from wuxia serials (Buddha’s Palm in particular) to “Jane Bond” films to Wong Fei Hung episodes gets parodied ruthlessly, as do the actors that appear in them. Hong Kong actors of that era developed signature mannerisms and inflections, which the film explains in irreverent and highly unlikely ways.

Maggie Cheung Ho-Yee as Connie Chan Po-Chu. Good casting, I think.

And if 60’s era gets parodied ruthlessly, the parodies of Wong Kar Wai’s films are even more viciously funny. When Wong gets his chance to direct, we’re treated with Days of Being Wild, Happy Together, and Ashes of Time (!) done in 1960’s style.

Shu Qi as Josephine Siao Fong-Fong.

But for all of that, the humor is really of a gentle and sympathetic sort. As a character based comedy, Those Were the Days is much too broad and silly to be taken seriously. The characterization, from both the script and the cast, is done entirely in short-hand. It’s very slight, but as a parody, it’s so dead on that for the initiated, it works.

The casting is inspired, to boot. Dayo Wong dons dark glasses, a cigarette, and an attitude for the role of Wong Kar Wai. Cheung Ho-Yee, Shu Qi, and Monica Chan look great in sixties attire. Francis Ng as Patrick Tse is at his usual hammy best. And in one of the few performances that nears mean-spirited, Lee Kin-Yee (a dude) as Lydia Shum stand-in Fei Fei goes even further over the top than growling, scowling Law Kar-Ying as Kwan Tak-Hing.

The look of 1960's Canto-serials is pretty well replicated.

The only thing I wished for was the presence of the actors being parodied. Even without that, this is the sort of referential nostalgia that is rarely done well. Those Were the Days offers little for the casual fan of Hong Kong cinema, I think. It was made for an audience that grew up watching the films of Chan Po-Chu and Walter Tso in the theater or on HK television. But for those of us who willingly watch un-subtitled VCDs to catch glimpses of that bygone era, Those Were the Days is the best kind of loving tribute.

Lolno.

And Wong Jing gets skewered, which, in spite of my unabashed love for Kung Fu Cult Master, is just lovely. And did I mention the sixties fashions? Yeah.

Beauty Escort (Pao Hsueh-Li, 1981)

2011-07-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Here would be a great entry in the halls of legendarily terrible re-titles. Beauty Escort is also known as “Samurai Bells of Death,” the English title that appears on the English dubbed print, a reference to a weapon that appears in the movie called The Death Song Bells. One assumes that “Samurai” was added to the title so as not to be confused with Yueh Feng’s 1968 Shaw Brothers film, Bells of Death. It (Beauty Escort, not Bells of Death) is also based on the Gu Long novel Hu Hua Ling (护花铃), available in English translation under the title The Flower Guarding Bells. Perhaps a clue as to what sort of movie Beauty Escort is, the explanation of the title itself is convoluted enough to have been devised by Gu Long.

Also, whoever came up with the English title was a liar. There are no samurai in Beauty Escort. It’s kind of like the Taiwanese Gu Long adaptation, The Lost Swordship, which has the alternate title “The Lost Samurai Sword,” in spite of there being no samurai or samurai swords in that film either. Unlike The Lost Swordship, however, Beauty Escort is unavailable in a widescreen, English language print. I watched the film on a Crash Cinema disc sourced from a terrible pan-and-scan VHS source, which is still better than the film being lost or prohibitively scarce.

The film starts with a duel between the Dragon and Phoenix clans, planned ten years prior. Dragon, leader of the Dragon Clan, has prepared to fight Phoenix, leader of the Phoenix Clan, but she died shortly before the duel was to take place. So a subordinate agrees to fight. Only she has less internal strength than Dragon, so, to insure a fair fight, he asks his subordinates to handicap him before the duel. Dragon’s daughter and her husband, Fei Ya, don’t really like this idea, but Nam Goong Ping agrees. Dragon and Phoenix Clan’s Yee Man Ching go to a secluded spot to duel, with Man Ching returning as the victor.

Already shocked by the outcome, the Dragon Clan receives an even greater surprise by Dragon’s will, which names Nam as his successor, rather than Fei Ya or his wife. The Dragon Clan hardly has time to fight amongst themselves, though, as bandits immediately arrive to steal their dead master’s coffin. Nam manages to apprehend the bandit as he runs away, only to find out that the bandits do not intend to steal any of the precious jewels from the coffin. They believe that the coffin hides a criminal in the martial world, a villainous seductress and master swordfighter by the name of “Cold Blooded Mistress” Mei Win Shu.

As it turns out, she’s hiding in a false bottom in the coffin, but she is not a villainess. She has been framed by various elements within the martial world who sought to force her into marriage, rape her, or otherwise subjugate her. After a duel, Dragon found out the truth, and hid her for eight years, his final wish that Nam would protect her and help to restore her reputation. In the mean time, Fei Ya and Dragon’s daughter have designs to take control of the Dragon Clan for themselves, while the shady business of how the Phoenix Clan won the duel has not been resolved and Nam’s wealthy, powerful family faces danger from growing forces who intend to seize their fortune.

So it is rather par the course for a Gu Long adaptation, convoluted and prone to barely explained coincidences. The dubbing is a problem, as it refers to some characters only by their nicknames – Dragon’s full name, Long Bushi, is never uttered – and others are not named at all, hence my referring to “Dragon’s Daughter.” And, like many of Gu Long’s stories, Beauty Escort is not really so much about the martial arts and clan rivalries, but about the romance between two of the protagonists, Nam and Mei Win Shu.

Unless the movie was also re-edited for its English dubbed version (a very real possibility), Beauty Escort devotes very little of its duration to the relationship between Nam and Wei, although even an inattentive viewer could tell where it’s headed once they meet. It’s not only unfortunate in that it ignores what was likely a central part of the novel, it lessens the opportunity for the sort of dialog that makes Gu Long fun to read or watch. Gu writes marvelous passive aggression, misdirection, and projection, all of which make for lively conflict and lively romance. Again, the dubbing captures none of this, assuming that it was ever there in the first place (also a very real possibility).

It’s hard, then, to give this movie a fair review, a problem endemic to kung fu and wuxia movies in general. Because of the broad perception that the appeal of this genre lies entirely in fight scenes, they were often dubbed without care. For reasons much more complicated, they were released on VHS in pan-and-scan, usually positioned to chop off embedded subtitles, the original prints often not well-preserved. So even visually, this film has been handicapped.

Which is a shame, since it was directed by alumni Shaw Brothers cinematographer Pao Shuh-Li, scripted by alumni Shaw Brothers screenwriter Katy Chin Shu Mei, and produced by legendary screen fighter Phillip Ko Fei. Stars Ling Yun and Nora Miao. Chan Wei Man plays the villain! It even looks like it had a bit more of a budget than a lot of other independent Hong Kong genre films. The fight scenes are acceptable, but it’s pretty clear that the movie is aiming for more than a highlight reel of kung fu sequences.

So, hey, if a nice, clean print shows up, maybe I can watch this movie again and give it a fair review. But the most seen, most available version of Beauty Escort is far from ideal, and with so many great films based on Gu Long novels available, it’s far from a must-see.

Sleaze for Social Justice

2011-07-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

Somebody on the internet referred to this 1996 South Korean film as “Korean style UHF with sexiness.” It’s more like “sexy UHF-like paean to media piracy,” but – and I write this as though anybody would read past “sexy UHF” – that is fundamentally wrong description, as Channel 69 (Lee Jeong-kuk, 1996) has little in common with Weird Al’s film opus besides amateur filming being key to the film’s premise.

The film starts with a young lady auditioning for a modeling job, using her film test to launch into a diatribe against actresses who want good roles while expecting to keep their modesty intact. She’s Cho Minhee, but she goes by “Super Mini.” When one of the expectant producers treats her to dinner and invites her for a post-audition interview on the casting couch, she hurts him off-camera, storming out of the restaurant with him in pursuit. Another patron trips him, takes Minhee’s business card, and proceeds about his business.

He’s Koo Je-ha, a former television journalist and expert computer hacker, who now works as something of a civilian detective, illegally acquiring hidden camera footage of corrupt politicians for an equally corrupt prosecutor. He had previously tried to cover the illegal fundraising tactics of political hopeful Yoo Chang Min, but now he’s taking illicit footage of his illicit affair with his secretary.

While the prosecutor is uninterested in Je-ha’s vendetta against Yoo, he does want to hire Je-ha to find the programmer of a computer virus, The Dark Messiah. He shows Je-ha the virus on his computer, which shows clips of Minhee’s screen test set to Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus before murdering the infected computer system. Recognizing Minhee from the business card he picked up in the restaurant, Je-ha finds and recruits her in his hunt for the creator of The Dark Messiah.

When Je-ha and Minhee find The Dark Messiah, he turns out to be a middle school drop-out named Koo Seokki, a young guy with a poodle named Handel, a plan for making pornographic video games, and a huge crush on Sharon Stone. He turns down what he thinks is a proposition from Minhee, saying that he’ll only lose his virginity to Sharon Stone via cybersex. He has two assistants, Yong Jontae and Im Saengko, a dancing electrical engineer and sound engineer, respectively, who seem to be in a relationship, neither of whom made it in college.

In keeping with the film’s cynicism about political figures and those who consort with them, the prosecutor who dispatched Je-ha plans to take credit for the apprehension of The Dark Messiah. Je-ha takes offense to this, and since he has nothing to lose, decides to aid and abet the hacker and his crew. Now an accessory to Seokki’s crimes, Je-ha devises a plan that utilizes everybody’s skills and gives everybody what they want: Channel 69.

Je-ha plans to interrupt the newscast from NBS, the station he used to work for, with his own, which will be anchored by Minhee, who he dubs the PJ, short for “porn jockey.” This allows Seokki to broadcast porn, which is his only ambition. Minhee gets to work off her exhibitionist tendencies and become famous, which is her only ambition. Im gets to broadcast the music he composes, which is his only ambition. And Yong gets to put his engineering training to use in the creation of a mobile pirate TV studio. If this is his ambition, the script never makes it clear. I think he’s along for the ride so that he can hang out with Im, cutting his hair and sleeping with his head in Im’s lap.

And Je-ha finally gets to expose the corrupt Yoo. That he gets to show up his ex-girlfriend, an anchor on NBS news, is just the icing on his cake.

As with any worthy ribald comedies, there’s more to see in Channel 69 than butt and boobies. The script is actually pretty smart, even subtle with its characterization, dropping subtle hints about Je-ha’s feelings for Minhee. And a little line implies that Minhee, in spite of her exhibitionism, is more innocent than she lets on. While the characters initially come off as broad stereotypes – Minhee is a ditz, Im and Yong are gay, Soekki is a pathetic nerd -- they’re endearingly stereotypes, and the film is non-judgmental. Except when it comes to politicians, and rightly so.

I also like Channel 69 for all sorts of Meta reasons. Low-brow, ‘90’s era Korean film is underrepresented on subtitled DVD, and that’s not even begun to change. There’s a certain charm to seeing all of the IBM logos, and the silly hacking sequences that might have been more convincing back when the internet was not something that everybody had to use daily. It looks a lot like the fantasy I had of computer hackers when I was a little kid, mucking about on my dad’s DOS based IBM in the early nineties.

More importantly, the movie is funny. And sexy. That politicians, the only people in the world I hate more than lawyers, get thematically broadsided sweetens the deal. As do female nudity and punny humor. It's not a great movie, and it is pretty slight, but it is also simple, good fun.

It Only Took Me Twelve Years

2011-07-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

In the car, driving back from an early dinner at a favorite restaurant, RockManXZ24, my game playing friend whose obsession has provided him with a unique ability to find extra hours in the day to finish absurdly long JRPGs, asked me the same question he’s asked for about four months: “did you ever beat Final Fantasy 5?”

The question would have hung in the air had I not known it was coming. RockMan started asking about my progress about two weeks after I, on a whim, started playing it again, likely my favorite game that I never bothered to beat. RockMan reminded me that it came out nearly twelve years ago – The twelfth anniversary for Final Fantasy Anthology, the first official English release of Final Fantasy 5, is on September 30th.

Final Fantasy 5 was one of the games that set off the internet translation scene, with various groups trying their hardest to push out a fully playable, English language rom hack before the others could take credit. Derrick Sobodash, one of the key figures in that era, had an insightful, honest article about the time he spent translating video games as a very young man. It seems to have disappeared, for the time being, or I would link to it here. It would be an interesting footnote for any retrospective on the game or its series. Not only was Final Fantasy 5 a “lost gem” for fans of the series and Japanese RPGs, but the catalyst for what is now an expansive community of hobbyists who seemingly spend more time working on games than playing them.

A lot of reviewers who look at the game in hindsight get hung up on the story, which is rudimentary and filled with shonen manga clichés about the importance of friendship, bursting with deus-ex-machina solutions left largely inexplicable, a cast of orphaned children trying to please their parents. All while trying to save the world.

Those more inclined to play a game for its mechanics praise its “job system.” The player decides on a character class for each of the four party members, and learns skills that can then be used while the character learns the skills of another class. So, if the player were inclined to do so, Bartz, the lead character, could be a thief who can also cast black magic, or a ninja who can steal items from monsters, or a knight who wields two swords like a ninja. Until Final Fantasy 7, this was the most customizable game in the series, and with the job system added on top of the typical equipment management and character progression, it is easily the numerically driven player experiences developed for the SNES/Super Famicom. But it’s also recognizably a Final Fantasy title, what with the moogles, chocobos, Nobuo Uematsu music and active time battle system.

In case it isn’t obvious, I am a numbers fetishist. At least when it comes to video games, that is. Grinding my way through Etrian Odyssey is, for me, a good time. But I also like games that feel that they were made by real people rather than assembled according to a formula. These sentiments seem slightly opposed. I’ve often considered that my ineptness at mathematics maybe created the desire to play with numbers in a less daunting way than doing geometrical proofs or solving equations. Is that why I want both warmth and pure number-crunching in my games? It could very well be.

But why would I like Final Fantasy 5 so much when it is generally agreed upon as having a totally rote story and cast? I’m thinking, maybe, that the familiarity is part of why it appeals to me. It’s so purely unpretentious, so reminiscent of the sort of anime I watched as a kid, before Neon Genesis Evangelion kinda-sorta ruined anime as a whole for me, that it somehow doesn’t matter that every twist in the plot and characterization appears close to the face, rather than peaking over the horizon or hiding in the margin. I’ve said it before: if I wanted a challenging narrative, I would read a book (and I often do).

After I got home, I hooked up my Playstation, inserted the Final Fantasy 5 CD; three hours later, I had made it through the final dungeon in the “N-Zone,” and was fighting Neo X-Death, the evil tree bent on destroying the planet. Yes, the last boss is an evil, world destroying tree.

I had grinded to the point that two of my characters had learned the “mimic” battle skill. Walking about in dungeons and fighting random battles had become a sort of before-bed ritual for about a month, and it made the last boss battle rather easy. Two characters with mimic, one with Black magic and a “Red X 2” ability (two spells cast for the same turn), and two characters in the mime cast made for entire rounds of “flare” cast on all sections of the boss. Four characters, each casting flare twice, meant that my party caused around 20,000 to 24,000 damage each round. As mentioned, it was easy.

And watching the ending, with the Nobuo Uematsu’s crystal theme, the overworld theme, and the Final Fantasy fanfare playing in a medley that evoked every ounce of nostalgia in my small, cynical heart to come bursting forth in a deluge of unexpected and unwanted melancholy, I thought about how I had been playing this game for almost twelve years. It was fun. I loved it.

The only other game that I think has ever gotten an emotional reaction from me was Final Fantasy 4. Unlike its immediate, unrelated sequel, I’ve beaten that game numerous times, and on multiple systems. The world has changed a lot in the twelve years between the time I first played Final Fantasy 5 and the time at which I beat it. It’s a landmark title, for a lot of people, and for a lot of reasons. Nostalgia has a funny way of working like that.

Progress

2011-07-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

I have not said anything about the closing of the local Borders because it was traumatic enough that I don’t want to dwell on it. I bought my first Zatoichi DVD at Borders. I spent more afternoons than I can well remember hanging out there, reading manga with my best friend from high school. It was a convenient stop on my way back from school; it fed my collecting habits, first with reasonably priced Japanese comics and movies, later with an efficient special order system that suitably made up for my inability to order unusual books and movies from Amazon.com. I even signed up for their discount program, and put it to good use.

Extenuating circumstances prevented me from picking through the carcass of their clearance sale until the day just before they shut their doors for good. I hoped to grab some Wolfe or Vance or Chesterton for cheap; maybe find some interesting popular history titles – I intended to buy various Jonathan Spence books that usually sat on their shelves untouched – only to find that the other bookworms had eaten through the inventory well before I got there. Most of the remaining merchandise was of no interest to me, although I did contemplate buying a table or a plate from their café. The insistence of the manager that potential buyers consider buying shelves and chairs and light fixtures as well persuaded me away. I loved that Borders, but not enough to want it relocated in my house.

So I bought the only what I could justify owning at a seventy percent discount: David Gaider’s Dragon Age: The Calling.

I’ve read about a quarter of Gaider’s second foray into actual fiction. Slow going: it’s pretty dull so far, but I’ve noticed a couple of improvements over The Stolen Throne already.

- First of all, the writing is much tighter. The Stolen Throne had me hitting my face with its incessant flood of adverbs and inappropriate turns of phrase. For instance, the infamous: “Maric stared at her in disbelief. He wasn’t quite sure she could have said anything else that would have been less surprising. Well perhaps a confession that she was actually made of cheese.” So far, no especially egregious instances of childish humor.

Also, the adverbing didn’t start until about twenty pages in, and it’s much less frequent. Every sentence in The Stolen Throne went according to a formula. “Subject verbs object, adverbingly.” It’s a bad formula. It tells, rather than shows. Thankfully, it’s employed much less in The Calling.

- For all the good that it does, Gaider also seems to have taken some notice of courtly formality. Among the litany of complaints I threw at The Stolen Throne was that its author used “my lord,” “your highness,” and “your majesty” interchangeably. The Calling was published shortly before my review of The Stolen Throne hit the net, so I cannot take credit for bringing this to the author’s attention. But since it only figures into a single scene in any meaningful way, it’s not really an issue – just nice to see.

I’ll have a more detailed review of the last book I’ll ever buy from my beloved book store chain location if/when I finish reading it. But it’s a bittersweet experience, even at a seventy percent discount.

The Lost Bladesman (Alan Mak and Felix Chong, 2011)

2011-06-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

While watching The Last Bladesman with a room full of fellow Dynasty Warriors nerds, I could not help wondering how somebody unfamiliar with China’s Three Kingdoms era would react to it. I suspect they would be bored. I also suspect that the ones that would not be bored would be looking for “Little Red Book” references, contemporary political issues coded onto historical ones, and barely veiled nationalism or Han racial superiority. I might have too, except that I couldn’t really be bothered to when Donnie Yen is playing Guan Yu. Yes, that Guan Yu, the one to whom Chinese gangsters offer their prayers in return for protection. Can you say -- Testosterone EXPLOSION!? Don't worry, it's not.

The Lost Bladesman is actually a slightly embellished adaptation of one of the most memorable parts of Luo Guanzhong’s The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Captured by duplicitous duke Cao Cao after a lost battle, General Guan Yu finds himself courted by his captor, who admires his incredible physical strength, tactical skills, and loyalty. Guan Yu agrees to kill warlord Yan Liang for Cao Cao, but only under the condition that he lets his hostages, including the wives of his sworn brother and Shu leader Liu Bei, go free. Cao, with the greatest reluctance, allows them to leave, but as they journey, Guan and his retinue come across armed opposition from Cao’s allies and subordinates, not least of which are former allies of Guan Yu’s, even soldiers whose lives he had previously saved.

The film’s epic melodrama comes from the very Confucian sense of duty and reciprocity that governs Guan Yu’s actions towards Cao Cao, the puppet emperor Xian, and the mostly absent Liu Bei. The script portrays Guan as a somewhat naïve true believer; he cannot go against the emperor, the son of heaven, even though he is weak, even though Cao Cao sees no issue with manipulating and disrespecting him openly. He must repay Cao’s kindness, but cannot do so at the expense of Liu Bei, with whom Cao has a nearly personal, ongoing feud. He cannot make his feelings known to Qi Lan, Liu Bei’s betrothed with whom he is hopelessly in love, much less consummate them (this is one of those embellishments previously mentioned).

Writer/directors Alan Mak and Felix Chong clearly want to show the tragedy inherent in idealism. No matter what Guan Yu wants to accomplish, he cannot wring rightness out of the corrupt political machinations of powerful bureaucrats like Cao Cao; and pursuing his own ends earns the resentment of peasants and soldiers tired of war and chaos, willing to compromise with the despotic Cao in return for some semblance of peace. The Lost Bladesman probably marks the first time that the legendarily powerful, physically monstrous, magnificently bearded Guan Yu seems powerless -- helpless even. It actually resembles, a little, Zhang Xinyan’s 1986 martial arts film, Yellow River Fighter thematically, although The Lost Bladesman eventually reaches more believable conclusions (Zhang was something of a left-wing idealist, and, ironically perhaps, it hurts his work).

But while aiming for high pathos, the film often finds itself hitting rank bathos. Part of the problem is rote direction. The cinematography is nice, as far as it goes, but with the cheesy cross-fades that segue between important scenes and Donnie Yen’s non-presence as Guan Yu, The Lost Bladesman feels, somehow, like half-baked leftovers. Scenes of expository dialog spoon-feed themes to the audience, even when the shown events make those themes quite clear. Yet it seems almost like the real meaty thematic concerns get lost in the spectacle of the production, which is appropriately expensive looking – just like every other recent film of this type, of which there are many.

Too often, the film looks for a fight sequence to keep its momentum going, like a genre flick rather than prestige picture. And given that the mainland market is largely middle class, and also willing to compromise with ruthless governmental clout for the sake of maintaining stability, Chong and Mak might have thought it prudent to diminish their own themes. Nobody likes to know that their compromises hurt strong, moral people. Nobody likes to hear a message that indicts them for their cravenness.

Or maybe the script needed another revision to trim out the unnecessary dialog, to more precisely show the tragedy of Guan’s situation, rather than tell it in between spectacular set-pieces.

Either way, it’s unfortunate, especially for poor, miscast Donnie. The fight scenes are well-done (I say this as somebody who has never been fond of Yen’s weapon choreography), but they seem like filler, especially given that they are filmed in a way that would not require a physical talent like Donnie to pull them off; they could have been as easily made with a double filling in for a less martially inclined, real thespian. And a real thespian Donnie Yen is not. He spends much of the film looking lost, and suffers in his scenes across Jiang Wen as Cao Cao.

But, for all that, I think that The Lost Bladesman is almost a nice counterpart to the unrelenting bombast and bromance of John Woo’s Red Cliff. Jiang Wen is the highlight here, as his Cao Cao is believably perspicacious, and even convincingly literate (historically, Cao was a prodigious literary talent). The somber, elegiac atmosphere really works well, and, in spite of a weak lead performance, The Lost Bladesman adequately renders the sorrow of a man caught up in the chaos of an awful, turbulent time in history.

I actually really liked this movie, in much the same way I like the messy films of Hong Kong’s earlier decades. The way I liked Red Cliff, to be frank. It’s much more watchable than some of the blunt political allegories that gained, to my astonishment, so much critical praise in the west. It’s certainly better than Resurrection of the Dragon (Daniel Lee, 2008), but that’s not setting the bar very high. The fact that the guys behind The Lost Bladesman actually tried to make a real movie with a real point makes it stand out amongst its competition.

So it’s a flawed, uneven success, in my book.

The Flying Inn by G. K. Chesterton

2011-06-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

To start a review of any text written by Chesterton with an admission that you cannot wrap your head around his mystical thinking, his “shamelessly beautiful prose” (as Orson Welles put it), or his utter disregard for the established literary structures of verisimilitude, pacing, and plot, is a cliché from which we will likely never escape. So let me preface my review of The Flying Inn with that admission. I am still contemplating various passages, the shameless beauty of the rolling verse that spices almost every chapter, and prescient observations of direction of western culture and politics, the unthinking appropriation and bastardization of eastern philosophy and thinking and art. I’m still trying to figure out how Chesterton fell out of literary favor, although he’s made a resurgence of late, no doubt thanks to the efforts of publishers like Dover, whose paperback printing of The Flying Inn I bought on a whim.

Dale Ahlquist over at Chesterton.org states that the plots to Chesterton’s novels are always hard to explain, which is something like a masterful understatement. The Flying Inn is about an England rapidly losing its national identity through the machinations of corrupt politicians, through social engineering masked as laws governing public safety. But the plot is about two fugitives roaming about the British country with a keg of rum, a wheel of cheddar, an inn sign, a donkey, and a dog named Quoodle. They are Patrick Dalroy, an Irishman and the former king of Ithaca (a reference I didn’t pick up on at first, but left me in stitches when realization finally bonked me on my thick head), and Humphrey Pump, the former owner of Pebblewick’s great inn, The Old Ship.

Parliamentarian Lord Ivywood has banned liquor from being sold through underhanded means. Alcohol can still be sold, but only at locations with an inn sign; inn signs can only be put up at establishments that meet prohibitive regulations and pay exorbitant taxes, eliminating the common inns at which common people gather to drink. Leading this temperance movement is Mysisra Ammon (or M. Ammon, get it?), and he becomes a sort of prophet for Lord Ivywood’s movement.

Ammon, of course, is a kook. He provides Chesterton an enormous opportunity to show the exercise of kook thinking, the echo-chamber logic that works perfectly upon the most obviously wrong premises, upon which Chesterton capitalizes with his usual aplomb. Ammon sees every aspect of British culture as a corruption of an oriental original, averring that “The Saracen’s Head,” the name of a famous English inn, is a textual corruption of “The Saracen is Ahead,” and other such nonsense that nobody with any knowledge of England’s history could believe. But for Lord Ivywood, who sees “only the breaking of barriers,” and his followers, this sort of logic provides justification for the remaking of England into a pseudo-Islamic culture, where the lower classes are governed by laws of temperance and abstinence, while the elite enjoys not only alcohol, but power and, possibly, polygamy.

So while Pump and Dalroy fight the tides of an unnatural cultural sea-change with rum and cheese and drinking songs written for their own amusement, Westminster Abby receives a crescent to compliment its cross, Ivywood manner transforms from an English mansion to an Arabesque harem, and the masses are coerced by big government and big business into teetotalism, vegetarianism, and other forms of submission.

Many commentators focus on the similarities of the future England posited in The Flying Inn with the current conflicts that many European nations currently enjoy with their immigrant populations. If I lived in Europe I might comment on that, but reading The Flying Inn on my porch in Dallas, Texas left me thinking about the way that some of the major players in the American cultural scene adulterate aspects of foreign cultures with their own ideology and agendas, offering their fantastical renderings of (usually) Asian cultures as antidotes to the very real problems facing the west.

Other commentators bristle at Chesterton’s depiction of Islam, but the Islam in The Flying Inn is as much a facsimile, a tool with which the powerful punish the weak. It is no secret that Chesterton would not have agreed with Islam at a fundamental level, but there is no clash of religions in The Flying Inn; the clash is between civilization and civilization turned on its head.

And the clash happens at the end of the world, but the pilgrimage there is joyous and funny. I think that the reason Chesterton gets away with so much is that he’s not following the rules by intent. The Flying Inn is not a novel, but a prose romance, a sanctified picaresque. And it is glorious from the moment it starts until the very end, when the Neitzschean Lord Ivywood shares a similar fate to his fellow superman.

Chesterton’s influence can be seen in everyone from C. S. Lewis to Borges to Neil Gaiman. It ought to be seen in practically everyone. He’s the most underappreciated writer of the last century, and I fully believe that he’ll one day be canonized. Until his feast day comes, you should familiarize yourself with is works, especially this one. The Flying Inn is easily my favorite of any of the books I’ve read this year.

What do I have to do to see some elf nipples?

2011-06-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve never seen the DVD for the second Dragon Knight OVA, Dragon Knight: Another Knight on the Town (bleh, pun), for sale at a discount, and I refuse to bother ordering it. But, as mentioned, I do have the third OVA, based on the fourth game in the series, which was apparently a pretty decent little strategy title that some developer or other eventually ported to the Playstation, with updated illustrations. The DVD I bought a while back is another ADV product, with much of the actual erotic content cut out. Again, there’s some visible nipples here and there, but at 100 minutes, there’s almost a half-hour of sex scenes missing, I presume because ADV couldn’t find talented voice-over actors who would willing feign moans and grunts, though the fact that so many of the female characters appear a bit younger than the American age of consent might have as much to do with that decision as anything, and is quite reasonable. So instead of what might be an above average, fantasy themed hentai – though I hasten to add that, not being a connoisseur of animated porn, I wouldn’t really know – Dragon Knight: The Wheel of Time is a merely average example of low-budget fantasy anime.

The movie starts with Kakeru trapped in a dungeon after a lost battle against Lucefon, a wizard or some such from the underworld. Marlena, another survivor of the battle, gives him a black stone that allows him to travel back in time. Finding himself in the past, well before the final conflict, he teams up with his past self and his companions, hiding his identity with a mask and assuming the name Eto. From the future events he’s already experienced, he knows that Marlena is not merely an elf who wants to kill Lucifon and that only she can help him resolve the final conflict. He only needs to know how to win her over to his side in order to make that happen.

The obvious answer, which we don’t really see in the censored version for the American market, is a good roll in the hay. In fact, the transition for this is rather clearly marked, if you know when to look for it. The missing content always seems to lurk in the background. I would have congratulated the makers of the OVA for their restraint and good taste during a scene where one of Eto’s companions, a female warrior with a bad attitude, decides that she cannot follow him unless he proves himself superior as a warrior and a man. After a sword fight and a knock-out punch, the typical hentai would follow up with a scene in which Eto wows the Amazonian mutineer with his – not to be too blunt about it – penis. This likely happened in the original, unaltered video, as Dragon Knight: The Wheel of Time was intended to be a typical hentai in its original incarnation, but I like that it doesn’t happen. I only wish that somebody had found a way to provide closure to that particular story arc in a way that left both Eto and the warrior-woman’s dignity intact, but the character practically disappears afterwards. It’s a trade-off that leaves neither the viewer wanting sexual fantasy nor the viewer wanting non-porny fantasy happy.

Believe it or not, she's actually about to be saved.

Dragon Knight: The Wheel of Time also takes itself rather seriously, which is something of a departure from the outright goofiness of the first Dragon Knight. There are, of course, some funny moments. Young Kakeru is much like his father, Takeru, in that he’s prone to making bad jokes and is quite immature. Eto, at times, is the same, but as most of the narrative is told from his perspective, the audience hears his internal monologues and philosophizing about the nature of time. In the third episode, he wonders if he’s not the first Eto, if history has begun to replay itself in a loop with the battle routinely fought and fought again with the same outcome. This is pretty heady stuff for an anime that seems like it wants to focus on romantic entanglements and panty shots, and it never quite works because it never develops into anything of consequence for the narrative or the characterization.

Is it worth watching, then, without any of the attractions for which it was originally created? I actually kind of liked it, at least more so than Dragon Knight. The animation is actually better, with more (and longer) fight scenes. I think I liked it more because of my affinity for the visual conventions and character designs of nineties era anime and video games than for any genuine appreciation of the narrative, characterization, or dialog. And much of my affinity for nineties era anime and video games probably stems from my ambivalence towards current anime and, to a lesser extent, Japanese video games. But that’s me.

There’s better anime features in this genre that, not having potentially offensive or illegal content, don’t suffer from content cuts the way that Dragon Knight: The Wheel of Time does. But it did kind of make me want to play Dragon Knight 4, in spite of the fact that I know I’ll roll my eyes at the erotic content and sexualized loli characters. It’s left me with another conundrum, in that sense. Do I bother to play a game that has content I was happy to not see in the licensed anime adaptation? Honestly, probably not. I figure the experience isn't too different from playing a Record of Lodoss War game while thinking about elf tits. And since there's a pretty good one translated in English (for the Dreamcast) it'd be easier to do.

Bioware Fandumb

2011-06-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

Indeed, nobody at all believes that I wrote that review of Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne for any reason other than to troll Bioware fanboys. If I am a troll, I am one of the rare, righteous ones. I troll with the truth; it is super effective.

I logged onto blogger a couple of days ago to see a huge spike in views and an incoming link from Bioware’s forums. David Gaider has new book, Dragon Age: Asunder, the third of his Dragon Age novels, now set during the same time frame as Dragon Age 2. I haven’t finished reading Gaider’s other novel, Dragon Age: The Calling. In fact, I’ve only just started to read it. David Gaider’s comments in that thread will likely receive due attention when I get around to reviewing The Calling, where my remarks will likely be more pertinent (and pointed). To my surprise, the rest of the responses in that forum thread actually got me thinking.

I posted a response to all of the negative attention my review of The Stolen Throne received not long after it went online. It’s been linked on Bioware’s forums before, to similar reactions, and most of the negative comments accuse me of either being “pretentious” or not having played the games; I admit to the latter in the text of my review, while the former is actually incorrect (few of these people seem to understand what that word means). When I wrote that first response, I thought that the fans were taking issue with the fact that I did not like The Stolen Throne. I was wrong; they do not like that I wrote out the reasons why I disliked it.

There’s a certain line of thinking that runs through many of these posts, a way of viewing things common, at least from what I’ve observed, amongst younger fans of certain media, especially amongst fans of video games. It’s an attitude that informs many of the arguments in the evergreen “video games and art” debate. It revolves around the term “subjective.”

The fanboy/girl’s typical defense of their half-formed thoughts or opinions or appraisals goes like, “well that’s just my opinion,” as if it could be anything else. Another one: “well I liked it.” Yeah. Likely nobody would tell you otherwise. Often they invoke subjectivity directly, under the false impression that if something has a subjective element, that all criticism that surrounds it is inherently subjective as well. Take, for instance, the following post from Imported Beer, in response to my review:

I’m only going to address that last part, as it serves to illustrate my point, and I will try to refrain from snarking at the repeated use of the term “personal construct.” Imported Beer makes two claims in this paragraph. The first is that prose aesthetics are subservient to narrative. The second is that all criticism is subjective, and only personally useful. Basically: “I don’t care what you think, and it doesn’t matter what you think.”

That people of this mindset would denigrate criticism – but only negative criticism aimed at the objects of their fanaticism – is unsurprising. Another Bioware forum-goer, nedpepper, contributed what he calls an old cliché: “Writers write because they can, critics critique because they can't write.” I suppose he’s unaware of how many professional writers of fiction publish criticism of their peers; I suppose he’s also unaware of the semi-colon.

Of course, if everything about fiction is subjective, their evaluations of Gaider’s work do not matter either. They think that they have marginalized an outspoken critic; they have attempted to do so by marginalizing an entire media, the liberal arts, and those who study them. And they do so -- I think -- unwittingly.

Few things in the world are purely subjective. Fiction, for instance, is not. The text is an object. An evaluative critique is based on observations of that object.

Fuckin’ duh.

The only person to respond to the review rather than react to it (sorta) was RosaAquafire, who would later accuse me of “rocking a big dumb bias.” Disregarding that second post, I appreciate that she both read my review and expressed disagreement with points I made rather than accusing me of “elitism” and “snobbery.” But then, she didn’t actually respond in the comments. In fact, none of the posters bothered to write a comment on my blog, in spite of my comments remaining open, even to anonymous posters. Bravely done, fellas.

ADV Went out of Business Over This

2011-06-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

Images courtesy of animecritic.com

Here’s a question for the gamers who read (occasionally, I assume) my blog: remember playing Dragon Knight on the PC-88 or MSX? No? Well that figures. What about Knights of Xentar? That one at least got an English translation and a DOS port. No? Okay, well, how about you anime fans – remember the Dragon Knight OVA? Any of them? There are at least three…

I could do that all day. And by all day, I mean at least another full paragraph. No, it does not take me a whole day to write a paragraph (damn literalists!); I’m making a heavy handed point about the breadth of video game and anime products produced by Japan back-in-the-day. You see, there’s a whole eff’n lot. Some of it even made it over here, and certain examples are, as best I can tell, absolutely senseless.

The Dragon Knight OVA I will be reviewing in a moment is a good example. Given that the only game from developer ELF’s popular series to see American IBMs was an obscure and mostly forgotten release, it ought not to have been an obvious decision for Texas based ADV to put out an original video animation in 1998, a good nine years after the game that never came to America or Europe was released in its home country, and three years after the Americanized Knights of Xentar quietly made its way to American PCs. I even recall reading about Dragon Knight in Gamer’s Republic anime review section, and the reviewer being none too kind.

I bought the VHS tape long after the fact, paid a couple of dollars for it at Half Price Books, failing to watch it until recently. It starts off looking like a fairly serious early nineties anime feature with its big-spiky-haired protagonist and his improbably large sword and its equally improbable flimsy handle. He’s Yamato Takeru, presumably of no relation to the legendary Japanese prince, and he’s hungry. He wanders into a castle in a kingdom called Strawberry Fields, and chows down on their foodstuffs. Caught and captured, he’s brought before the queen, to whom he makes a lascivious comment or two, and while Takeru ogles the bevy of beautiful women surrounding him, Luna, a pink-haired bishoujo character in a tiny tunic, mentions that he might be the prophesied warrior who will save Strawberry Fields from the Dragon Knights who kidnap the kingdoms young women and turned their goddess into a stone statue.

When shown the stone relief of the nude goddess, Takeru gets horny. Queen Neina figures that if he is the warrior, he’ll free her kingdom, and if not, he’ll die, so she sends him into the Dragon Knights’ tower to retrieve magic orbs that will restore the goddess and etc. So he heads off with Luna.

Upon entering the tower, he immediately finds a young woman being tortured by lizard-monsters. She’s tied to a chair, naked, and the monsters are whipping her boobs. After saving her, Takeru takes out a Polaroid camera to get some pics, much to Luna’s displeasure. This scene basically repeats itself until the end of the animation, where the kingdom is saved, and Takeru and Luna realize their feelings and etc.

There’s plenty of “and etc.” to Dragon Knight, as much the result of being based on a video game as the video game being based on a simple, adolescent sexual fantasy. The camera gag was kinda funny once, but by the third time, I was ready and hoping for Luna to smash it or for it to turn into a camcorder so some real naughtiness could finally happen. But then, I thought that this was a hentai. Aside from a few visible nipples, though, there’s little in Dragon Knight that one could not see in a televised animation serial or mainstream anime feature from the same period. By current standards, what with Seikon no Qwasar and Queen’s Blade, this is hardly worth the trouble to fap over.

Dragon Knight does make a reference or two to its origins as an adaptation of a game, as when Takeru accidently opens the wrong door and is sent back to town. But for the most part, the humor is fairly juvenile, and not in a humorous way. Compare to something genuinely hilarious, like Golden Boy (another ADV release from around the same time) and the writing seems even more flat and uninspired. If you’re not going to have lots of visually compelling sex, you’ve at least got to have some good banter. Dragon Knight is just corny.

There’s two other Dragon Knight OVAs. Dragon Knight: The Wheel of Time takes itself rather seriously, if I understand correctly. I don’t imagine that that’s an improvement. But I do have The Wheel of Time, so I’ll watch, and regret, and I do it all for you. That Gamer's Republic review certainly is telling; when you can't please anime fans from back in the day...