GoldenPigsy's Gilded Trough

Mortal Kombat (Paul W. S. Anderson, 1995)

2015-04-17T01:38:00.001-07:00

Well, it was on my mind because of my (relatively) recent review of Robert Tai’s Death Cage, and the new Mortal Kombat X debuts this week, and it’s almost the twentieth anniversary of its release, so I watched Mortal Kombat today.

It’s tempting just to post the Cinema Sins youtube video here and call it a day, but I think there are actually some interesting aspects to Paul W. S. Anderson’s first of many video game movies. I grant that the story and dialog are preposterous, the fight choreography generally mediocre, and that it fails to really bring to the cinema screen what really made the games so entertaining: the absolutely senseless and incredibly silly gore and violence.

It was also that profoundly entertaining element that made Mortal Kombat, in both game and movie form, one of the forbidden fruits from my admittedly odd early years. My parents did not allow me to play the games or see the movie. I managed to play them anyway, usually waiting until they were out of sight when at the pizza parlor arcade to play it, an occasion rare enough that I became pretty good at the Fighting Vipers machine next to it in the narrow corridor that held the arcade games. Kids would gather around to see how far I would get on one credit (usually a match or two away from the final boss), while I would be looking over my shoulder to see if my mom or dad was still watching by the door so I could spend a couple of quarters on a game of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Helicopter parents. They certainly made some mundane childhood shit seem like an adventure.

And it’s that nostalgia that you have to have in order to enjoy anything in the Mortal Kombat feature film. You have to like that era of awful looking nineties CGI effects and forget all about the Hong Kong movies that were being made at the same time. The aesthetic is very much a product of a time when Hong Kong movies were even less a mainstream thing than they are now, and anime and manga and other Asian media too. So you get this weird mix of western fantasy elements, kung fu movie tropes and imagery -- “Bruce Lee” (scare quotes necessary) and ninjas particularly -- run through a silly ass game of telephone, and American action movie and comic book cliches to make up not only an aesthetic but a diegetic melange.

And this applied then to both the games and the movie and the sequel and the cartoon and the comics and etc. And even now, to the games and to the fan films and licensed media and etc.

See what I mean?

So the movie follows the story of the first game, with the focus mostly on Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson), and Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), falling into the titular fighting tournament that will determine whether Shao Khan gets the right to invade Earthrealm. The ruler of Outworld must win ten consecutive mortal kombat tournaments to gain the permission of the elder gods to invade, and his team has won nine. Liu Kang wants to fight Shang Tsung (Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, devouring the scenery), while Sonya hunts down Kano (Trevor Goddard), who killed her partner, and Johnny Cage wants to prove he’s not a fake. They get help from Raiden (Christopher Lambert) and Kitana (Talisa Soto, too beautiful to actually matter) as they fight against Shang Tsung’s incompetent guards. They defeat iconic characters from the games, like Goro, Sub-Zero, Scorpion and Reptile. And there’s a handful of incidental characters not from the games, like Art.

Art gets killed by Goro, it’s a big deal to everyone except the audience; we’ve seen him once before, briefly.

And it goes how you’d expect it to. Lots of talk about destiny, about how the characters need to “face the enemy, face yourself, face your greatest fear.” All of it’s meaningless. We just wanna see the fights damnit! Movies like this don’t need a plot or a story. They need a premise. Thankfully Mortal Kombat has it, and mostly delivers.

At least eighty percent of this movie is fight scenes. And I believe it was Seanbaby who first pointed out that in Mortal Kombat, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a backflip. The cgi effects are dated. Characters randomly appear in deserted orchards or cliff sides to duel. There’s some funny death scenes (all of them, really). And the set design is very much that weird blend I went through some length describing above.

If you like this sort of thing at all, it’s pretty glorious.

And part of why it’s glorious is that the cast is pretty game for it. Linden Ashby, in particular, seems to be having a really great time as a non-martial artist playing a martial artist who makes movies while being accused of being a non-martial artist. “You can’t fake those moves...” Art says in the only scene he figures into before getting killed by Goro. Well no, no you can’t. He’s performing them all right. Doing them on a resisting opponent though...

Ashby gets to deliver some actually funny lines to: “What if the legends were true!” breathlessly exclaims Robin Shou as Liu Kang. “What legends?” Ashby’s Cage responds.

Christopher Lambert and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa are on opposite ends of the awful spectrum. Hiroyuki-Tagawa is well into so-bad-it’s-good territory, relishing lines like “flawless victory” and “your soul is mine” with such hammy delight that it’s hard not to smile. Paul W. S. Anderson even mentions in one behind-the-scenes featurette that the crew was constantly imitating him. Christopher Lambert is just awful. But he’s always awful. He’s even worse in the sequel. Brigette Wilson doesn’t seem to be in on the joke, which makes her perfect.

Some of that great Pat Johnson fight choreography

And Robin Shou? He’s there to be a badass. And he is. And here’s the interesting thing about his presence: this is one of the movies that came out before The Matrix that really tried to capture some of the Hong Kong action magic in a Hollywood package. There’s a handful of these from the nineties which vary pretty widely in succeeding at that goal , but I think it worked out perfectly for Mortal Kombat because Mortal Kombat was never a very good imitation of the kung fu genre that partly inspired it.

Pat Johnson’s fight choreography is pretty staid Hollywood stuff, for the most part. You can see some guys from the periphery of martial arts cinema in bit parts. Hakim Alston (of “WMAC Masters” fame, lol) gets a nice fight scene with Robin Shou, for instance. Pat Johnson’s choreography does shine when performed by these guys though, which probably has far more to do with them than it does with him.

So Mortal Kombat is incredibly silly, badly dated, and just utter nonsense, but if it’s your kind of nonsense, then it’s only gotten better -- more fetid really -- with age. And with the new game coming out and its twentieth anniversary a few month away, it’s a perfect time to enjoy it. And dat theme song!

Kickboxer (Mark Disalle and David Worth, 1989)

2015-02-17T22:17:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of my review of the odd Toby Russel/Robert Tai feature Death Cage, I listed off a bunch of movies that I remembered. Surprisingly enough, I failed to recall Kickboxer, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s follow up to his (I assume) biggest film, Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, 1988). Come to think of it, I didn’t even think of Bloodsport, initially. The similarities between Kickboxer and Death Cage are pretty striking, actually. Both feature location shooting in Thailand by non-Thai crews and Thai characters played by non-Thai actors. Even the martial arts choreography featured in both are
less than representative of actual Thai kickboxing.

Kickboxer tells the story of Kurt Sloan (Van Damme), the brother and corner-man of cocky kickboxing champ Eric Sloan (Dennis Alexio, an actual heavyweight kickboxing champ), who learns Muay Thai from Xian Chow (Hong Kong actor Dennis Chan), in order to avenge a crushing defeat of his brother at the hands of Tong Po (Michel Qissi) which has left him a paraplegic. Of course, the Thai boxing promotion is corrupt, with crime bosses exercising control over local territory with threats and violence. They don’t really want to see Kurt Sloan beat their guy, so they resort to underhanded methods, like kidnapping Xian Chow’s niece Mylee (Rochelle Ashana) and raping her, and holding Eric hostage. How this makes more sense than just shooting Kurt and killing him makes little sense (he will later die offscreen by this method in one of the sequels).

Kickboxer is quite risible. Structurally, it resembles its Hong Kong peers, setting up its simple revenge premise early, devoting a large portion of its run-time to training sequences, complicating the circumstances surrounding the final brawl, albeit according to some very Hollywood action movie conventions (raped girlfriends and whatnot were not the go to plot point for the Hong Kong martial arts genre) and ends the whole thing cleanly with a victory for the protagonist.

That’s not what makes it laughable. The humor comes from different sources, mostly related to the writing. There is some incredibly leaden expository dialog from the brothers Sloan, explaining why one of them has a Belgian accent, which resembles a real conversation between actual people the way that Van Damme and Michel Qissi’s fight choreography resembles actual Muay Thai. The acting by non-actors Van Damme and Alexio is, to put it nicely, quite apt for the writing here.

There’s also a typical Hollywood Black Guy named Winston (Haskell Anderson), who introduces Sloan to Xian, and mostly jabbers about how he doesn’t want to get involved. Mylee is eye-candy and designated love interest, who also has the important job of getting raped to provide extra motivation for Slaon, but since she doesn’t tell him before the fight, and he only gets angrier upon finding out, even this seems like it was pretty damn unnecessary. Why let her go after the fact? Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep her hostage if they wanted to mess with Sloan’s performance?

In spite of the fact that audiences and US film makers are far more sensitive about this sort of thing in the 2010’s than they ever were during the 1980’s, these character types are still relatively prevalent. We still get the typical Hollywood Black Guy and still have pretty designated inter-racial girlfriends. We even still have wizened Asian martial arts masters of indeterminate nationality and age. What we don’t usually have is the slope-browed antagonist played by an actor literally against genetic type. Michel Qissi’s character and performance would be accused of being horrifically racist caricature there days. And there would probably be more people describing Kickboxer that way if it weren’t for the fact that the whole thing is so endlessly silly that to take it seriously...

Let’s just say you can’t.

I actually really enjoy these earlier Jean-Claude Van Damme films. The fight scenes are preposterous, as are the training sequences. But while the fight choreography and even the shooting and editing might compare poorly to the same from Hong Kong during the same period (keep in mind that Jackie Chan was making films like Police Story 2 and Miracles around this time), the training sequences are definitely fun to watch.

I think the most interesting thing, when comparing Kickboxer to Death Cage, is that Death Cage apparently saw release in advance of Kickboxer. In other words, it isn’t a rip-off, one presumes. And a lot of the similarities can be accounted for by the nature of the productions. Each feature a Thai setting and Muay Thai, but neither utilize the local stunt talent, which, given the talent of Panna Rittikrai's crew even at this point, probably prevented them from being sorely upstaged. Smart move there. And so that may be why each feature so much ersatz Chinese martial arts in the training sequences. But at least Death Cage tells the audience that Mark Long is teaching Robin Shou Chinese Boxing. Kickboxer just throws in some Tai Chi looking stuff and calls it a day.

All said, I liked Kickboxer well enough. It’s hilarious to watch now, so transparent and goofy, that even the cornucopia of politically incorrectness can’t possibly be considered offensive by (the following word is important to read) normal people. As said, the fight choreography, which was once the film’s raison d’etre, is part of its unintended humor. But that's the appeal. And although he's no Roy Chiao, Dennis Chan is a plays a pretty grand martial arts master. And we get plenty of the rest of that dated, goofy appeal that make Van Damme so watchable. Like him doing the splits and dancing. Dancing seems to be a common denominator in movies I enjoy these days. Good times.

Death Cage (Robert Tai, 1988)

2014-12-21T22:20:00.002-08:00

Death Cage reminded me a lot of Soul of Chiba (Yukio Noda, 1977) in one particular way: it’s set in Thailand with a totally not Thai cast. It also reminded me of a bunch of other movies, like Mortal Kombat (Paul Anderson, 1995) and Bloodfight (Shuji Goto, 1988), as well as the more recent Shamo (Soi Cheang, 2007). It reminds me of the former two mostly because it was marketed internationally on home video as a sequel to each. One assumes the Mortal Kombat connection is because Robin Shou plays the lead in both films, and home video releases of martial arts movies have never been wholly ethical when it comes to marketing and presentation, a problem that persists to this day, regardless of the size or prestige of the publisher in question. The Bloodfight connection is remarkably tenuous, given that the only similarity between the two is pro-fighting aspect. To be honest, Shamo just plain feels like a throwback to movies like this, which is why I kinda liked it.

Death Cage is a Robert Tai directed (some sources say co-directed with Chai Man Sam) Mafia vs. Ninja (Robert Tai, 1985) and Shaolin Vs Ninja (Robert Tai, 1983). This should be some clue as to what you can expect from Death Cage.
co-production between Lan Tien Motion Picture Co. Ltd. and Golden Sun Film (H.K.) Co. Golden Sun was the producer or distributor for a number of earlier projects involving Robert Tai, such as

Again, the movie is set in Thailand, and it opens with an in-ring fight between the fighters from the Wai Chai gym and Kent’s Gym (yes, that’s the proper name). The Kent’s Gym fighters win nine matches (the first eight happen before the title scroll), and finally Nam See Hon (Robin Shou) goes up against the wild man Lai Chai, who cheats to win with some brass knuckles. Things get worse when Kent’s Gym owner, Mr. Kent (Joe Lewis), buys the property to Wai Chai gym out from under them, forcing See Hon, his godfather, and his adopted sister, Linda, to open a garage on the outskirts of Bangkok, where they are routinely harassed by thuggish lads who train at Kent’s gym.

Then along comes Tang Chuan (Mark Long), along with his daughter Tsu Chiu. Uncle Tang, as he’s referred to by See Hon, Linda, and Michael, the other guy at the garage and See Hon’s training partner, is a kung fu master, who demonstrates his ability by sanding the paint off of a car really fast. See Hon wants to train in his style, which he obliges. In the meantime, See Hon is annoyed by Linda running off with Bikin (Steve Tartalia), who she meets when he brings a car in to be fixed.

Mr. Kent finds it hard to put on exciting matches and profiteer off of gambling without Wai Chai gym around to provide competition, so he challenges See Hon to another match with his fighters by spreading posters promoting a fight before he even contacts See Hon or his godfather, with the stipulation that they get their gym back if See Hon wins, which they accept, of course. We see a potentially important scene in which Bikin gives Linda a bottle with some powder that he says was prepared by Tibetan monks to give strength to martial artists. She thanks him and he then tells her that she should show her thanks, which is then followed by the most cringe inducing makeout scene that thankfully cuts out before it transitions its elicited response from “cringe” to “vomit.”

The face of ecstasy

The powder is not a magic kung fu supplement, which should surprise nobody, but some sort of sedative or something, which Linda (of course) give See Hon without telling him or her godfather or even querying them over the subject. So See Hon is fighting Lai Chai, he in his now trademark leather caveman skirt and half-top, while stumbling about in his blue spandex body-suit and going blind. He remembers some words of wisdom from Uncle Tang though, and overcomes the effects of the drug and then beats the shit out of Lai Chai. Then Bikin jumps in the ring, flings the referee out, and starts fighting See Hon, managing to lose.

Gwai Lo actors just don’t have any luck in these movies.

Anyhow, Bikin then gets yelled at by Mr. Kent, and is forced to train. Wai Chai gym is reopened, and, in easily the least believable part of the story, everyone forgives that poisoning slut Linda. So all is well right? Well, no. There’s still plenty of movie left. More thugs show up to fight See Hon, this time with swords. See Hon beats them up a bit before getting stabbed and cut a whole bunch, but Uncle Tang arrives in time to save him. Then they kidnap Linda, so Uncle Tang goes and beats up the thugs handily. Unfortunately, Mr. Kent has dispatched his two female bodyguards, Billy and Jennifer, to fight Uncle Tang. They actually kill him too, using a sheer blouse as a net to tie him up, slashing his face with their sharp nails (again, not kidding), and finally stabbing him.

So See Hon goes inland to train with some monks, of which we see only one scene, where he fights a monkey kung fu guy (again, shades of Soul of Chiba here), while his godfather gets kidnapped by Mr. Kent’s thugs and Tsu Chiu takes revenge on Billy and Jennifer, in what actually turns out to be the best fight scene in the movie. This forces See Hon to return to Bangkok to fight Bikin in the eponymous death cage, an ovoid bamboo fort around a wood platform with sharp bamboo poles and wooden stakes pointing inwards. The finale goes as expected.

Death Cage is actually a pretty odd movie. The story is quite predictable -- we know who is going to win the big fights, for certain -- but it does not always follow the well worn beats of the genre. Who would expect, for instance, that See Hon would actually get sliced up by a bunch of random mooks wielding swords? That question sounds utterly ridiculous in reality. It is wholly unbelievable that anybody could beat up seven or eight guys who have long blades and are ganging up on him. But genre movies are not concerned with mimesis unless they are trying to subvert the generic expectation, or unless the writers and directors seemingly made stuff up as they went haphazardly.

But there are interesting things that don’t seem to be the result of merely “make it up as you go” writing. The training montage sequence gets flipped on its head, as Steve Tartalia’s Bikin is the one who gets the pounding music to scenes of wrestling with John Ladalski dressed as a stereotypical kung fu movie Mongolian and practicing tameshiwari on porcelain vases and performing martial arts forms. For the bad guy to get a training montage is unusual enough, but it’s actually a bit longer than the one given Robin Shou’s Nam See Hon. That training montage is interesting in its own right.

You would expect that training with the traditional Chinese martial artist would involve lots of form work and Chi Kung and whatnot, but it actually is a mix up between the typical kung fu movie training sequence and the sort of thing one might see in a boxing film. Robin Shou even performs squats! With a home-made barbell to boot! Also some totally insane and unbelievable road-work.

Alas, it isn’t all that interesting. The biggest let down in Death Cage is, unexpectedly, the fight scenes. Say what you want about Robert Tai (and some people have), but do not try to deny that he was a genuinely creative fight choreographer. Sadly, that creativity did not translate terribly well from his usual period setting to a contemporary boxing ring. These are not Muay Thai style fights, but some sort of bare-knuckle, catch-as-can fights with undefined rules and a referee who is only in frame occasionally. There’s grappling and elbows and joint locks. It seems a bit like Robert Tai and co-action director Alexander Lo Rei (we’ll have to talk about him some day) saw some of the “shoot” style pro-wrestling taking place in Japan during the 1980’s and tried to replicate it with Hong Kong action choreography. Unfortunately, the grappling is largely silly, and while the striking exchanges are competent, they are not exciting, looking much like what one would typically see in any period set martial arts movie.

Not a brohug, actually. They're grappling.

And it carries on to the finale in the cage. There’s some wire work that looks awfully dodgy, although it is generally reserved for when somebody gets kicked really hard. Truth be told, Robert Tai’s wire work was always inventive, but rarely well realized on screen. It’s neither here.

That said, the editing is the worst during these fight scenes. HK and Taiwanese film makers of this
era did not pay much attention to spatial continuity during fight scenes, but tight editing usually helps to mask this. It fails here, and so we are left to wonder at when fighters made their way ten or fifteen feet across a flat surface in a matter of milliseconds.

But for all that, Death Cage is not terrible. The interesting parts, in my opinion, make for a fun diversion. Squats!

I enjoyed it enough, but then, I am easily entertained by this sort of thing. The simple pleasures of the genre are often enough to make even poorly conceived and sub-par excursions like Death Cage bearable, even enjoyable.

The Scroll of White Crane Wing Chun (Leung Kar Yan, 2014)

2014-11-12T09:57:00.002-08:00

Leung Kar-Yan directed a new movie! And it’s on YouTube! It’s got kung fu! And a new star as a protagonist!

But it sucks.

The movie opens with a text scroll which is un-subtitled. So whatever context it provides was lost on me, but it doesn’t seem to be terribly important. We then see the attractive young lady Fan (Zhao Cong) hanging out with her old friend Jerry (Young Jung). She has recently returned from Taiwan, tasked by her grandfather, Chen Gorbon (Leung Kar-Yan) with returning an antique scroll to the village where it was made. Jerry is being annoying. He annoys Fan the character, and the audience, and likely the actress playing her. This will be a recurring theme. Some guys try to steal the scroll she’s carrying on her person, so she chases them in split screen (not kidding here), and they end up getting beaten up by a beefy construction worker. This action scene is not a great start.

Fan hasn’t even contacted her sister or her boyfriend just yet. So she gives them a call and they agree to meet up the next day. Her sister, Xing (Shen Fangxi) whiles the time away hanging out with Fan’s boyfriend, Young (Jerry Liau), who practices Wing Chun and break dances in the park with a guy named Bozzy.

Fan is staying in a hotel for her first night back in Hong Kong, apparently paid for by the town committee to whom she is returning the scroll. She gets attacked, again, by a bunch of random thugs, awaking with just enough time before they barge in to put a robe on over her underwear. Sadly, this is not a straight up cheesecake fight.

The person sending the thugs to steal the scroll is Boss (Tong Zeng Ye) who looks like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers and collects antiques. Why he’s so obsessed with stealing the scroll is kind of beyond me. He appears in interminable comic relief scenes with his right hand man Fei (character actor Wong Yat Fei). These scenes are just awful and will not be mentioned again; they exist solely to provide a reason for why some random thug has come to fight Fan or Young.

So the movie proceeds. Fan, Xing, Young, and Jerry all hang out together, acting silly and flirting. Young and Fan have been a couple for seven years and haven’t gotten married yet, while Jerry and Xing obviously like each other but can’t be arsed to just get together and be done with it. Fan repeatedly remarks that the two are immature, but there’s little difference between their behavior and Young and Fan’s. The whole thing eventually leads to a weird moment where the four track down Grandpa Chen’s long lost love, Jen (Cheng Pei-Pei), and she tragically cries to him over skype. No joke. This lights a fire under everyone to take their relationships seriously.

So its getting closer to the day where the scroll gets handed over, and Fan has it hidden really well, so now the people who want to steal the scroll are just outright attacking. Xing gets kidnapped, and Jerry chases down the van they pack her into on his bike. It conveniently runs out of gas, and Jerry attempts to intimidate the thugs with some Bruce Lee-ish nunchaku play. He and Fan are saved by that same beefy construction worker, who then performs mouth to mouth resuscitation on Jerry after he hits himself with his own weapon. Lame.

Then Fan gets attacked by a big group of thugs, which she takes out handily and without any tension to draw the audience in. Finally, Young gets attacked by a white guy (Roberto Gilabert), and they have a drawn out, really decent fight scene. It’s easily the highlight of the movie.

It ends with a photo montage of the four handing over the scroll, then a final scene of them acting silly. This time they have “old makeup” and a couple of cute kids to join them, letting the audience know that everyone ended up together and apparently grew really old before they finally decided to reproduce.

So why does this movie suck? Based on the above summary, it sounds like fight scene after fight scene. But, in the same tradition as 2011’s Choy Lee Fut, there’s a lot of talking, a lot of pouty faces and flirting and nonsense. This is another attempt to marry some lightly delivered romance with typical kung fu. This has happened to the genre before; in the 70’s and 80’s there was concerted effort to make kung fu comedies. Some of these were great, most of them really kind of sucked.

I’m still waiting for the good examples of kung fu romantic comedies coming out of China and Hong Kong. Recommendations are entirely welcome here. The Scroll of White Crane Wing Chun is unfortunately much heavier on the romantic comedy than Choy Lee Fut was. And that romantic comedy is painful. I’ll say this: the four leads are all terribly cute. Obnoxiously cute. I want to say rude things to Shen Fangxi and hear her squeak out “ewwww.” Instant.

But you can only take so much annoying and not especially well acted flirty behavior. It wears thin so fast, and the only thing that keeps you watching is the fights, but before every fight, you get an even more annoying sequence with the Big Boss and Fei. These are even worse. I don’t fault Young Jung for his performance; he’s playing the material he’s given and he isn’t obnoxious himself. He even manages one or two funny expressions, and his dancing (as well as Jerry Liau’s) is amusing, shades of Mismatched Couples. I have similar thoughts about Wong Yat Fei’s performance. The problem is the writing here.

It takes a really strong script to merge such disparate genres. Think something like Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), which has characters that are so well drawn (and acted) that they’re interesting whether they bicker about relationships or are getting mauled by zombies. The whole kung fu romantic comedy idea could work, if the characters are as interesting when they flirt or bicker as when they bust out the kung fu. The characters in The Scroll of White Crane Wing Chun aren’t even interesting when they fight because there’s so little to them. They’re endlessly cheerful and silly, and that’s it.

Jerry Liau does get to bring some personality to his character in two fight scenes. The first is a fight with a Japanese fighter who wears a gi and fights with karate and katanas. Liau’s character is drunk during their confrontation and is cocky and obnoxious. Then in the climax against Roberto Gilabert, He rips off his shirt, busts out some dance moves, Bruce Lee screeches, and a cocky attitude. This is great, and the movie needed more of it. A lot more, and for the other characters too. The only thing that impressed me about Zhao Cong as Fan, for instance, was that she looked pretty good in her panties.

Enjoy :)

Anyhow, this was awful. Watch it on YouTube, if you must.

The one thing that I do think was good about this movie, with its tv-serial cinematography, weird weepy scene with Cheng Pei-Pei, and obnoxious script and characters, was Jerry Liau. He was a contestant on Jackie Chan’s reality show, which looked for new talent for making action movies. He’s got a really good look to him, and he can move. If he can get into a real movie, he’ll have people following him pretty closely, I would be willing to bet.

Choy Lee Fut (Sam Wong and Tommy Law, 2011)

2014-10-24T01:04:00.002-07:00

Every once in a while, there comes along a genre movie that is either truly pushing the boundaries of its genre or is perhaps not really a genre film, but a film that uses the language of a genre for its own ends. Consider Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time. It’s a wuxia movie, an adaptation of a Jin Yong novel no less. It uses the tropes of the wuxia genre, but it doesn’t look or feel like a typical genre movie. None the less, wuxia fans very often have great things to say about it, particularly if those fans also happen to be Wong Kar Wai fans. Because if Ashes of Time is anything, it’s a Wong Kar Wai movie.

Every now and then there comes along a genre movie that really proves the true greatness that a film within the boundaries of that genre is capable. Consider the greatness of a movie like Drunken Master 2, where smart film making -- camera work, editing, mise en scene, acting -- came together with sometimes innovative, always exciting, and expertly performed fight choreography to make a spectacularly watchable film. Drunken Master 2 offers a tremendous spectacle of the physical mastery that was absolutely worth filming and is still worth watching for that reason alone. It reaches the pinnacle of the genre without doing anything but being a great genre film.

Choy Lee Fut is neither of these things.

It was unlikely to be the first from the start, let us face it. Not too many film makers have the sort of extremely personal focus of Wong Kar Wai (most people, regardless of their vocation, do not, could not). But genre films that are worth watching because they are just so great at what they do are not so uncommon. Never the less, they are difficult to make. So let’s set the bar a little lower.

There are those genre films that would pretty much suck ass except that they give genre fans what they want. There may be no perfect meeting of film making and generic elements, but the fans get what they want. These are the bread and butter of genre fans and film makers. Sure, I don’t have a great deal to say about the worthiness of, say, Bastard Swordsman (Lu Chin-Ku, 1983) as a movie that everyone should see, but it’s a worthwhile time for genre fans. Same for its sequel, and for even some of the less seen films of the genre I have reviewed here, like, say, Big Land, Flying Eagles (Au Yeung-Jun, 1978).

Choy Lee Fut does not even meet this standard.

It stars Sammy Hung, son of the great Sammo Hung, as Chan Wai-Yip. He’s been abroad in England, played here by the English themed Thames town in China, hanging out and with his Japanese friend Ken, played by the more convincingly Japanese Kan Kosugi, and essentially accomplishing nothing. Ok, seriously, movie. Your England is full of Chinese people and white people who speak with heavy Chinese accents. Who do you think you’re fooling here?

So Wai-Yip and Ken get into a fight in the cafe where Ken works because some guy is being chased by a multicultural band of thugs who attack Ken and Wai-Yip when Ken tells them to leave the cafe. That night, Wai-Yip’s dad (Sammo Hung, in a nice bit of recursive casting) shows up out of nowhere, to try to convince him to come home to China and take over the Choy Lee Fut school he runs there. Wai-Yip makes no promises, but the following day, he heads back to China with his friend Ken in tow, because Ken wants to learn Kung Fu. But not any Kung Fu, only Choy Lee Fut will do.

So they go back to the school, which is in a relatively poor part of Southern China, and are greeted by Wai-Yip’s uncle, Tin-Cheuk (Yuen Wah, stealing every scene he’s in), who is smoking a traditionally huge water pipe made out of bamboo. Wai-Yip gifts him a western style briar pipe, which he smokes constantly, and I can say as a former pipe smoker, correctly, throughout the movie. Some more expository scenes follow, introducing Wai-Yip’s cousin and elder student, Si Hai (Lau Wing-Kin), and his wife, who is only there to provide unfunny comedy moments and some flat drama that doesn’t really matter. Oh, and Wai-Yip’s dad is still abroad.

Still here? Good, because the actual plot is about to start here, twenty or so minutes into the movie. There are people who want to buy out the Choy Lee Fut school. They are called the “Pan-American Corporation.” If you are wondering what a “Pan-American Corporation” would be doing by acquiring a martial arts school, or why that corporation is in China rather than America, or why everyone involved with it, save for one of its fighters, is Chinese, you should just accept that it makes no sense and it doesn’t matter. So for whatever reason, the Pan-American Corp thinks they can make money acquiring martial arts schools, and the leader of this project, Ha Yu-Fei (Wang Jia-Yin), shows up at Wai-Yip’s school to make the offer, which he refuses. She then says that his father already agreed to it, and he still refuses.

So Yu-Fei makes an offer that they will have a “tournament” to decide. The Choy Lee Fut school will match three fighters against her three fighters, and winner of two out of three matches will get ownership of the school. Wai-Yip agrees, even though her three fighters, Qian Xing (former Jackie Chan stunt team member and co-director Sam Wong), the ridiculously named X-Man (Ian Powers, the aforementioned sole white guy in the Pan-American Corporation), and Yu-Fei’s boyfriend Cho Cheung-Heung (Steven Wong Ka-Lok).

There’s still a good bit more run-time left, which, in a typical kung fu movie, would be devoted to training montages. There’s some of this here, and it’s actually pretty fun. Tin-Cheuk trains Wai-Yip, Ken, and Si Hai at one point by standing around and waiting for one of them to ask a question. They wait for hours before he tells them he’s waiting for them to ask him something. There are also appearances here from three martial arts masters who help train the Choy Lee Fut fighters, including an appearance by Lau Kar-Wing. This is great for a couple of reasons: we get to see Lau Kar-Wing appearing again in a movie with Sammo Hung, even if they don’t get to share any screen time, and he’s appearing in a movie as a trainer for his real life his son, Lau Wing-Kin.

But most of this time is actually comprised of some extremely silly romantic sequences between Yu-Fei and Wai-Yip. He’s crushing on her almost immediately, and she keeps on showing up at his school (apparently she doesn’t do any real work for her job). She breaks a high-heel and Wai-Yip rubs some dit da jow on her ankle and sends her home with some flat, Chinese style shoes. Then he asks her out, even though it’s her boyfriend Cho’s birthday. She agrees to spend the morning with him so that she has time in the evening for Cho. But they spend the whole day together.

This is the most outright absurd part of the movie. Yu-Fei and Wai-Yip go driving around, feeding each other by hand and taking selfies. Then they go to the library, which is funny for all sorts of politically incorrect reasons, making duck faces at each other as they pull books from the stacks. They eat fast food, and Yu-Fei just adorably (/sarcasm) gets some sauce on her nose. They hang out at a hot spring, where Wai-Yip gets a nice ogle at Yu-Fei’s bikini-butt and receives a splash in the face as a result.

All this in one day. One single date. All that. And a cheesy Mando-Pop song is playing in the background the whole damn time, with cutaways to Cho hanging out in Yu-Fei’s office, checking his watch and looking bored. It is preposterous. And hilarious.

So Cho confronts Yu-Fei after Wai-Yip brings her home and fails at kissing her. He tells her, in possibly the most beta-male move recorded in a movie, that he doesn’t mind if she wants to be wooed by two men at the same time. She, of course, shows up at the school one last time to tell Wai-Yip that they can’t see each other again, with Cho tagging along. So now they’re fighting over the school and the woman too.

Ok, this whole movie is just silly. But most kung fu movies, regardless of when they were made, or their setting, or their actual writing, are pretty silly right? Right. So why does it not work here?

Choy Lee Fut builds on two pre-fab foundations, neither of which is stable. It is trying to balance between giving the genre fan what he or she wants to see -- training sequences and fight scenes -- and giving the mainstream Chinese movie going audience what they are known to enjoy -- light-hearted pop cinema romance and comedy. This could be done in theory, but in execution, Choy Lee Fut does neither well.

For pop-cinema romance, we get that ridiculous date sequence. But aside from that, we see Wai-Yip spending more time with Ken than with Yu-Fei. And I will certainly grant that Wang Jia-Yin is really very lovely and she and Sammy Hung actually make for a pretty nice on-screen couple. They’re cute. But there’s nothing else there of interest. And Steven Wong seems to be there solely for his goatee and spiky hair; he’s got no personality beyond glowering and then acting like a eunuch when he finds out his girlfriend more or less cheated on him. He’s seems like a jerk and then acts like a wimp. So the love triangle lacks any interest or conflict that the audience could find believable.

But the movie really drops the ball on delivering for the genre fan, since the kung fu movie elements are the stronger from the very start. The training sequences are set up well, but they are edited in montage. The training fights against the three masters brought in to help out Wai-Yip, Ken, and Si Hai ought to be genuinely wonderful, pairing up Choy Lee Fut (and Karate, in Ken’s case) against Tai Chi, Hung Gar, and Muay Thai. But these are also done in montage, so we see little in the way of extended fight scenes.

The reliance on montage carries into the final fight sequences. All three fights are edited in montage. And I do not mean that we have a lot of quick-cuts. These are genuinely shot in the style of music videos or maybe highlight reels. This makes the fight scenes so much less exciting than they would be if they were put together in the traditional Hong Kong cinema manner.

The best of the fight scenes is the one between Kane Kosugi and Ian Powers. The worst, sadly, is the finale between Sammy Hung and Steven Wong. This is likely because Steven Wong is not a martial artist.

Choy Lee Fut tries to work up a lot of themes that could be interesting. We have tradition vs. modernization, represented here with the Choy Lee Fut school’s humble trappings and traditional training methods vs. the Pan-America Corporation (I still cannot get over that) gym, which has some cable/pulley based weight machines. Their styles are still traditional Chinese martial arts though. There is also some talk about “being a man,” which is only mentioned a few times and is best exemplified by showing how not to act with Steven Wong’s character, which I don’t think was necessarily intentional. But it does nothing with these themes. They’re hardly mentioned or developed throughout the movie’s run time.

But for all that, I cannot say that I hated Choy Lee Fut. It’s bad, badly made in parts, and laughable at various points. But I do like how cheesy it is. And it has one of the most hilarious soundtracks of all time, including an astoundingly silly Choy Lee Fut rap by some guy named J-Town. He’s trying to sound all hard and shit, but look up a video of him on youtube or tudou. Really intimidating, that guy. Anyhow, that song made it onto my workout play list. Yeah, I know.

You should re-read this post while you listen to this.

Basically, this movie is on the lowest tier of kung fu movies. It’s hanging around with a bunch of forgotten movies from the seventies and eighties for company. But I actually kind of like those movies too. Because for all that it does wrong, as much as it fails to deliver on its promise, the very real potential that it has with such a great cast and the best bad soundtrack to kung fu movie in the history of ever, Choy Lee Fut will be remembered by somebody (me) as the apotheosis of bad Mainland Chinese kung fu movie making from this era. It’s on that bottom rung, but it’s at the top of it.

Mismatched Couples (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1985)

2014-02-23T22:25:00.000-08:00

This movie did something that I never would have expected. It surprised me and made me question one of my long held opinions about the Hong Kong martial arts film genre of the eighties, nineties, even up to recent releases. Hell, it changed a great deal of my feelings about Hong Kong film in general.

To be specific: Mismatched Couples made me a fan of Donnie Yen.

This sounds unfair, and it is. I really failed in giving good ol’ Donnie a fair shake. His physical skills never failed to impress, and he boasts a physique that belongs in a Chang Cheh movie from yesterdecade. I never doubted those things. And Donnie Yen has artistic ambitions, with his directorial efforts, action choreography, and even a good role here and there. And in my defense, I did acknowledge a noble effort from Yen in The Lost Bladesman (Alex Mak and Felix Chong, 2011).

My first exposure to Donnie Yen, his early directorial efforts like Ballistic Kiss (1998) and Legend of the Wolf (1997), colored my view of him, if anything. They came at an odd time in Hong Kong cinema and feature some camera work and editing that I loathe. And Donnie’s action choreography lingered in a sort of odd experimental period here. It’s difficult to describe, but I never liked it, and so I never liked Donnie.

But, wow. Wow.

Mismatched Couples is the most eighties movie ever made. It also marks a shift in director Yuen Woo Ping’s filmography. His previous film and Donnie Yen’s first role, Drunken Tai Chi, was something in the vein of the highly creative and extremely odd cycle of films that began with 1982’s The Miracle Fighters. It’s also incredibly fun.

The movie opens with a montage of Donnie Yen dancing. Just, let that one sink in. And good sweet Krishna those dance moves are epic silliness. He sticks his finger in an electric socket and dance-convulses like he’s getting shocked at one point.

The movie proper starts with Donnie Yen waking up, then going back to sleep after killing his cuckoo clock with a dart gun. Then his radio turns on, the DJ playing some “Disco Rock” to wake up sleepy Hong Kong, and Donnie dances his way into his clothes.

Donnie plays Eddie, presumably a college student who lives above a diner with his Big Sis, Ah Ying (Wong Wan Si) and kissing cousin Stella (May Lo). Eddie doesn’t help out a lot at the diner, for which Ah Ying scolds him. He prefers to hang out with his attractive classmate Anna (Anna Kamiyama, presumably a Japanese actress) and has an ongoing, passive-aggressive dance feud going with “Colorful Punk” (Mandy Chan). He also has to deal with some outright cockblocking from Lynn, Anna’s beefy BFF (a very fit Chan Lai-Win, in her only credited role).

Eddie runs into a down-and-out opera performer named Mini (Yuen Woo Ping) while being pranked by Lynn (if one could call attempted murder a prank). Mini is starving and has no money, so he follows Eddie to Colorful Punk’s outdoor dance party, where we get to enjoy scenes of Mandy Chan breaking. Mini is about to chow down on a whole roast chicken, but Colorful Punk catches him and says he must dance if he wants to eat.

Mini busts out a monkey kung fu form, much to the pleasure of the party goers. Colorful Punk picks up and leaves, so Eddie brings him back to his home, thinking that he could work as his sister’s assistant and teach him kung fu (which he already knows, apparently, so this is not a real plot point). After a bit of very silly not-quite flirtation between Mini and Ah Ying, which goes rather poorly for both of them, a prolonged slap stick sequence in which Eddie and Stella try to hide Mini’s presence in their home, and a vote on whether or not he can stay, Ah Ying relents. Mini is the new employee at their restaurant.

Keep in mind, this is a Hong Kong movie, so all that is just set up for a bunch of loosely assembled vignettes. Donnie fights over Anna with the gwielo, Kenny (Kennny Perez), who treats him like a waiter when he first meets him. They have a tennis match with Donnie using a bicycle as his tennis racket, which is one of the most absurd sequences in motion picture history. Their feud eventually comes to a point when he and colorful punk attempt to give him a laxative at Kenny’s birthday party, which leads to a dance off -- the second most absurd sequence in motion picture history, but also one of the funniest and most entertaining.

The other running non-plot is Eddie’s fight with a “champion fighter” played by Dick Wei. He doesn’t even get a name, from what I remember, but he meets Eddie at the gym, where he displays his physical prowess in an attempt to embarrass Lynn. “If men can do it, so can us women” she announces. Eddie and Mini use a number of tricks to make her look bad and Eddie look good. Why this is necessary is beyond me, but it offers an opportunity for some sexist humor, which is always a good time.

But the fighter played by Dick Wei mistakes Eddie for a top fighter because of the display. So he demands a fight. They have an excellently choreographed and filmed fight scene to end the movie.

What I might have failed to get across with all that description is just how much fun this movie has with pretty much everything. The whole cast looks like they’re having an absolute blast with the all of the silly scenes, and it is infectious. For real, the whole thing is compulsively watchable. I’d say its easily within my top ten Hong Kong movies.

And part of that is because it’s a very sweet-natured movie. Nope, it’s not the break dancing or the fight scenes (there’s really only one, the extended fight between Donnie Yen and Dick Wei) or the pretty girls (May Lo is stupidly cute) or even the physical comedy. My favorite part of Mismatched Couples is the romance between Mini and Ah Ying. Yuen Woo-Ping is totally perfect as Mini. He’s actually a very capable actor for this sort of role, and not just because of his looks, although they help. Yuen manages to hit the sympathy button with his facial expressions more often than he has any right to; Wong Wan Si was a veteran actress who has the fairly difficult job of being something of a ball-buster while still conveying warmth and winning the audience over. She succeeds, which means that the audience can’t help but cheer for Yuen when he’s doing his best to win her over. And it works especially well because these two are not the typical movie couple. These are two older actors who are hardly in their pretty years, if they ever had pretty years to begin with, and they aren’t the leads in the movie. But Yuen allows just the right amount of time for their scenes to play out. It’s spectacular how well he pulls it off, given that it plays out in between some really overblown comedy sequences. Credit.

And Donnie. Man. Who would have thought that Donnie Yen could look so damn happy? Like the Yuen Woo-Ping/Wong Wan-Si relationship building, it’s freakin’ adorable. Not to take away from the value that some people place on the intense, testosterone fueled Donnie Yen that would later become the Donnie Yen that we all expect. That’s great too. But happy-stupid Donnie is just about the most fun you can get in a Hong Kong movie of this vintage outside of happy-stupid Jackie Chan.

Special mention to the music. The original music in the movie was supplied by an artist named Chyna. I can't find any information on her, but the theme song is as dated as it is fun.

Mismatched Couples is a substanceless movie. It’s cheap and silly. It has no real plot. And it is wonderful. The perfect sort of movie for a boring Sunday afternoon with a few friends who enjoy things like break-dancing battles and mildly sexist humor and pure sweetness played without a hint of cynicism or irony. In other words, Mismatched Couples is just plain wonderful. I love it love it love it.

And yeah, I even like Donnie Yen, a whole lot, just because of it.

I Should Not Be Proud of This

2013-05-05T15:03:00.001-07:00

One of the nice things about unemployment is the free time.

Actually it isn't nice at all. It's boring as hell. So you find things to occupy yourself while you wait to hear back from any of the employers whom you desperately hope will give you a shot at minimum wage part-time work. Anything to get some income flowing.

Anyhow, I managed to log a few hundred hours in the Omega Force developed Samurai Warriors: Xtreme Legends during my few months of no income.

Granted, the 340 hours or so were logged over a period of years (I bought the game at least a year after its initial release), during which I was, for the majority, gainfully employed.

And here it is, the final bonus selection.
By the point that you can unlock this mode, chances are that your favorite character will be so highly levelled, and has such a powerful weapon and items that it won't make a particularly noticeable difference when you can gain additional speed or defense.

But its more of a trophy than anything else. I recorded these videos with the help of RockManXZ21 when the old gang was back together. I actually lost the footage until recently, when I was pleasantly surprised to see that he had kept the whole run-through on his hard drive.

Omega Force's games are pretty silly, and the Gold Rush mode has plenty of silly parts, like Lu Bu appearing at the very end, assuming that one has met the right conditions while playing. What he's doing a millenia or so in the future and in Japan is anybody's guess, but it's a cool moment the first time that he shows up. It's certainly unexpected.

That was an unintentionally long hiatus

2013-04-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

Really, apologies to those who were expecting more reviews of movies starring Kong Ban and Lin Hsiao-Lan to be posted here during the last nine or ten months.

I'm not going to justify or try to explain what's been going on, as most of that stuff is personal and not really pertinent here. But I'll be writing stuffs here again. In fact, I had intended to put up several reviews that unfortunately didn't survive the switch I made in computers. This is one of those not-pertinent events that led to my posting anti-spree. Shame on me.

Otherwise not too much has changed on my part. Expect reviews of the most eighties movie Hong Kong ever produced, a likely unwanted amount of writing on the various eighties anime (and their sequels!) I've been watching, and possibly a little bit of redesign to the blog's layout.

All this assuming anybody was reading this thing regularly in the first place.

Does the Auction House Sell a Windows 7 Compliant Diablo 2?

2012-05-22T12:53:00.001-07:00

I don’t have to apologize for not having a movie review to post, or for that matter, a real review of anything, but I want to. And since I’m here, I also want to let the few people who care know why they won’t see GoldenPigsy wanting to join their game in Diablo 3.

I’m frustrated with the whole Diablo 3 situation for several reasons, the most trivial of which is that I’d still rather play Diablo 2 even though Blizzard will not release a patch to make the game stable on Windows 7. Granted, you can get it to run by fiddling with some settings – there are guides that show you how to do it – but I suspect that Blizzard will reissue Diablo 2 digitally sometime down the line, newly Windows 7 compliant, with heavy DRM and minor improvements, hoping to resell the game to customers who bought it twelve years ago.

But the fairly trivial reason ties into the very big problem I have with Diablo 3, which is the DRM. In order to play Diablo 3, the player must connect to Blizzard’s servers. And it isn’t as though this connection is a simple check-in; the connection must be maintained, even when playing single player. During last week’s launch, a seemingly large number of players had trouble actually playing the game they bought for sixty dollars. The servers were down entirely on Saturday.

I honestly cannot think of another industry that has such an adversarial approach to customer relations, and it is not strictly an issue of DRM. Diablo 3 is not designed for single player. Its single player mode is just a desiccated MMO; the game is meant to be played either with a party or with a NPC follower. The insistent solo player will find that the item drops and crafting provide only the occasionally useful item, and that it is far more sensible to buy powerful items through the online auction house, which will eventually implement an option to buy or sell virtual goods for not-virtual money.

In other words, the persistent online configuration is not only designed to prevent piracy, but to force the consumer into playing the game in a specific way, and with the hope that the consumer will continue to feed money to the developer.

Even the game mechanics are tightly controlled. The player no longer allocates stats, as it is done automatically, and the skill trees are quite linear. The “rune system” allows for a superficial amount of customization, but with the way they have structured the skill tree, Blizzard has done away with the whole concept of a unique character build in an attempt to nullify class optimization. The idea is that players no longer have to think about how to make the most efficient character. In practice, it means you can forget about making a unique build, like a singing Barbarian which buffs/de-buffs while hacking through hordes of enemies. From what I can tell, the Barbarian in Diablo 3 is a designated tank, and little else. Others have reported that the classes are poorly balanced – which was a problem even in Diablo 2, to be honest – which is telling of Blizzard’s priorities. They’ve spent several years and much capital in the making of this game and still not fixed a twelve-year-old problem.

And since stat allocation is handled automatically, and the skill system is mostly linear, the most effective decision making available to the player is in equipment – again, much like your typical MMO. And since the drops and crafting don’t seem especially helpful – and since level caps on equipment no longer seem to be a major part of the game – this leaves the auction house as the most viable way of building a character to your liking.

It’s like a free-to-play MMO, but you pay sixty dollars to play it.

So those are the reasons why I’m not interested in playing Diablo 3, at least based on the impressions I’m getting from watching RockManXZ24 while he plays it. As for the game itself, I will admit that it looks like fun. I like mindless hack-and-slash, loot-focused action-RPGs quite a lot, and, mechanically speaking, Diablo 3 looks like a compromise between Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and some of the MMOs that come out of South Korea and Japan. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. But I’m not interested in MMORPGs and the attitude that informs the new DRM policy is unacceptable to me. So that’s how it is.

This is not what David Gaider Wants

2012-05-01T16:06:00.003-07:00

Last week I received an unusual e-mail from a reader. I call it unusual because its author did not want a) me to tell him or her where to find one of the more obscure movies reviewed on the blog or b) for me to send him or her a copy of the movie for free. (Seriously, people, do actually expect somebody to do that? Stop sending me your addresses.)

A portion:

I'm a BioWare fan. Not even gonna try to hide my fandom here. Relax though, while this email is coming your way because I read your reviews of The Calling and The Stolen Throne, I'm not writing to put your head on a pike. Quite the opposite actually. Basically, I'd love to write professionally. Preferably for video games but hey if I could do prose then I would not be complaining one bit. As silly as this may sound, I've always looked up to David Gaider immensely…

So where's the issue here? Easy. Up until today, Gaider has been... God. Well more or less, I have had several issues with parts of his writing but who can I read without having that? As many writing classes as I've had I'm frankly reading two versions of the same texts as my eyes dance them over - my own version and that of my education's mean eye. This man though has not set off that many red warnings in my head though. He has been who I want to be. Or at least, someone far along the ladder I want to climb, should I be able to go even further. But today I allowed myself to read quite a bit of his criticism, the final pieces of today being your two reviews (sorry, I'm leaving a turd on your doorstep almost by chance, I am really sorry =( ). Everything is changing.

It’s very easy to assume that people who enjoy tie-in fiction are stupid or lacking in self-awareness, but this isn't necessarily true (even if it often is). The young lady who sent me this very much wants to write fantasy stories for video games and fiction, and she feels let down now that she’s realized that her emperor’s ass is showing.

Her reaction is entirely normal – healthy, even. One of the more unnerving aspects of “fandom” is how it disconnects people from the broader scope. I don’t even mean, necessarily, from mainstream or higher brow literature, but from a broader scope of what might be within the fan’s interests. It’s also the sort of attitude that corporate interests try to foster.

It’s almost cult-like in its operation. Fan forums, especially those that are officially operated by the producers of large franchises (Bioware Social, Bethesda Softworks et al), cultivate insularity and reward fanatical obsession. Breaking away from all of the obsession and idolization can actually be stressful for the fan who once sincerely believed her or his favorite game developer or tie-in writer to be "God."

And that sort of cultivated myopia is what I’ve been railing at in the reviews of David Gaider’s fiction, and it’s what the sender of this missive is trying to cope with. She's quite right to be bothered.

David Gaider has done her no favors with his mediocrity, or with his half-hearted attempts to dodge criticism, or with self-important puffery – a trait which is consistent throughout Bioware’s public self-image. If there is one thing that Gaider sincerely does not want, it is for the readers of his fiction and the players of his games to actually educate themselves about decent story-telling and game design. Gaider (and the company that employs him) does not want for the majority of fans to feel the consternation that drips off of this e-mail.

Thankfully, it isn’t up to him. I wish my reader all the best.

Journey to the West (Chang Cheh, 1991)

2012-04-23T15:53:00.001-07:00

In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m a big fan of The Journey to the West in its literary form. And I’ve got a pretty wide ranging appreciation for the cinematic adaptations that visualize the story with varying degrees of fidelity. I did, after all, choose an internet handle from one of the principle characters in the story. I even played the part of the loveable porcine man-child in a student theater production in college.

I also love films by Shaw Brothers’ million dollar auteur Chang Cheh. Chang rose to prominence with the 1966 film One-Armed Swordsman, which not only tapped into the generational malaise afflicting Hong Kong youth at the time, but revolutionized Hong Kong’s approach to the wuxia genre, then dominated by Cantonese film makers and teenage starlets, with its combination of heavily masculine themes and imagery. Its cinematographic style was so heavily imitated that the only competition it has for the most influential martial arts film of all time is King Hu’s Come Drink with Me. And aside from being an epochal genre film, it’s also plain fun to watch, and has aged better than many other films of its vintage.

Chang went through various stages in his film-making career. He started as a critic and writer; experimented as a co-director and crafted a legendary lost film, Tiger Boy, before moving on to making the most profitable film in Shaw Brothers’ New Wuxia Century wave of Mandarin language wuxia films in the 1960’s; he worked extensively with David Chiang and Ti Lung in wuxia, kung fu, and historical spectacles before settling into a niche of manic kung fu films utilizing the talents of Taiwanese born Peking Opera stars Phillip Kwok, Lu Feng, and Chiang Sheng. I could go on about Chang’s accomplishments during each of these periods for several more paragraphs.

But towards the end of his career, Chang was no longer the same creative force as he was when he made One Armed Swordsman. His final Shaw Brothers film, The Weird Man, was neither well received critically, nor profitable. It’s so utterly farcical in some portions that the mind wanders from the film itself to contemplate the mental state of the man who made it. After leaving Shaw Brothers, Chang made three films in Taiwan, using many of the actors from his latter period at Shaw Brothers. These five films not only used some of the same actors, but Chiang Sheng and Lu Feng – often the action directors and assistant directors from his Shaw Brothers days – took over many of the directorial duties for films like Nine Demons and Attack ofthe Joyful Goddess.

Chang Cheh had always, if those who worked with him are to be believed (and there’s no real reason to doubt them), been a fairly hands-off director. By the mid-eighties, however, Chang’s eyesight was deteriorating. But even so, I think at least two of Chang’s films from this era, Shanghai 13 and Attack of the Joyful Goddess, are worth seeing.

After this brief excursion in Taiwanese film making, Chang Cheh headed to the Mainland, where he continued to “direct” in the capacity that he could. He found a stable of Peking Opera talent, dubbed by Western fans as “the New Venoms,” and set about either remaking or retreading his old films (Hidden Hero is a remake of Life Gamble; Ninja in Ancient China is like a remix of both The Weird Man and Five Element Ninjas).

Chang Cheh’s Journey to the West is new territory for him, although he was no stranger to fantasy films tinged with Operatic visual cues. It certainly takes the same tack as other low budget, low ambition adaptations though. The film covers the episode in which Princess Iron Fan attempts to kidnap the Tang monk with the help of her step-son, Red Boy, only to be foiled by Sun Wukong and company. In Chang’s film, the Bodhisattva Guan Yin sends her emissaries (including Na Zha), to aid in the battle against Red Boy and his magic.

The film starts with a synopsis of the story thus far, with the imprisonment of Monkey, his journey with Xuanzhang, the Tang monk, meeting Pigsy and Sandy, etc. Then there are some hijinks with a demon who accosts the travelling crew, followed by Monkey and company meeting with Princess Iron Fan. She’s annoyed with Ox King, her husband, who has taken a second wife. After a failed attempt at seducing Monkey (and a thorough rebuking of Pigsy, who is happy to fill in for Monkey after he abjures Iron Fan’s advances), Princess Iron Fan begins scheming to kidnap the monk.

But before that, Monkey and co. must help a small outpost which is besieged by demons pretending to be the Emperor, who has raised taxes to an unreasonable rate. This is where the film indulges in the long tradition of having Monkey disguise himself as various other characters with his magic, although none of the actors portray unique enough personalities make this fun, and only the inevitable jump cut between one actor and the other gives away the game.

It’s also where two supporting characters are introduced, who are in love and betrothed. One of them will later be killed by Princess Iron Fan, and the other never mentioned again.

Finally, the film meanders into the major fight between the Red Boy and the heroes. Monkey, Sandy, Ne Zha, and two other characters whose names I can’t remember (if they were ever mentioned) have it out in a ten minute brawl with Red Boy and his demonic cohorts. We get to see Monkey use his magical hair, which turns into monkey fighters, along with a bevy of pyrotechnics, poorly done wire work, and some genuinely good fight choreography.

Although credited to Chang, much of the direction was likely on the shoulders of Dung Chi-Wa, Du Yu-Ming, and Mu Li-Xin, who also handled action direction and play Monkey, Sandy, and Red Boy, respectively. The camera work occasionally resembles Chang Cheh’s better films from Shaw Brothers, utilizing slow motion and overhead angles when large crowds fight in formation, but very often looks utterly awful with people flitting in and out of frame, or the frame being too close to capture all of the movements during one-on-one fight scenes. Lighting equipment makes a split second cameo in one shot.

So it isn’t the best looking film. Locations are re-used; there is little visual continuity – how exactly can the heroes journey through a desert and somehow come across the same leafy outpost time and again? But it does have nice fight choreography. And the finale threatens to wander into Yuen Clan territory with fighters on rocket propelled roller skates and bladed, flame throwing go-carts.

There’s also some of Chang Cheh’s trademark gore on display, including visible intestines.

This was the penultimate film of Chang’s career, with the much better Ninja in Ancient China premiering two years later in 1993. In some ways, it’s a shame to see the once brilliant creative force stamping his name on such a lacking product. At the same time, you almost have to respect Chang for cranking out a movie when he was nearly blind. A lot is made of the sexual politics and sanguine aspects of Chang Cheh’s films, but the man loved making movies – he made them as long as he could. That’s pretty awesome, even if most of the later films are not, or are for unintended reasons.

And that finale is worth seeing at least once, if only to get a glimpse of Dung Chi-Wa in action before Stephen Chow rediscovered him and cast him as the spear wielding master in Kung Fu Hustle.

Still Alive and Learning to Enjoy the SHMUP

2012-03-27T19:53:00.001-07:00

I'm still here. For reals.

But I’ve been busy. And when I get busy, I stop doing things, even things that don’t require that I leave my home or put on pants. Hence, I stopped watching movies, and once I stopped watching them, I stopped writing about them. And now I have not yet begun to write about movies again, mostly because I haven’t actually watched one in, like, three weeks.

So, what have I actually been doing in the spare time I have? Mostly whittling it away. I developed something of a habit, recently, of sitting in a chair across from my only television that picks up a digital signal and playing video games on one of my analog TVs, situated nearby, which now serves no other purpose. This usually means that I blaze through a few rounds of Samurai Warriors Xtreme Legends while listening to the local news broadcast before turning in for the night.

But recently I decided to actually try playing something a bit different from my usual selection of JRPGs and Koei brawlers – specifically, I decided to try to reacquaint myself with the scrolling shooter. Once among the most popular genres in arcades, the seemingly simple scrolling shooter had fallen out of favor during much of the late nineties and oughts, with few developers (Treasure comes to mind) bothering to make them, while fans became so desperate that they would praise even mediocre games – see Dave Halverson’s gushing over Silpheed: The Lost Planet in Gamer’s Republic for an example. Recently, iOS ports of Japanese arcade shooters (the genre still enjoys a profitable audience in Japan) helped rejuvenate the interest in this very noble style of electronic game.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an iPhone. I do own a PSP, so rather than paying for old games on a new platform, I downloaded a Turbografx-16 emulator and a Sega Genesis emulator and a few roms so that I could enjoy old games on relatively old platform, without paying anything at all.

Of course, I had to choose which games I would try to play – I say “try,” as I had not actually played a scrolling shoot-em-up since the DOS days and Raptor: Call of the Shadows – which lead me over to Hardcore Gaming101. I eventually decided on trying out some Compile shooters, since I rather like Puyo Pop for the Game Boy Advance.

The first one I tried was MUSHA for the Genesis. It’s a vertically scrolling shooter where the player controls a giant mecha robot in a vaguely Sengoku era Japanese setting, which is exactly the sort of silliness that contemporary gaming eschews to its own misfortune. The technological/mythological/historical mash-up is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. I mean, you’re a giant robot in ancient Japan shooting electrified arrows and shurikens at giant Japanese castles on tank treads which shoot flaming oni demon heads at you. That’s definitely something.

The other thing that I liked about MUSHA was the weapon system. The player can collect three types of weapons and get two satellite units, which is more or less conventional. What is unusual is that the player can actually order the satellites with the press of a button. The two smaller ships that fly next to the giant robot can home in on enemies, or aim themselves next to the ship to spread gunfire across the screen. The support units are vulnerable to enemy fire, though, so it is best for the player not to simply set them to homing and leave them to get slaughtered by incoming enemies.

It’s a hard game too. I’ve still not managed to get past the third level, but that’s two levels farther than the first time I played. One of the things I like about scrolling shooters is that they’re genuinely skill based, and time spent with them is time spent learning the skills it takes to play them. Granted, a person with exceptional hand-eye coordination is going to be better than somebody whose fingers get tangled up when they try to type a six word sentence, but for being simple games based on a simple concept (shoot the enemies; don’t get shot), the best games of this type actually have a lot of depth that the uninitiated will not see.

The other game I’ve been playing recently is a Turbografx-16 title called Blazing Lazers in the West, although in Japan it was released as Gunhed, a tie-in product for a live-action film based on a manga by Kia Asamiya. I haven’t seen the film and the manga doesn’t seem to be available in English, so what relation they have to a more-or-less stereotypical space-shooter, I couldn’t say. What I can say is that the Blazing Lazers is good simple fun.

It’s another vertically scrolling shooter, and it also has power ups that the player can collect. There are four types of weapons, spread shot, waves, a wide electrical current that mows down anything in its path, and a spinning balls that protect the ship. This is about as conventional as it gets, except that secondary power ups will change the range and spread of the weapons. My favorite is “field thunder,” which makes the third power up shoot out in waves that make patterns around the screen.

I didn’t think Blazing Lazers was as difficult as MUSHA, but it’s hardly as easy as your average platformer (for me, at least, being rather new to the genre). The sci-fi theme is not nearly so striking as MUSHA’s – no Noh theater mask gunships to be found here – but the weapon system is quite to my liking. Comparably simpler, but the sheer number of different combinations makes up for not being able to customize satellite support.

Compile is one of those interesting Japanese developers whose games I have read about more often than I’ve played them. They were extremely active on the Japanese MSX computer scene, releasing disc magazines and games in all sorts of genres. They’re still around, sort-of, in the form of Compile Heart, a team made of former Compile employees whose games are published by Nippon Ichi. Compile Hearts most notable games in the US market are Record of Agarest War and Hyperdimension Neptunia, which…

Okay, the less said about those games, the better. Still, if they ever decide to stop pandering to creepy otaku types, there is hope that the development team formerly known as Compile could still craft games like MUSHA and Blazing Lazers. I may use them to whittle away my free time because I’m too tired to do anything else, but the level of craft that went into these games is both apparent and highly respectable.

And hopefully, I'll get around to watching some movies some time soon.

Apparently, I am the Genre Police

2012-02-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

Funny how it’s only been a week or so since I wrote a little bit about how it isn’t my job to correct people who are wrong on the internet and an article shows up on a blog I enjoy which makes me want to publicly raise my objections.

There’s a lot to love about Black Gate’s blog. They’ve done admirable work with articles about authors who deserve more attention. I particularly appreciate their retrospectives on Leigh Brackett, Manly WadeWellman, and Clark Ashton Smith. Their three part retrospective on the originsof the fantasy genre as a whole is highly worth reading for the fan of fantasy fiction, which many of Black Gate’s editors write quite well.

Among these editors is John R. Fultz, whose recent novel, Seven Princes, has attracted much positive attention. I read a post on a forum which compared it to Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy, which is high praise to say the least. And if it’s an apt comparison, I have to give Mr. Fultz a tip of the hat; it takes guts to publish that sort of mythic fantasy when the current trend in the genre is “in the grim darkness of… there is only grim darkness.”

So it is not personal when I say that Mr. Fultz’s “DANGEROUSBEAUTY: The Kung Fu Fantasies of Zhang Yimou,” is a presumptuous, wrong-headed, almost contemptible look at the wuxia genre as a whole, and a bland, uncritical paean to a mistake so big that Zhang Yimou had to make it over three movies.

I will not bother with a critical examination of Zhang Yimou’s films here; they, and the enamored western public, exhausted my patience when they were new. Needless to say, I have a number of aesthetic, political, and ethical bones to pick with Zhang and the critics who championed his films in spite of their less than savory political underpinnings. But Mr. Fultz seems to enjoy them primarily for their aesthetic qualities, for their evocation of “the China of Legend, where martial arts is a magic all its own.” (His words) Aesthetics are subjective, and personal; I disagree that Zhang’s films evoke this vision of China particularly well, much less better than many of the films of such directors as King Hu, Chang Cheh, Chu Yuan, and Pan Lei. But to each his own. If Mr. Fultz enjoys these films, I will not begrudge him his enjoyment.

I do take exception, though, to his myopic view of the genre as a whole, as I do with certain statements that betray unfamiliarity with the subject of not only wuxia in both its literary and cinematic forms, but with Chinese film as a whole.

The first real red flag comes from his mistaking wuxia films for kung fu films. This is, to some degree, like speaking of spaghetti westerns as though they were the same as Poliziotteschi. To acknowledge overlapping themes and visual conventions is one thing, but to mistake the one as the same as the other is a fallacy. I also find it hard to swallow that he refers to them almost uniformly as “flicks.”

After summing up what he believes to be the artistic triumph of recent wuxia films (Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Zhang Yimou’s trio of genre excursions being the only ones he mentions), Mr. Fultz informs us that “there’s nothing wrong with the ‘grindhouse’ style of kung fu movie,” which makes me what he means by “grindhouse,” given that these films were mainstream entertainment for their intended audience and home region. Compared to Chang Cheh’s The Five Deadly Venoms and Jimmy Wang Yu’s The Master of the Flying Guillotine, we are told, Zhang Yimou's films have “[taken] this type of action-based movie to a whole new level of excellence.”

This illustrates precisely the problem I have with this piece. More apt comparisons for Zhang Yimou’s films might be found in the highly influential, elegiac work of King Hu, or the literary adaptation of Li Han-Hsiang at his best, or even the thoughtful tragedy of Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time. But Mr. Fultz has, either through ignorance or genuine equivocation, written off the breadth of a nearly century old film tradition. To read his article, one would believe that until the advent of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the genre contained not a single thoughtful meditation on the cycle of violence and revenge, not a single critical examination of the xia code and the jiang-hu, not a single film that was not a “grindhouse” style action film.

If Mr. Fultz is under the impression that Zhang Yimou’s films have set a visual bench mark for the genre, I have to again disagree. Although the gaudy visuals of his films appeal to western sensibilities, visual experimentation -- whether with slow-motion, special effect, or wonky cinematography -- has long been a staple of the wuxia genre. If he means that there is a technical proficiency present in Zhang’s films that is lacking in the rest of the genre, I have to once again point him to the work of King Hu, and to Wong Kar Wai’s lone contribution. Visually arresting wuxia (and kung fu) films existed before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but Mr. Fultz gives us no indication that he has actually viewed them.

And as a fan of Jet Li who has long championed his ability to, y’know, actually act, I have to wonder at the statement that his one-note role in Hero “is arguably the greatest role of Jet Li’s career.” What about his deft handling of a non-action role in Ocean Heaven? What about his Golden Horse winning performance in Peter Chan’s Warlords? What about his role as the Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei Hung in Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series, where he managed, with aplomb, to fill the shoes of the legendary Kwan Tak Hing? In the comments, there is some discussion of the melodramatic nature of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, which Fultz compares to Shakespeare, oblivious to the fact that it is a loose adaptation of Cao Yu’s “Thunderstorm.”

I am reminded of the brief furor caused by HBO’s “A Game of Thrones.” Various television critics – critics unfamiliar with the fantasy genre, its history and current trajectory, its diverse audience, and the current enthusiasm it enjoys – made a number of statements about what it meant as a product of its genre. Many of those critics actually enjoyed the show, but fans took umbrage at their myopic view of fantasy, quite understandably, and rightly. Fantasy fans are more numerous than (English speaking) wuxia and kung fu fans, and their displeasure was made quite well known. I only hope that they will remember their displeasure when they decide to write about subjects that, though perhaps related, are not within the purview of their fandom.

So yeah. Apparently I am the genre cop. Also: please stop perving over Zhang Ziyi.

I'm not the Genre Police

2012-02-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

It’s not so much that Lightwing23 and I have a bad relationship so much as we have a great love-hate relationship that manifests itself, in practical terms, as mutual annoyance. If you have not read his overview of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series, I can give you an idea of how he appraises it by telling you that I gave him the final book as a Christmas gift. He gave me a copy of David Gaider’s latest opus, Dragon Age: Asunder.

Lightwing23 was also present for a number of pivotal events in my life, like my discovery of Asian cinema, kung fu and wuxia movies particularly. One of the things he enjoys is making me rage by telling stories about people who spout off things that are completely wrong about subjects that interest me, and he knows that few things interest me more than my favorite genre films.

So when he e-mailed me a link to an IGN article titled, “AsianCinema's 20 Greatest Fight Scenes,” I expected to rage. He expected me to rage on my blog for his amusement.

Of the list, I have a few things to say. I find the listing a bit odd. Lacking entirely in Japanese cinema – the author excluded the region for the “purposes of focusing more on martial arts battles,” which is about as perplexing as it gets – the list is hardly a good representative of Asian cinema as a whole. It was nice to see a couple of Korean films make the list, although I would not have chosen the two that made it. I was even happy to see Invincible Armor, which has an expertly choreographed and performed finale. That almost made up for the lack of attention to the films of Lau Kar-Leung, Ching Siu-Tung, Chang Cheh, Kenji Misumi, and a great number of others I could rattle off were I up to it.

But I’m not up to it. I cannot really even get worked up about the assumption that all of the best fight sequences in Asian cinema would be “martial arts battles,” or that fairly recent films comprise the majority of the list. I cannot even be bothered to go off on a writer proclaiming with certainty that the finale to Drunken Master 2 is “the very best depiction of Zui Quan (a.k.a. Drunken Boxing) ever caught on film.”

I can’t get myself in a tizzy over this because it really is not that bad of a list. Granted, it is not a particularly good list; I can think of a number of people who could compile better, more comprehensive lists, myself included. But I was not asked to write it, and the audience for whom this article was written would likely have no truck with many of the films I would pick. It is easy for somebody who subscribes to a historical view to want to discuss the influential aspects of the finale to Zatoichi Monogatari, or the tea-house scene in King Hu’s Come Drink with Me. For the student of martial arts, there is probably a desire to highlight the very carefully constructed depictions of Hung Gar in Lau Kar-Leung’s Martial Club. For the fan of spectacle, it would be hard to top the finale to Ong-Bak 2, or the chaos of John Woo’s Hard Boiled.

But for the average reader of IGN, whose interest in Hong Kong cinema likely extends no further than what is readily available on DVD, and whose knowledge of Asian cinema likely does not extend beyond martial arts movies, this is probably a series of excellent recommendations. Not everyone is likely to become a collector, let alone a historian, critic, or aficionado.

I’m not the genre police. None of us are, really. And while there is a presumptuous edge to this list that I do not appreciate, I can actually get behind the author’s enthusiasm for lesser seen films, like the Indonesian film Merantau. You still cannot spell ignorance without IGN, but for even mentioning a few underappreciated films, I have to give the writer props.

Oh, and, for the record, I actually got all of my rage out the way in the e-mail I sent to Lightwing23 yesterday.

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.