In terms of importance alone, "Come Drink With Me" is a five-star movie. King Hu changed the way martial arts films and Hong Kong cinema in general were made with this highly influential film.
Cheng Pei Pei, best known to western audiences as Jade Fox from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," is absolutely beautiful in this movie and puts in a great performance as the film's main protagonist, Golden Swallow. Drunken Cat is another entertaining character, though the actor who portrayed him didn't seem very drunk at all. The film's music is also memorable, and is likely to get stuck in the head of the viewer for the rest of the day after watching it.
Though the film is very important, it doesn't quite hold up after forty years, which is what kept it from recieving a perfect score. It is still entertaining, but some viewers of newer martial arts and wuxia may feel disappointed with the slow action of this classic.
Shaolin And Wu Tang (product link) Martial Arts / Action/Adventure "Shaolin And Wu-Tang" is an entertaining film which features excellent fight choreography and training sequences, but suffers from a somewhat weak plot and characters. Gordon Liu plays basically the same character from "The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin," who lives through tragedy and wants to become a monk, but the twist is that instead of the film focusing on his struggle, it focuses on a rivalry between the Shaolin and Wu-Tang schools.
The real treat in this movie is for fans of the Wu-Tang Clan: many of the most famous soundclips used throughout their first album originate from the English dub-tracks.
This is a worthwhile film. Martial-arts enthusiasts and curious fans of the Wu-Tang Clan will likely enjoy it.
I had first heard of "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" through reading The Wu-Tang Manual (the book by the RZA, not the actual manual, mind you). RZA wrote about the movie with such reverence that I was convinced I needed to track this movie down. It was not an easy film to find, but once I did, I was not disappointed at all.
It's not a flawless movie, but the flaws within the movie aren't nearly large enough to discredit this movie's reputation as one of the greatest martial arts films ever created. Fu Sheng's acting in particular is over the top, but it works for his character. The main distractions are the props and sets, which are a bit tacky at times.
Other than those issues, "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" has "classic" written all over it. The story is deep and involving, and the action is on par with the best of Lau Kar Leung's films. The three-section closing fight scene is a real treat.
Viewers of "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" may recognize some of the musical cues that Quentin Tarantino used in "Kill Bill", including the horns that play when Beatrix meets her daughter for the first time in Vol. 2.
The White Dragon [2004] (product link) Action/Adventure / Martial Arts Half the time I was watching this I wasn't sure if I was watching a not-funny comedy or a really awful drama. The back of the DVD said that it was in the vein of House of Flying Daggers, but it's nowhere close. I'm not sure what the intent of the filmmakers was when they made this, but it fails as a martial arts film, as a comedy, as a drama, as a parody (is Chicken Feathers supposed to be Zatoichi?), and as any other type of film you could categorize it into. By the end of the movie I just wanted Chicken Feathers and that prince dude to battle it out and accidentally kill Cecilia Cheung's narcissistic character. This doesn't even fall in the "so bad it's good" category.
Romeo Must Die (product link) Action/Adventure / Martial Arts Romeo Must Die is a movie that is highly flawed, but if you actually bother to pay attention to the small details in the plot it is still enjoyable. This is the type of movie which could be a much better film if it were re-edited: for example, cutting out the x-ray vision scenes, and definitely leaving some of the dialogue in the scene where Trish O'day's brother is smoking weed with his girlfriend/wife/friend/person. In fact, it was the horrible acting job of the guy who played Trish's brother (I can't remember his name) that largely weighed down this film.
Enjoy the film, but don't expect any classic action sequences.
SECURE CREDIT CARD PROCESSING BY VERISIGN.
1429 users online right now / 1126090 visitors since 12/28/2008 5:37:27 AM All content copyright 2000-7 HKFlix.com, not to be used without written permission.
