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.
The pressure for "Windstruck" to live up to the expectations of director Kwak Jae-Yong's previous collaboration with actress Jun Ji-Hyun were tremendous. The resulting film is a wildly uneven spiritual sequel/prequel to his earlier hit that contains some moments of unbelievable beauty and other moments of unforgivably calculated melodrama.
"Windstruck" is a supernatural romantic cop thriller comedy drama. It's a pretty safe bet that there has never been a film less sure of itself. Much like its aforementioned predecessor, it starts off lightly enough and becomes more serious as it goes along, with a set of somewhat unpredictable twists and turns. While the twists and turns worked for "My Sassy Girl", they are cruelly and manipulatively maudlin here. The film goes in and out of emotional overload and devolves into pure saccharine by the third act. The final scene is a predictable link to "My Sassy Girl", which is somewhat satisfying but very much groantastic.
There's still a bit to be admired here that will undoubtedly find fans for the film. The best moments in "Windstruck" fill the frame with an incredibly gorgeous color palette, inviting the viewer to admire the sheer majesty of the sequence. Too bad about the narrative, though.
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.
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I agree about the editing, this film could have been a lot better. However, I believe Joel Silver felt that casting Jet Li with Hip-Hop culture stars would at least have DMX and Aliayah fans help balance the receipts at the box office.
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'm normally not a big fan of the comedy in Hong Kong cinema, which is just for the most part too "in-your-face" for my tastes. However, I found "Chinese Odyssey 2002" to be a very nice surprise: a delightful, light romantic comedy with gags that actually work quite well.
Director Jeff Lau spends much of the time mocking himself and his producer, Wong Kar Wai, parodying scenes and quotes from their filmography. There is one scene early on in which literally all the characters involved have a voiceover narration akin to Takeshi Kaneshiro's in the opening of "Chungking Express," to comedic results.
Also greatly helping the cause are the lead actors, especially Tony Leung and Faye Wong. Leung's comedic timing is great and makes his character immediately likable, despite being considered a bully by the rest of the town. Wong's performance is more proof that she needs to do more acting, because whenever she does, she lights up the film.
Overall, this film is very well recommended, though many of the jokes will likely fly over the heads of those uninitiated with Hong Kong cinema and culture.
"My Sassy Girl" is a film that's a bit uneven, but with the good far outweighing the bad. The comedic moments are great, as is the camerawork, and the performances of the lead actors are spectacular. However, the running time is overly ambitious, and there are a few scenes in the film that should have been left on the cutting room floor.
In other words, it's a film like this that really makes me hate giving a numerical score to film reviews. When "My Sassy Girl" is in a good moment, it's spectacular; but there are a few unforgivable scenes that would knock it down from a 4.5 to a 4 for me without placing this review in the context of director Kwak Jae-Yong's subsequent work and its importance within contemporary Korean cinema. In particular, there's a short montage of the two friends goofing around at an amusement park that looks like it comes straight out of a made-for-TV movie.
There are many unexpected twists and turns within "My Sassy Girl" that one would not expect in the typical romantic comedy narrative. This formula is actually rather successful overall, and while the second half takes a turn for the more dramatic, the characters have become so well defined that the melodrama is well-earned.
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.
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Good review. Cheng Pei-Pei was beautiful, graceful, and deadly. Yueh Hua was also quite good in his portrayal of Drunken Cat. As a whole though slow, the total movie was excellent.
Chungking Express (product link) Art "Chungking Express" is the rare film that is both experimental yet irresistibly fun. It will be more well appreciated by fans of art cinema than it will by most HK cinema fans, but those who approach it with an open mind will likely find it to be an enormously rewarding experience.
"Express" eschews traditional plot structure for a more "slice of life" approach to narrative, portraying the daily lives of four lonely Hong Kong dwellers. Besides the gorgeous cinematography courtesy of Andrew Lau and Christopher Doyle, the real scene stealer is first time actress Faye Wong, who plays what can really only be described as an endearing stalker.
This film, along with its spiritual sequel "Fallen Angels", is probably the most accessible of Wong Kar-Wai's oeuvre. While much is to be said about all of his films in general, "Chungking Express" remains my personal favorite.
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Absolutely. I'm not the biggest WKW fan, but this film is tops.
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.
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