Past Misdeeds: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China, 1917. Liu Jin-Xi (Donnie Yen) lives a peaceful life with his wife Ah Yu (Tang Wei), her son from a first marriage Liu Fang-Zheng (Zheng Wei) and their son Liu Xiao-Tian (Li Jia-Min) in a country town, working in a paper mill. Shadows of a different man Liu Jin-Xi once was begin to emerge when two martial artist villains try to rob the mill.

Liu Xiao-Tian kills the men in what on first look seems like a series of exceedingly lucky accidents, making him the hero of the village. But Xu Bai-Jiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the detective investigating the villains' death, has his doubts regarding Xiao-Tian. How, after all, should one hapless butcher's son be able to "accidentally" kill two of the meanest martial artists around? Some of the physical evidence Xu Bai-Jiu finds tells a different story, too, and the detective is soon convinced Xiao-Tian must be a masterful martial artist and experienced killer who is just using this identity to hide himself from the law.

Even though Xiao-Tian must be a changed man from whoever he was before, Xu Bai-Jiu can't help himself but go after him, sniffing and asking questions and even accommodating himself at Xiao-Tian's place. Xu Bai-Jiu's own past has him convinced that his natural tendency to compassion is a weakness before the spirit of the law that needs to be purged, so he treats his sense of empathy as an illness that keeps him unable to practice the martial arts; not surprisingly, he also doesn't believe a man can ever truly change, so Xiao-Tian becomes an obsession and a riddle for him to solve.

Xu Bai-Jiu's investigation has other consequences than those he intends, too, for once it has reached a certain point, the people that made Xiao-Tian the man he once was (Jimmy Wang Yu! Kara Hui!) learn where their old friend now is, and they very much want him back, not realizing that some men do in fact change.

Peter Chan Hoh-San's Wu Xia is one those films from Hong Kong that makes me doubt the truth of the old-fartish refrain of "things in Hong Kong cinema are just so bad now" I and many other long-time fans of the city's cinematic output have been singing for about a decade now, for how bad can a regional cinema truly be if it still can produce fantastic movies like this?

In time-honoured fashion, Wu Xia mixes elements of the mystery genre with elements of the wuxia (a real surprise given its title, surely), to form a meditation on the possibility of change in people, the usefulness of suppressing impulses, and even the old question about nature and nurture that may remind some of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, just with the difference that Chan's film - unlike that of the Canadian - is not a comedy. (To digress for a parenthesis, yes, I am that weird guy who really thinks Cronenberg's film is not just a black comedy, but is also meant to be one rather than as the bloody drama most viewers seem to see when watching it; I'll only point at the nature of the sexual role-play between Mortensen and Bello as an obvious hint at that film's true nature.)

Unlike Mortensen's Tom Stall, though, Xiao-Tian isn't only truly alive when he is a monster, and his family life with Ah Yu and the children never has the feeling of somebody going through trained motions without any actual emotions; Xiao-Tian may have only locked away the monstrous parts of himself, but what's left is not an automaton, but an actual human being.

The movie's first two thirds are in large parts about exploring its two male main characters (with Tang Wei getting a handful of scenes that flesh her out as a character more than I would have expected from a film with this set-up and structure - it sure helps how much the actress is able to express with just a few looks) as mirror images of each other: Xiao-Tian as a man who has locked away everything destructive and monstrous about himself to become a human being, and Xu Bai-Jiu who has locked away his most human traits - compassion and empathy - to become a better agent of the Law. The former is a man who will not use his martial arts abilities because they are so closely connected to his worst nature, the latter unable to use his because his best nature cost him his abilities. I can't imagine what the Chinese censor thought about the film's treatment of compassion and the Law, especially since the film treats Xu Bai-Jiu as being in the wrong with his priorities; it's nice to still find Hong Kong films that dare to argue for humanist values being more important than the jackboot. Interestingly, the film also seems to express that it's easier to suppress one's worst impulses than one's best. Of course, both of Wu Xia's main characters will have to accept parts of what they've kept closed up to become fully functional human beings, possibly even heroes.

I was a bit surprised by how well Donnie Yen is able to sell his character's complexities. I do of course love the man and his generally motionless or scowling face, but he always has been a better martial arts actor than an actor, and this is a film that needs him to express himself outside of fight scenes quite a bit. Yen is still using more body language and posture than facial expression (though he has developed a surprisingly pleasant ability to smile over the years), but he is doing that very well, selling the inner changes his character goes through without having to talk about them.


The well handled philosophical discourse alone would be more than enough to recommend Wu Xia, but there is so much more to love here: there are the fantastic fight scenes - of course choreographed by Yen - that dominate the film's final third; Chan's curious yet effective decision to treat Chinese village life of the early 20th century as a peculiar mixture of naturalism and bucolic idyll and still have martial arts be more than a little magical instead of "realistic"; the relatively small but important roles of Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui who feature in the film's two most intense fight scenes; the way the film uses Kaneshiro's traditional Chinese science and medicine as the base for some CSI-inspired scenes and makes that work too without things becoming ridiculous; how Chan's direction handles action, near-mythical dramatic family conflicts, human-level emotions and moments of peace with the same assured sense of rhythm and pacing as well as a deep understanding of their importance. In Wu Xia, it's all good.

On WTF: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

From time to time, Hong Kong cinema still produces films to delight even the most jaded of viewers. Case in point is Peter Chan's wonderful, complex and exciting Wu Xia, a film that plays fast and loose with genre tropes, discusses philosophy and still finds time for some inspired action scenes where Donnie Yen can strut his stuff.

Read more excited rambling about the film in my column on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,wuxia,peter chan hoh-san,donnie yen,takeshi kaneshiro,tang wei,jimmy wang yu,kara hui,other places

Three Films Make A Post: REIGN OF TERROR FROM EARTH

District 9 (2009): If it was ever needed, this is proof that a maximalist aesthetic can work perfectly when in service of the right material. Obviously, you can have social commentary, an unsympathetic protagonist, Hollywood sentimentality, bloody shoot-outs, moral ambiguity and a finale with a big damn mech on Hollywood money, and you can make it good, if you just try hard enough.

Stuff like Avatar is just not on the same level, even as pure spectacle.

 

Rocktober Blood (1984): While it starts out with ten minutes of everything loveable about the 80s Hair Metal Slasher sub-genre (perverse hair, terrible music, cheesy dialogue, cheesy everything else), this movie credited to a group of inbred cannibals calling themselves (excuse their grammar) "the Sebastian's" crawls to a halt for the next hour only to awaken again for the mandatory "massacre on stage". While I'm all for poking people to death with a microphone stand and death by guitar, even this theoretical highpoint of the cinematic art is destroyed by slow, slow, slow pacing. I'd recommend reading a book (about METAL!, of course) while watching this. That way, you can still enjoy the better parts of the film while not nodding off during the idle hour.

 

Beach of the War Gods (1973): Wang Yu writes, directs, stars and really really hates the Japanese. What a surprise.

Our "hero" and a bunch of under-characterized "patriots" protect a Chinese town against Japanese pirates. More than half of the film - as it seems the only half Wang Yu as director and writer cared about - consists of a pro-longed battle inside the town walls. The battle is stylishly shot (and ironically heavily influenced by Japanese Chambara) and brutal, but isn't as involving as it should be. Turns out that I need to be vaguely interested in characters to care if they live or die, and that Wang Yu isn't at all interested in building at least stock characters.

I prefer Wang Yu when he's either kept in check by the Shaw Brothers production machine or utterly insane. Beach is neither here or there.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,new zealandish movies,hong kong movies,neill blomkamp,sf,action,martial arts,horror,in short,jimmy wang yu

Knight Errant (1973)

This is a typical Jimmy Wang Yu feature after his stint with the Shaw Brothers.

Jimmy earns his money as a taxi driver, but has the sad tendency to always get into trouble he can only get out of using his kung fu. Since Taiwan seems to have very strange laws concerning things like self defense, he always ends up paying the hospital bills of the guys he's knocking out, even of the gangsters who tried to rape his girlfriend. Soon a problem appears that he can't make go away by hitting it and he learns a few important things about the morality of violence. Oh, no, wait. It's a Jimmy Wang Yu movie, so of course a problem appears that he solves by hitting, kicking and killing a few people.

Jimmy's father was working as an aide to a Japanese officer during the Japanese occupation, but secretly helped the resistance against them. After he made the escape of an important spy possible, the officer committed suicide, as did the officer's wife some time later. Their three sons were brought up by their grandmother, who trained them in the martial arts to take revenge on Jimmy's father.

Now the three come to Taiwan to kill their victim and - since it is a Jimmy Wang Yu movie and in Jimmy's little world all Japanese people are incredibly evil - his whole family.

Although they develop some devious plans, some of them involving a saw and Jimmy's blind sister, they aren't successful at all. Instead, Jimmy slaughters them all mercilessly.

Granny of course won't let the matter rest that easily and makes a final assault.

There's not a lot to say about Knight Errant. As in many of JWY's films the direction has a lot of sloppy moments and some inspired ones. The same goes for the fight choreography and acting. Unfortunately the sloppiness this time overwhelms most of the inspired moments as thoroughly as Jimmy does with his victims enemies, leading to a film I can't help but call a little boring.

It doesn't help the entertainment value of the film that there is not much of the madness on display that makes a lot of our hero's movies endearing in spite of themselves; there are no flying guillotines, no Yoga fighters with telescopic arms nor any midgets on display. Even the theoretically nastier moments of violence are somewhat subdued.

Technorati-Tags: taiwanese movies,jimmy wang yu,martial arts,action,reviews