Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.

Past Misdeeds: Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (2010)

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 without any re-writes or 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 in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have earned the Empress a lot of enemies, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die - spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims' moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

Dee isn't exactly the biggest fan of the ruler himself, what with him having spent the last eight years in one of her prisons for acts of rebellion, but he still takes on the job she wants him to do. I suspect the man just loves to solve riddles.

With the help of the Empress's closest servant Shangguan Jing'er (Li Bing-Bing), whose job it is to keep the good Judge in line, and albinotic secret police man Pei Donglai (Deng Chao), Dee begins to investigate. Despite his fabulous knowledge of martial arts and his very big brain, Dee will need all the help he can get, because he'll not only have to thwart a secret conspiracy, but will also have to escape the metaphorical pitfalls of politics and morals, as well as various pointy and sharp objects various shadowy figures want to poke him with.

One (among only a very few) positive developments in Hong Kong based movie-making of the last few years has been the return of directors like Tsui Hark and John Woo to Hong Kong and China to make decent movies again. The way their careers in the US were going, Hark and Woo would probably have had to direct Steven Seagal movies next, so their return to making actual films with actual actors again is something to make an old fan like me pretty happy.

Not that Detective Dee's director Tsui Hark - whose return to his native grounds came quite a bit earlier than that of Woo - has made much of the comparatively better working environment in Hong Kong in the last few years. Before Dee Hark's best efforts of this century have been rather pedestrian, very much giving me the impression of being the products of a man who has too many technical chops to make truly abysmal films outside of Hollywood, but who has lost the inspiration and energy of his youth without finding a suitable replacement for these traits.

This first Detective Dee movie by Hark (at least a second one will soon follow) - based on a historical character who had been a hero of legends and novels in China and was later used in Western detective novels, too - is a big step in the right direction for the director.

The film is a martial arts fantasy mystery (so at least genre-wise quite a bit like Tsui's debut movie, The Butterfly Murders) that just barely (and with more than just one unspoken yet clear "but") manages the required, undignified kowtow to the imperialist ideals of contemporary China in its final five minutes, but is really more interested in the things many of the director's best films are interested in: flying people, weird fu, the grey areas where duty and personal feelings collide, a bit of gender-bending, and Andy Lau punching out attacking CGI-deer. Not unexpectedly, this is the sort of film that might take place in a precisely located historical era, yet that only cares about the actual morals, technology and feel of its era when it's convenient or interesting, which, if you ask me, is as it should be in a pulp adventure. Plus, this approach makes the addition of various steampunk elements possible.

As a Hong Kong pulp adventure movie, Detective Dee is a lot of fun. Once the narrative gets going, Tsui basically moves from one interesting and/or fun action set piece to the next, with only a few stops for characterization, moral deliberation, and detection in the mix. It's clear that the director knows what an audience wants from its pulpy adventure movies and is all too happy to provide it.

However, it has to be said that the choreography of the action scenes (by good old Sammo Hung, no less) isn't quite up to the highest standards of martial arts cinema. While the action is certainly professionally realized and exciting, there aren't many moments here that let one gasp with excitement or be startled by the film's beauty. The action - like Tsui's direction itself - tends a bit to the safe and professional where I'd have wished for the strange or ambitious. Of course, Detective Dee's type of "safe and professional" still beats many comparable Hollywood movies - as well as far too many Hong Kong films of the last decade - in this regard, even without breaking a sweat.

Acting-wise, the film is on just about the same level, though Andy Lau and Li Bing-Bing have no chemistry at all, which doesn't help the non-fighty bits of the movie much.


Clearly, when the worst thing I can say about a new film by Tsui Hark is that it's merely very good instead of great, I'm only complaining because the film's quality shows that the director still has a great film in him and not just a pretty great one, and just hasn't delivered quite what he's capable of here.

On WTF: Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (2010)

Original title: Di Renjie

Sometimes, cinematic dreams come true and a once-loved director who has been in the dregs for years suddenly comes out on top again.

Case in point is Tsui Hark's pretty great, slightly steampunk-y mystery wuxia Detective Dee. Find out what exactly I think about the movie in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,martial arts,wuxia,mystery,reviews,tsui hark,andy lau,li bing-bing,carina lau,deng chao,other places

The Magic Crane (1993)

We are in martial world China. The Emperor has ordered a meet-up of the nine great martial arts schools, so that the groups can peacefully arrange those things which usually end in large fights between them.

Alas, being peaceful is not in the program of the upstart Dragon School and their master, the nastily disposed So Pang Hoi (Lawrence Ng). So Pang Hoi wants to become the master of the martial world, and what better way is there to achieve his goal than to attack the congregation with poisoned rubber bats? The bats of evil nearly do everyone in, but an oversized crane (doll) kills them all.

The crane belongs to a girl named Cloud/Pak Wan-Fai (Anita Mui), excellent martial artist and kung flute player. Her further assistance is needed, because all masters of the various schools, except for Yat Yeung-Tze (Damian Lau), the "leader" of the very insignificant Diancang School, have been poisoned by the bats and now need all their concentration to stave off death. Fortunately, Yat Yeung-Tze's only student, the loveable-but-only-mildly-competent Ma Kwun-Mo (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) has already had several meet-cutes with Cloud and asks for her help in curing the poisoned. So Ma Kwun-Mo and Cloud ride off on the crane to kill a giant fire-breathing turtle whose bile is the only cure for the poison. At the same time, Yat Yeung-Tze will take care of business at the home front.

Both projects shouldn't be much of a problem, but Cloud, or rather her master Lam Hoi Ping (Norman Chu), has an enemy the girl does not know about: Blue Butterfly (Rosamund Kwan), who has sworn to kill Lam - her father - for having left her and her mother to die in a burning palace he rescued Cloud from (further explanation not forthcoming). Blue Butterfly uses her superior lute fu to make everyone's life miserable.

At the same time, Yat Yeung-Tze has to fight through the usual squabbles and conspiracies amongst the martial artists and against the ambitions of the power-hungry General Tsao Hung (Zhang Tielin). And it's only getting more complicated from then on.

Benny Chan's The Magic Crane seems to be the Tsui-Hark-produced--and-written wuxia nobody likes to talk about. That's patently unfair, because this is an absolutely awe-inspiring film.

Sure, Chan is a gun-for-hire director without much of a personal touch, but Tsui Hark's hands-on production approach prevents the film from ever becoming boring or merely competent.

The script is - as is the wuxia genre's wont - telling a basically simple story in exceedingly complicated ways, with a large cast of characters, all of which turn out to be equally important. Depending on how you look at it, it's either sprightly and sprawling or utterly chaotic. I'd go with the former, if possibly only out of thankfulness for The Magic Crane's incessant madness and manic energy. I also suspect that the film was made with an audience in mind that knows at least the basics of the wuxia novel it is based on, making some of its elements less clear to those like me who haven't.

But "Understanding the plot" isn't the point here anyway. Forward momentum rules the screen.

The film just doesn't seem to know where to stop, and if it knew, it still wouldn't do it as a matter of general principle. There's something absurdly wonderful or wonderfully absurd to be experienced in every scene. Besides the lute fu and the flute fu, the ridiculous crane and the possibly even more ridiculous turtle, there's also sex fu, a lady fighter with underwear trouble (feel the power of Hong Kong "humour"!), a deadly poison that can only be cured by sex, an utterly random evil old guy who is chained up in a hole in the ground and feeds a magic martial arts manual to someone (with terrible mutation consequences, of course), bell fu, a peculiar tornado, a wonderful sound wave stance fight - it just goes on and on. Whatever weird thing you want to imagine is in here, so many weird things even that the usual scenes of people flying through the air (which is of course in here too) seem perfectly quaint in context.

Oh, and did I mention that the film's big bad is disposed off by being blown up with a flute? Or that the film ends with the sweet, sweet promise of legal polygamy (oh, the wonders of Chinese culture!)?

Of course, this high concentration of madness leads to a certain lack of depth in characterization (although the actors are doing what they can), and doesn't exactly help to make the film's themes clear, but complaining about it is like complaining that there are noodles in your instant ramen.

I'm pretty sure the world would be a much better place if everyone would just go with the program and watch The Magic Crane.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,wuxia,wtf,benny chan,tsui hark,reviews,tony leung chiu-wai,anita mui,rosamund kwan

Swordsman (1990)

When a retired official of the Chinese Emperor steals a scroll containing the secrets of an invincible form of martial arts from one of those notoriously evil and hard to kill eunuchs (Lau Shun) to ensure the future of his children, the plan backfires a little.

Soon, he and his family are slaughtered by the Eunuch's henchpeople (among them Jackie Cheung in one of his few outings as an evil bastard). Before he dies, the official can just inform Ling Wu Chung (Sam Hui), the pupil of his friend, the leader of the Wa Mountain School (Lau Siu-Ming) of the scroll's hiding place and ask the young man to deliver the secret to his son.

Of course, this being a wuxia and all, what should be an easy delivery of a small piece of information turns into a quest of epic proportions with double-crosses, the song that won't ever go away, snake throwing, girls badly disguised as boys and more flying people than in the last general meeting of the Marvel Universe. Limbs will be torn, hearts will be broken and honor sacrificed to ambition.

Swordsman obviously had quite a troubled production history, but the accounts I found of it are so inconsistent that I don't think it prudent to go into it too much. Let's just stay with the fact that the HKMDB lists six directors for the film - King Hu (who is the official director going by the titles), Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-Tung, Ann Hui, Andrew Kam and Raymond Lee. At a guess and based on my knowledge of their other films I would say that most of the movie was directed by Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung, with a few scattered scenes (the rather melancholic moments in the first half of the film come to mind) by King Hu, but it's impossible to know for sure. What I can say for sure is that the film is very much a new wave wuxia as one would expect of Hark and Ching.

For a film directed by just about everyone, Swordsman stays surprisingly consistent in tone and content. It is a little complicated for the uninitiated, perhaps even convoluted, but that has always been the wuxia way of storytelling. "Let's just throw as much of everything on the screen as possible, and do it well, and let the audience (with the knowledge of the novels our films are based on) do the rest", seems to be the main thrust of the philosophy behind these films, and usually - as well as in this case - this works out well even for people not familiar with the sources.

While Swordsman's plot is complicated, it is quite comprehensible when one sets one's mind on understanding it, this time even with quite clearly understandable character motivations, but - and that's one of the aspects I love about this genre the most - the film works perfectly well as a string of little marvels; just going with the flow is as pleasant as understanding everything.

One of the deepest pleasures of this phase of wuxia filmmaking lies in the way the complex plotting and the incessant motion of the fight scenes are intertwined, making the flying and spiraling people with the superhuman powers and the archetypal psychology the logical consequence of the shifting world they find themselves in.

Swordsman seems to me like a perfect specimen of its genre, with wonders and small, lovely moments of humanity to spare that quietly tell the story of a bunch of young people declining to become like their elders.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,king hu,tsui hark,ching siu-tung,sam hui,cecilia yip,jacky cheung,wuxia,reviews