Bodyguards and Assassins

[Drunk Monk]

I took a break from integrating albatross corrections because I had a shitty day on Friday and I just couldn't work any more. I had B&A, Wushu, and the entire upcoming season of NG's Fight Science, sitting in my queue. I'll get to the others in a month or so.

This is Donnie Yen's latest, a lavish period piece where they rebuilt a huge section of old Hong Kong to scale. The sets and costumes are amazing. It's also rather melodramatic with a ton of characters with complex relationships. My version only had Mandarin subs and it's the first time I've watched a kung fu flick and couldn't quite get wtf was going on without subs. As a kung fu flick, that's not to its favor. There's some decent action for sure, but not enough of it, and it's drowned by plot. The action is a lot of wire work - to a comic book level - although Donnie again shows his virtousity by adding his take on parkour to the mix. Cung and Xing Wu are in it, both friends who I've hung out with a bit, and both are villains, so I'm not sure what that says about the martial company I keep. There's some good stuff in here in terms of story, but as a martial arts film, it's a bit disappointing. There's just not enough action and too much weepy violin music. The Donnie vs. Cung fight is ok, the best on screen one for Cung so far, but overall, it's not mind blowing. The moral of most of the fights is when the villians bust out their hooks-on-chains, run like hell. Also, wtf didn't they just shoot some of the villains earlier? They had the damn pistol. That's a bit of a spoiler, and I should have warned you, but I'm sure if you bother to see this, that plot turn will bother you too. There's some good ninja attacks. I think if I understood the story, I might have liked it better, or at least been a little more engaged.

Donnie turns in his best acting performance to date. First Jet, then Jackie, now Donnie, busting out some real acting. It's odd. I have mixed feelings about that.

I'd recommend this to Greg because the set is out-freaking-rageous. I might recommend this to CF & LCF because they know kung fu, know the players a little better, and might be more interested in the story arc. The rest of you can give this a miss, sad to say. I was really hoping this one would be much stronger as a kung fu flick. It's got a great cast.

OK, back to the albatross for me.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

The albatross is your friend, Padawan.

[Drunk Monk]

This is a classic example of how some films are better when you can't quite understand the language. Most of the dialog was sappy patriotic propaganda 'Oh, aren't we heroic? We're going to sacrifice our lives for Dr. Sun Yat Sen.' It's too much, waaaay too much, so melodramatic that it totally hampers the action.

This film is a lot like Road Warrior, only they spend the first hour of it crying about the having to die for this noble cause, then there's some Road Warrior-like action, only instead of post-apocalyptic car fu, it's turn-of-the-century kung fu, parsed with a lot of over played death scenes. The film is way too self absorbed. Too much crying. There shouldn't be so much crying in kung fu films.

[cranefly]

Finally caught this on TV. It was playing channel 26. I saw almost all of it, but must admit to being in the recliner and surfing the web on my laptop at the same time. So please don't test me on all the details.

Yes, some amazing sets, and some of the scenes impressed me with their composition and lighting, though others seemed a bit dark. An artsy technique of fading quickly in and out of black again and again to bracket certain characters or events as they unfolded got annoying. Still, overall great cinematography.

There were English subtitles, but I wasn't following them all the time. The first half was setting up the plight of these repressed and outnumbered rebels, and no doubt one of their figureheads was Sun Yat Sen, but I didn't bother figuring it out. The last half shows these rebels trying to protect their figureheads, among them Sun Yat Sen, from 600,000 assassins. Or so it seemed. They were thicker than TV antennae on the rooftops, which I now realize is a terrible analogy. There was crying throughout. In fact, the rebels could have won handily if they'd only weaponized teardrops. My god, so many tears coming from all directions. The sobbing, oh, the sobbing. Big-star rebels got extended death scenes -- and I mean long to the point of channel-flipping (while also surfing porn on the laptop). Way too many static character-building scenes. Way too few fight scenes. The battle between Donnie Yen and Cung Le was much longer than I expected, which was good and bad. Good because it gave him screen time, and you got to see him trying various things. Bad because for all its inventive techniques and ideas, the fight scene wasn't as carefully choreographed as I wanted, and there wasn't much of a "plot" to the fight (there was some redundancy in Cung Le stomping on a fallen Donnie Yen).

But all those death scenes where the noble hero gets picked apart by no-good cowards or meanies were incredibly and sickeningly sadistic. Yes, you're hearing this from Mister "Let's watch Ichi the Killer again!" Cranefly. I haven't looked up the director Teddy Chang, but my goodness he's a sadistic son of a bitch who loves to torture innocents and show their slow agonizing death in extreme close-ups.

It got me thinking about Flowers of War that DM just reviewed. If Teddy Chang had directed that movie instead of Yimou Zhang, those girls in the church would have been graphically eviscerated after a couple hours of graphic rape.
Graphically speaking.