Bite Me Kate – Underworld Awakening

Vampires are supposed to be scary. If there is one thing that makes the Twilight movies suck, it is that they have forgotten that fact and made vampires into pasty-faced hunky dreamboats.   Vampires prey on humans, they don’t date them. Last year the excellent Stakeland brought the horror back to the vampire genre and provided a bloody antidote to the Twilight barf-fest. Now Kate Beckinsale returns to the character and catsuit of vampire warrior-woman Selene for her third entry in the Underworld series (there is a prequel in which she does not appear, before anyone feels the need to point that out, so technically this is the fourth Underworld movie).

In the prologue, the existence of vampires and lycanthropes (werewolves) is exposed to the waking world, leading to a mass cull to rid humanity of their “infection”. Attempting to flee with her lover Michael, Selene is captured. When she wakes up in a laboratory, years later, she discovers the humans have been experimenting upon a child called Eve (India Eisley) who is a rare vampire-lycan hybrid and with whom Selene shares a strange bond. Selene takes Eve and goes on the run from the human authorities, determined to protect the girl from humans and lycans alike. They find an ally in vampire David (Theo James), all the while pursued by the forces of Antigen, led by Dr Lane (a sanguine Stephen Rea).

Eve hides in shame after wearing white to Goth Night.

Man Marlind and Bjorn Stein take over the directorial duties and to their credit they have greedily embraced the horror elements of the franchise. If the first Underworld was gothic in tone and style, with gorgeous vamps languidly reclining in sprawling, gloomy mansions, Awakening is the industrial Underworld – a loud, pounding onslaught of a movie. The violence is aggressive, unrelenting and at times quite shocking – a shot of Eve being attacked by a werewolf is graphic and unsettling. However, this is no retrograde horror flick in which women are helpless before unstoppable male predators. The most dangerous character here is Selene, consumed by a maternal desire to protect Eve. Selene is far more ferocious than in the previous films and, unlike the appalling Edward in Twilight, she is not shy about sinking her fangs into a human’s jugular when she’s hungry. Beckinsale imbues Selene with an air of power and self-assurance. She is more dynamic than any of the men, a better fighter and, when matched against a larger, more powerful opponent, smarter.

It is arguable, of course, that Selene is a male fantasy construct – a beautiful image of an idealised female form but the character is never presented as being beholden to or defined by the men in her life. She has her own agenda and relies upon no-one but herself, unlike Bella “How can I make him love me?” Swan.

The movie looks tremendous on a big screen and the action scenes are ambitious and extremely well realised. In the first Underworld film, it was never entirely clear what made Selene special in her status as a Death Dealer who hunted werewolves. This time around, it is abundantly clear that Selene is lethal. The sequence in which she tears through a squad of human police is brutal and delivered with bombast and style. The battles with the lycans are bloody affairs, thrilling in their visceral impact, while the climactic showdown provides an almost deafening crescendo of mayhem. The stunt work is top notch, with cars being thrown around and a lovely shot in which Selene knocks over a moving van by charging into the side of it. She’s a bloodthirsty super-heroine who could punch Batman into next week.

There are some plot elements sure to raise a smirk – the humans hold Selene in captivity as a test subject but inexplicably decide to keep her distinctive catsuit, corset and boots in a cabinet close at hand so that moments after escape, Selene is back in her fetish gear. Beckinsale looks amazing but she does rather look like she’s on her way to a goth-industrial nightclub somewhere to spend the night dancing to Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails. Just as in all the films in the Resident Evil franchise, the ending leaves the door wide open for a sequel. If Beckinsale wants to get back in the catsuit again, I’ll be there. Bite me, Kate. Bite me hard.

Haywire – An Alpha Female Hits The Big Screen

Since the boom in public interest in MMA following the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, a growing number of MMA fighters have dabbled in acting. The results have been, by and large, teeth grindingly awful. Straight-to-DVD releases like Circle Of Pain and No Rules are unwatchable, and far and away the best MMA movie so far – Gavin O’Connor’s superb Warrior – made the smart choice to use actors in the leading roles, because, let’s face it, it’s easier to teach an actor to fight than a fighter to act. But then along comes Steven Soderbergh with Haywire, an action thriller starring former American Gladiator, kickboxer and MMA starlet Gina Carano, to buck the trend.

The new "Dodge The Bullets" round on American Gladiators really thinned out the competition

The basic premise is that Mallory Kane (Carano) is an operative working for a private contractor that works with the US government carrying out espionage for hire. Betrayed by her employer and hunted by the authorities, Mallory goes looking for answers and revenge. The script adds interest to the fairly straightforward premise by telling the story out of sequence and teasing out information gradually.

It was bold of Soderbergh to have a first-timer carry the film, but Carano rises to the challenge. Certainly, the script gives Mallory little time for introspection and certainly none for soliloquising but then this is Soderbergh showing the same lean, muscular style he displayed in The Limey. Carano makes Mallory likeable to root for, with a fair dash of sex appeal, and she exudes enormous self-belief. She’s the alpha female and it certainly does not hurt that she is surrounded by a top notch supporting cast. Channing Tatum (who was excellent in The Eagle, which is well worth your time) is spot-on as Aaron, an agent obviously hired for his muscles rather than his brain, and Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender and Bill Paxton are all on reliably good form. Ewan McGregor drips sleazy intentions as Kenneth, Mallory’s boss and former lover. He makes a despicable villain and has one of the best lines of the film – “You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. That would be a mistake.”

The movie opens with a confrontation in a cafe between Mallory and Aaron that explodes into shocking violence. This is where Carano’s casting really pays off. The fight scenes are brutal, no-frills affairs and benefit enormously from the fact that Carano is visible performing them herself – there is no need for frantic editing and lurching cameras to conceal the presence of a stunt double. Carano carries herself with a fighter’s confidence and cuts an athletic figure. An illuminating contrast is with Angelina Jolie in Salt (such a dumb movie – apparently you can infiltrate the White House by hiding round corners). Jolie is so thin she singularly fails to convince as a hand-to-hand combatant – it is hard to believe anyone so emaciated could pack a punch of any consequence, but Carano has power in her physique and makes you believe in Mallory’s ferocity.

Sure, she can jump over a car - but can she cook?

The stripped down direction of the fight scenes brought to mind the classic scrap on the train in From Russia With Love. There is no time for witty banter or clever insults – these are desperate encounters where defeat will result in death, so the combatants’ concentration is absolute and there is no energy or time to talk. The fight in the hotel room is a knockdown, drag out classic and matched by the scene in which Mallory takes out two members of the Garda in Dublin with ruthless determination. J.J. Perry, who worked on Warrior, is credited as fight choreographer and has really hit the mark. If there was any wirework, I didn’t spot it. Instead there is a mix of Muay Thai and jujitsu all performed with total conviction. It looks painful but is thrilling to behold. If Carano stays in the movies and never returns to the fight game, Haywire suggests she could have a bright future as long as directors continue to play to her considerable strengths.

Wong Fei-Hung And The Shifting Identity Of Hong Kong Audiences

Brace yourselves, this is a long one.  In February I was one of the speakers at a symposium on East Asian cinema at Coventry University. I think it was called Asian Exposure, which sounds like what happens when you’re confronted by a flasher on the Hong Kong subway. Anyhoo, I put everyone to sleep with the following load of waffle, now yours to savour. Someone suggested that I shouldn’t post this on my blog as someone might pinch it and try to pass it off as their own work for a college course.  Seriously? Who would want to pinch this? Some of this material was covered in my book, Chasing Dragons: An Introduction To The Martial Arts Film, which you should buy. For everyone you’ve ever met.

Wong Fei-Hung And The Shifting Identity Of Hong Kong Audiences

This paper sets out to show how the Cantonese-language martial arts films of Hong Kong evolved from an attempt to connect the displaced citizens of Canton with their native land into a cinema that reflected the separate and distinct identity of Hong Kong itself. To track this shift, I will look at the changing representation of the figure of Wong Fei-Hung, arguably the most recognizable and enduring figure in Cantonese popular cinema.

A large part of what makes Wong Fei-Hung such a useful barometer of change and at the same time such an accessible figure for Cantonese filmmakers is that virtually nothing is known about the real man himself. He was born in Canton in 1847, the son of Wong Kar-Ying, a highly respected martial artist who was a master of the Hung Kuen kung fu system and who passed his knowledge on to Fei-Hung. As an adult Wong Fei-Hung took over the running of his father’s school and medicine clinic, Po Chi Lam, and supplemented his income by serving as martial arts instructor to the 5^th Regiment of the Canton Army and the Civilian Militia. He died in 1924. That is largely all that can be said about Wong Fei-Hung with any certainty but through the huge number of films about the figure, Wong Fei-Hung has become mythologized in Cantonese folklore.

Early Chinese cinema had its own heroes, including the Shaolin anti-Ch’ing fighter Fong Sai-Yuk and the fictional character Wu Song from The Water Margin. The earliest known film about Fong Sai-Yuk is Ren Pengnian’s 1928 movie Fong Sai-Yuk’s Battle In The Boxing Ring, made in Shanghai. Wong Fei-Hung did not come to the screen until 1949. At the time a novel called The True Story Of Wong Fei-Hung was running in serialised form in the Kung Shueng Daily News. Despite the title, it was a work of fiction but it inspired filmmaker Hu Peng to bring the character to the screen with Kwan Tak-Hing in the title role. Hu Peng was born in Shanghai in 1910 and moved to Hong Kong in 1936. He directed over 190 films in his career.

Winner of Best Supporting Eyebrows In A Drama Or Kung Fu Movie, 1956.

Kwan Tak-Hing was born in Canton in 1906 and started his career in Cantonese opera. He was ideally suited to bring Wong Fei-Hung to life, with his background on the stage and a fluency in Chinese martial arts, particularly the Hung Kuen style and White Crane boxing. The success of The True Story Of Wong Fei-Hung led to Kwan Tak-Hing playing the character from 1949 up until 1981. The original series with Hu Peng was so popular with Hong Kong audiences that [according to the filmography in A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film] no less than twenty-five films about the character were released in 1956 alone.

In the absence of any historical information about the figure, Kwan Tak-Hing effectively became Wong Fei-Hung, with the fictional portrayal of the character on screen filling the vacuum created by the lack of any official record. Despite being produced, shot and distributed in Hong Kong, the Wong Fei-Hung films were deeply rooted in Cantonese culture. The films showcased traditional Southern Chinese martial arts, lion dances, traditional Cantonese music and songs to the extent that the series served as an archive of Cantonese culture for the people uprooted from South-Eastern China. How Wong Fei-Hung pitted 7 Lions Against the Dragon features a lengthy sequence of lion dancing, dragon and even centipede dancing that would sorely test of the patience of any modern audience. Unlike the Hong Kong movies of the 1980s, which were shot silently and then dubbed into numerous languages to enable them to be as widely distributed throughout Asia as possible, the Wong Fei-Hung films were shot with synchronous sound in the highly distinctive dialect of Cantonese.

The opening title music in the series was Under The General’s Orders and the theme became synonymous with the character. In his article The Prodigious Cinema of Wong Fei-Hung: An Introduction, Yu Mo-Wan notes that, “Quite apart from their subject matter, this strong regional flavour, including of course the lively and vivid Cantonese dialect, clearly distinguishes these films from productions from mainland China or Taiwan. Few Hong Kong productions have succeeded in embodying or reflecting this regional sensibility to the degree accomplished by the Wong Fei-Hung series.”

I have come to drink tea and kick ass. I'm all out of tea.

The cinematic figure of Wong Fei-Hung as played by Kwan Tak-Hing was the very embodiment of tradition, a living concatenation to the past with no relation to the reality of life in Hong Kong in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Wong Fei-Hung is shown as the stern Confucian patriarch and a shining example of the notion of wu de, or martial virtue. This is an idea drawn from the four Confucian principals – the Way (tao), ritual and propriety (li), humaneness and compassion (ren) and virtue (de). Confucianism is concerned with the cultivation of a moral and righteous spirit and is reflected in the traditional Chinese approach to martial arts, with an emphasis on improving the practitioner as a human being who only uses his kung fu as a last resort in self-defence. Throughout the series, Wong Fei-Hung personifies this spirit and he triumphs over his opponents not only because he is the superior martial artist, but simultaneously the superior human being.

He is a mediator, a source of knowledge and prone to giving long lectures at social gatherings in which he extols the benefits of self-cultivation, eating your greens and being an upstanding citizen. Kwan Tak-Hing’s vigorous health and longevity off screen seemed to speak to the truth of his onscreen alter ego’s words. The line between the film and real worlds became increasingly blurry. Kwan Tak-Hing opened his own medicine clinic and martial arts school in North Point, Hong Kong. When the actor was in his mid-Seventies, he played Wong Fei-Hung again for Yuen Wo Ping in The Magnificent Butcher. The opening sequence establishes the legitimacy of Kwan as Wong Fei-Hung as he performs a series of exercises to prove his continued potency, including press ups on his finger tips. The sequence states loud and clear – this is the real Wong Fei-Hung. Accept no substitutes.

However Hong Kong had begun to develop its own popular culture in the 1970s that broke with the traditions brought over from Canton and began to speak directly to the experience of life in Hong Kong. The three main players in this process were the Hui Brothers, Michael, Sam and Ricky. All three were stars on TV and in the cinema, while Sam was vital in the birth of Cantopop, a form of pop music sung in Cantonese but using modern Western-style instrumentation and arrangements. The 1974 film, Games Gamblers Play, was set in contemporary Hong Kong, not Republican China. The Hui Brothers films were comedies, not martial arts films, but their impact on Hong Kong popular culture was enormous. They made great use of the Cantonese language’s capacity for wordplay, setting a precedent that Stephen Chow would follow in the 1990s. The characters the brothers played were ordinary men struggling to get ahead. They were cynical, street wise and totally lacking in the four Confucian precepts. By contrast, Kwan Tak-Hing as Wong Fei-Hung looked nostalgic at best and out of touch with the times at worst. Kwan made a handful of outings as his legendary alter-ego in the 1970s and early 80s, in The Skyhawk, Dreadnaught and The Magnificent Butcher. Lau Kar-Leung explored the relationship between the young Wong Fei-Hung, his father Wong Kar-Ying and their sifu Luk Ah-Choi in Challenge Of The Masters, from 1976. Lau Gar Fei took the role of Fei-Hung but the film retained the spirit of the Kwan Tak-Hing movies, with a strong emphasis on martial virtue and respect for your elders.

However, with the rise of the Hui Brothers and the development of youth-oriented Cantopop, the kung fu movie had to move with the flow. The result was a proliferation of kung fu comedies, a blend of slapstick, word play and kung fu with no relation to the Confucianism of the 1950s cinema. In late 1976 director and producer Ng See Yuen founded his own production company Seasonal Films, where a young action choreographer called Yuen Wo Ping was given his first chance to direct a feature – Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, starring Jackie Chan, who had previously been toiling away unsuccessfully in formulaic kung fu movies for Lo Wei’s production company. The movie cast Chan as a hard-luck orphan who learns kung fu from an old beggar, enabling him to defeat an evil Eagle Claw kung fu assassin, played by Korean Taekwondo master Hwang Jang-Lee. The box office success of Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow led to star, director and producer reuniting on Drunken Master, in which they tackled the most revered figure in Cantonese cinema – Wong Fei-Hung.

The young Wong Fei-Hung bears the burden of looking after the elderly. In our aging society, such situations will soon be commonplace.

As is all too often the case in Yuen Wo-Ping’s work, Drunken Master lacks a cohesive plot and is really just a collection of set pieces linked together by the central protagonist, in this case the young Wong Fei-Hung played by Jackie Chan. This presentation of the hero is a far cry from that of Kwan Tak-Hing. As an independent producer, Ng See Yuen did not have access to the large period sets of the big studios like Shaw Brothers and there is only a passing attempt to approximate a period mise-en-scene. In particular, Chan as Wong Fei-Hung is clearly taking fashion cues from Sam Hui, with his long pop star hair that is totally anachronistic for the story’s late Ch’ing Dynasty setting. In Yuen’s film, Wong Fei-Hung is no longer the stern, severe patriarch. He is the spirit of modern Hong Kong, youthful, vital and irrepressible.

The Confucian notion of self-cultivation through the pursuit of martial virtue is noticeable only by its total absence. This Wong Fei-Hung chases after pretty girls, clowns around during kung fu lessons and even tries to cheat when practicing horse stance, the very foundation of the Hung Kuen style. It is out of the desperate desire to curb his son’s impetuosity that Wong Kar-Ying puts Fei-Hung into the hands of Beggar Su, the titular Drunken Master played by the director’s father Yuen Siu-Tien.

Drunken Master was not the first film to feature Wong Fei-Hung performing drunken boxing. The 1968 movie Wong Fei-Hung: The Eight Bandits, directed by Wang Feng, saw Kwan Tak-Hing’s Fei-Hung employ drunken kung fu in a duel with a villain using Monkey style, played by Yuen Siu-Tien. Ten years later, Yuen Wo-Ping’s film took drunken boxing to its illogical conclusion, as the more Fei-Hung drinks, the better he fights. This is the opposite of the Confucian notion of martial virtue and using martial arts to cultivate the self. Fei-Hung, played by Chan, is a belligerent drunk who goes looking for the King of Sticks specifically to get revenge and humiliate him for the earlier assault on Beggar Su. Rather than being improved through kung fu, Fei-Hung is a wine-guzzling brawler.

Moreover, where the original series served as a catalogue of authentic Southern Chinese martial arts, the

Kids today, with their long hair and kung fu. Hanging's too good for 'em.

choreography in Drunken Master drew heavily upon the acrobatics of the Northern style martial arts seen in Peking Opera. In the final showdown with the villain of the story, played again by Hwang Jang-Lee, Fei-Hung performs Beggar Su’s Eight Drunken Gods style, which includes Fei-Hung pretending to be an inebriated woman, Fairy Ho, and performing techniques with names like “Old Lady Sits On The Toilet”. It is very funny and, at the same time, mildly iconoclastic for an audience raised on Kwan Tak-Hing’s majestic countenance to see the revered figure of Wong Fei-Hung transformed into a blundering rascal and grotesque drunkard. Yuen Wo-Ping’s film makes no attempt to act as a record of Cantonese tradition and rather than looking back to an idealised vision of the past, the film reflects the youthfulness of its intended audience and the blossoming self-awareness in Hong Kong pop culture that it needed a new identity.

Wong Fei-Hung defeats the villain in Drunken Master not because he is morally superior or the product of self-cultivation. He triumphs through a combination of athleticism and raw vigour. He is not the model of Confucianism, but represents the irrepressibility of youth. The characters Jackie Chan played in Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, Drunken Master and subsequent films The Young Master and Dragon Lord, saw him merely providing variations on the same screen persona. Such models of youthful rebellion were crafted to appeal to a contemporary audience whose first point of reference was no longer Canton, but Hong Kong itself.

Shih Kien in Millionaire's Express, one of Cantonese cinema's great screen villains.

The 1980s saw the decline of the traditional kung fu movie. It was replaced by modern day action thrillers or comedy-action vehicles like the Lucky Stars series. Wong Fei-Hung largely disappeared from cinema screens, although he would pop up in unexpected places, as the character makes a cameo appearance in Sammo Hung’s Millionaires’ Express from 1986. Wang Yu plays Wong Kar-Ying, taking his young son on a train journey on which they share a train carriage with a rival master, played by Shih Kien, the perennial villain of the Kwan Tak-Hing series. If nothing else, the skit shows that Hong Kong filmmakers and audiences had not forgotten the Kwan Tak-Hing series after its demise.

The film that brought Wong Fei-Hung back to the forefront was Tsui Hark’s Once Upon A Time In China. Tsui’s earlier films,  The Butterfly Murders, Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Swordsman (which he produced and co-directed), drew more heavily on the Mandarin language cinema of King Hu and the swordplay genre than from anything in Cantonese cinema. Peking Opera Blues showed Tsui had his finger on the pulse of Hong Kong, with a thinly veiled critique of the lack of democracy set in Republican China. However with Once Upon A Time In China, Tsui reinvented Cantonese cinema’s most important figure for a new generation and revitalised the stalled career of his star Jet Li at the same time.

Released in 1991, Tsui’s film was not an irreverent take on the character, like Drunken Master. It was a pure martial

Didn't I used to have hair?

arts movie, not a kung fu comedy, but it offered a very contemporary spin on Wong Fei-Hung. Tsui establishes that his film belongs to the traditional canon right from the get go, opening with the theme Under The General’s Orders and a display of martial arts leading in to a lion dance. However, the choreography in Once Upon A Time In China moves even further away from Southern martial arts than Drunken Master. Jet Li’s background is in the gymnastic form of Wu Shu and the action scenes in the film draw upon Li’s acrobatic ability married to a great deal of wirework and special effects to create gravity defying scenes of combat more in keeping with the flights of fantasy found in Hong Kong swordplay films than any pure kung fu movie.

As Wong Fei-Hung, Li brings a youthful charm to the role even as the film cast Fei-Hung as the keeper of the flame for traditional Chinese values in the face of the encroaching influence of the West. This is demonstrated throughout the film by Wong Fei-Hung’s relationship with Aunt Yee, who has travelled abroad and adopted Western fashion and manners. Once Upon A Time In China is not about reconnecting the citizens of Hong Kong with Canton, it is an allegory for Hong Kong caught between the competing and contrasting influences of China and the West on the cusp of the city’s return to Chinese control in 1997.

This is expressed elegantly in an exchange between Fei-Hung and Aunt Yee when she tries to convince him to wear a Western suit:

“Chinese shouldn’t wear suits. Chinese are Chinese,” says Fei-Hung, to which Aunt Yee replies, “Soon with railways, telephones, everything will change. China will change with the world.”

Fei-Hung responds, “You’re right. Western guns and ships have arrived. Everything is changing. What will we become?”

That deceptively simple question was at the forefront of the minds of Hong Kong’s citizens ahead of the handover to China. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, found the issue was so all consuming that he described the local press as “a one-issue media”. If Kwan Tak-Hing as Wong Fei-Hung was concerned with the propagation of tradition, then Jet Li as Wong Fei-Hung was concerned primarily with the quest for identity and self-realisation set against the clash between East and West. In the second film in Tsui Hark’s series, Fei-Hung fights against the rapidly anti-Western White Lotus Sect who want to drive all foreigners out of China. That the cinematic figure who personifies all that is good and great about Chinese culture should set himself in opposition to the White Lotus Sect’s xenophobia is testament to the changing nature of the character’s presentation.

Always stretch thoroughly before engaging in vigorous exercise, especially beating up gweilos.

In 1997 Jet Li made his final outing as Wong Fei-Hung in Once Upon A Time In China And America, produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Sammo Hung. By this point the market had been saturated with Wong Fei-Hung knockoffs and imitations and Hung’s film was less concerned with exploring what it meant to be Hong Kong Chinese than with playing with the cinematic legacy of the figure. The script was written and re-written during production and the result could politely be described as patchy, but there are a handful of standout sequences. After Wong Fei-Hung loses his memory following a bump on the head, his friend Clubfoot Seven tries to jolt his masters memory back in to place by re-enacting Fei-Hung’s battles with Iron Robe Yim and Lan Yuan-Shu, characters from the first and second of Tsui Hark’s films. Tellingly, Clubfoot Seven did not join the series until the third film, so how is his character able to re-construct battles that he did not witness much less participate in? The answer is simple – Clubfoot Seven, like the viewers themselves, has seen the movies he is referencing. As the battle heats up, the local Chinese grab musical instruments and start playing Under The General’s Orders. They too are obviously well versed in Wong Fei-Hung’s cinematic heritage.

Similarly, a recurring element in the Kwan Tak-Hing films was the moral of each story, in which Fei-Hung would expound at length about the Confucian precepts and the importance of hard work and clean living. Sammo Hung references this twice in Once Upon A Time In China and America. In an early scene, Fei-Hung is shown putting his audience to sleep with a long-winded speech about presenting a positive image of China to the Western world. Then, after the climactic battle, Fei-Hung addresses the crowd again and says just a few short words. When he is finished, no one dares move because no one believes Fei-Hung to be capable of such brevity. It is very funny but only in reference to Fei-Hung’s established screen persona as a virtuous windbag.

Despite the 1997 handover, Hong Kong filmmakers continue to produce films in Cantonese alongside Mandarin language cinema. Since Jet Li’s final outing, Wong Fei-Hung has been absent from Cantonese cinema [Sammo Hung played him in a cameo in Around The World in 80 Days, an English language production]. In a period of almost fifty years, Wong Fei-Hung has been transformed from a symbol of the past and the power of tradition, to a testament to the vigour of youth and the new individualistic spirit of Hong Kong in the 1970s. With Tsui Hark and Jet Li, he became the means to explore Hong Kong’s unique position as the meeting point between East and West before finally Sammo Hung used the character to explore Fei-Hung’s cinematic lineage. After that exercise in intertextuality and deconstruction, perhaps there was simply nowhere left for Wong Fei-Hung to go. Hopefully Cantonese cinema is not finished with its greatest hero and the character will be reborn for a new generation and used to express their unique situation with the same eloquence seen in the past.

Too Much Fisting – Chen Zhen, Chinese Nationalism And The Myth Of Kung Fu

On an internet forum about Asian pop culture I recently saw a post from someone interested in taking up a martial art. They said they wanted to learn something that would enable them to take on a group of attackers, like in the movie Ip Man. They were thinking of trying Wing Chun. A recurrent theme in Hong Kong kung fu movies is the superiority of Chinese martial arts over pretty much everything else. I don’t know when the idea was first expressed on screen, but it can be found in the 1969 film Wong Fei-Hung: The Conqueror of the Sam-Hong Gang starring the legendary Kwan Tak-Hing. In that movie, Wong Fei-Hung defeats a Japanese samurai played by perennial Hong Kong movie villain Feng Yi, who would later tangle with Bruce Lee in the guise of the rotund judo instructor in Fist of Fury.

Everybody Wang Chung tonight

Fist of Fury is a vital film in the canon of kung fu movies because it introduced audiences to the fictional character of Chen Zhen, immortalised as an unstoppable engine of Chinese vengeance by Bruce Lee. In the film, Chen is the student of Fok Yuen-Gap (aka Huo Yuanjia), a martial arts instructor who lived in Shanghai and was head of the Jing Wu Athletic Association. Fok is referenced in many films, notably Legend of a Fighter, and his lofty status is typical of the mythology that springs up around these figures and informs so much of kung fu cinema. There is a very thin and fragile dividing line between fiction and reality in the world of kung fu. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the portrayal of Wong Fei-Hung in the Kwan Tak-Hing series. So little was known about the real Wong Fei-Hung that the films became a substitute for history so successfully they generated their own folklore in Cantonese culture. The same process is now happening with the figure of Ip Man in a slew of films about the Wing Chun kung fu instructor following the wake of the Donnie Yen/Wilson Yip hit.

Chen Zhen, who would rather die of hunger than eat okonomiyaki. Or try to spell it.

A similar process of mythologizing has occurred with Fok Yuen-Gap and Chen Zhen. Much of Fok’s reputation is built on stories of his fight with a Russian wrestler. This encounter is the source of the endless scenes in kung fu movies in which a Chinese martial artist takes on a foreigner in a challenge match and invariably triumphs. You can see this in Fist of Fury in which Chen, played by Lee, defeats the Russian karateka played by Rob Baker. A similar scene is played out in The Boxer From Shantung, starring Chen Kuan-Tai. Fearless, with Jet Li, is basically all about Fok Yuen-Gap beating up foreigners to preserve the honour of China. The only problem with all this is that it is based on something that never happened. Yes, a  Russian wrestler passed through Shanghai during Fok’s lifetime. There was even a challenge issued. But then the wrestler left Shanghai and moved on. No fight ever took place. Fok’s reputation for invincibility is based on a fight that didn’t happen.

Now Chen Zhen has become the embodiment of Chinese national pride, which is even more absurd as Chen is not even a real historical figure, but was a character invented for the Bruce Lee film in 1972. Chen has since been played by Jet Li in Fist Of Legend, where the character exists as a cipher for Bruce Lee, and by Donnie Yen in the Fist of Fury TV series and again now in Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen.

Fisting in the rain, what a glorious feeling, I'm happy again...

The impact of China’s defeats in international conflicts in the Twentieth Century upon Chinese pride, even in the displaced Cantonese populace in Hong Kong, was considerable. Having been beaten by the Japanese and the British, forced to hand over Hong Kong to the Brits and allow Shanghai to be occupied by the Japanese, China’s pride was badly bruised. Japanese abuses in Hong Kong and the appalling treatment of the civilian population in Nanking have left scars on the Chinese psyche that have proven slow to heal. So it falls to the movies to provide the retribution that was unavailable in the real world. In Fist Of Fury Chen Zhen single-handedly decimates an entire dojo of Japanese fighters. Legend of a Fighter qualifies the anti-Japanese sentiment, with Yasuaki Kurata playing a karateka who befriends Fok Yuen-Gap but is then forced to fight him against his own wishes. Fist of Legend is far less rabidly anti-Japanese than its predecessors, having Chen fall for a Japanese girl which would have been heresy in the Bruce Lee/Lo Wei original.

Sadly, Legend of the Fist is part of a recent trend in Hong Kong cinema following a pattern of regression to the mindless jingoism of the 1970s. Fearless, True Legend, Ip Man: The Legend Is Born, both Donnie Yen Ip Man vehicles and now Legend of the Fist centre upon the spectacle of a Chinese martial artist beating up non-Chinese opponents in the name of national pride. The irony is that China has never been more in the ascendant internationally. China is a global economic powerhouse and yet apparently there is still a need for Donnie Yen to beat up Japanese men and shout “The Chinese are not the sick men of Asia!” echoing Bruce Lee’s cry of forty years ago. Frankly, no one is currently suggesting anything of the sort, China. In fact, everyone wants to trade with you and business and political leaders are falling over themselves to be your number one pal. Just ask Taiwan, which has lost official diplomatic relations with a slew of countries as China has flexed its industrial and economic muscles.

So why this insecurity about being sick men? Historically, Chinese martial artists have not fared well in competition. Partly this is because traditionally most Chinese martial artists were hobbyists, by which I mean they were not professional fighters. There is a world of difference between someone who spends their free time in a training hall learning forms and following the Confucian mode of self-cultivation through martial virtue – wu de – and someone who fights for a living. In the past when Chinese martial artists went to Thailand and stepped in the ring with seasoned pros, or travelled to Japan to compete in Kyokushinkai knockdown competitions, they learnt the hard way that all the martial virtue in the world was no substitute for experience.

Worst Anti-Smoking Ad Ever.

In modern Chinese martial arts, there is clear divide between the practice of Wu Shu, the acrobatic display form endorsed by the Chinese government, and the competitive fighting style of San Shou, which is essentially kickboxing. What does it say about the practicality of Wu Shu that it bears no resemblance to the techniques of San Shou? Chinese martial artists have begun training in MMA and are starting to build a reputation slowly in events like Art of War, but at present China and Hong Kong have no competitive fighters of international standing. Professional boxing is dominated by America, Mexico and South America, and the former Soviet nations. MMA is ruled by the North Americans and Brazilians. Muay Thai and kickboxing are dominated by the Thais and the Dutch, with very strong contingents from Morocco, France and a growing number of European nations. Where are the Chinese tough guys to be found? In the movies.

Legend of the Fist gets off to a stirring start with Chen Zhen and his compatriots under fire in Europe during World War 1. Chen saves his friends and single-handedly beats the hell out of the Germans. Back home in Shanghai after the war, he is part of an underground network working to oppose the Japanese occupation. The Jing Wu Athletic Association is empty and China’s pride has never been at a lower ebb. The Japanese and the British wrangle for control over the country but then Chen puts on a mask and sets about putting the Japanese in their place, one broken jaw at a time. He becomes entangled with nightclub singer and hostess Kiki (Shu Qi, surely one of the most beautiful women in the world), who has a dark secret, while the Japanese set about murdering everyone who stands in their way in their bid to control Shanghai.

So when I get done killing people later, you want to hang out? I don't mind where we go, as long as it's not for sushi.

Several key icons remain from Fist of Fury. There is a flashback of the scene of Chen smashing the Sick Men Of Asia placard and killing the Japanese sensei, played here by Yasuaki Kurata, which is a lovely touch. When Chen returns to the Hongkou Dojo for the climactic showdown, he wears the white suit worn by Bruce Lee in the opening sequence of Fist Of Fury. It’s all very referential if more than a little generic. The principal villain this time is Takeshi Chikaraishi (Ryu Kohata), who is the son of the sensei killed by Chen in the backstory. You can’t get more generic than the plot device of “You killed my father, I want revenge”, which is indicative of the lack of progress in Legend of the Fist, a movie all too content to retread very familiar ground under the stewardship of director Andrew Lau.

Donnie Yen was his own action director on Legend Of The Fist. He’s done good work as both an action performer and choreographer in the past but the fight scenes here are surprisingly weak. The lurching camerawork is distracting, the frantic editing is obtrusive and obscures far too much of what is going on. By contrast, the camerawork and choreography in Fist of Fury served to reveal the techniques, not hide them. For a film that so clearly wants to state the case of the superiority of the Chinese and their martial arts over the Japanese, it is not possible to deduce from the fight scenes what kung fu style Chen Zhen is supposed to be skilled in. He’s certainly not performing Hung Kuen or Wing Chun, not Chow Lay Fut or even Northern Long Fist. The kicks are more akin to those found in Taekwondo than any Chinese system and most of the time Chen is just brawling. At one point he even throws a bolo punch, a slightly old-fashioned boxing technique that has nothing at all to do with Chinese kung fu.

The climactic scene when Chen takes on the Japanese in their own dojo relies on editing and camera tricks for its execution. Chen pulls out the nunchaku, another reference in the 1972 film, but Yen/Chen is clearly not the master of the weapon that Lee was. Lee didn’t need camera tricks and a busy editor to make him look good. I’m not sure that Donnie does either, but you’d never know it from watching this. What I always found so appealing about the Hong Kong films of the 80s was that you could always see what was happening. The final fight scenes in Donnie’s 80s and early 90s films, particularly Tiger Cage II and In The Line Of Duty IV, are showcases for his abilities and the superb choreography of the Yuen clan. Legend of the Fist could be any Hollywood action movie, like the Bourne series, where the fight is built in the editing room and you can never actually see what anyone is doing. The worst recent perpetrator of this is The Expendables, when all you see is a series of blurry, jerky shots during most of the fight scenes.

Chen Zhen wants you to know that he hates you and he hates your assface, Japan.

While I have criticised Legend of the Fist for being regressive in genre terms, it neglects a vital genre element in the fight choreography, which is the development of the martial artist. A common element in traditional kung fu movies is the invention or refinement of a new technique. The best single example of this is the final fight between Tan Lung (Bruce Lee) and Colt (Chuck Norris) in Way of the Dragon. In the early exchanges, the stronger Colt overpowers Tan Lung and knocks him down. Then Tan Lung adapts his style, becoming elusive, light on his feet and unpredictable. No longer trying to match Colt’s strength, Tan Lung beats him by evolving his own martial arts technique in the heat of battle. Fist of Legend apes this idea in the scene between Chen (Jet Li) and Funakochi (Yasuaki Kurata), as their sparring match becomes an exchange of ideas, a conversation between two bodies about the martial arts. It’s a brilliant scene and easily one of the best in Li’s career, in no small part due to the fact that the scene doesn’t rely on the wires to do the work.

Sadly, there is none of that here. In the climactic fight between Chen and Chikaraishi, Chen starts out being beaten all over the dojo. Then he thinks about China and his dead countrymen, gets really mad and kills Chikaraishi with his bare hands. There is no development of any new technique, no exchange of ideas and no conversation between bodies. It’s just two guys taking turns beating each other’s faces in and the Chinese guy wins because he’s fighting for China’s affronted honour. Frankly, that’s weak. It perpetuates the myth of the invincibility of Chinese martial arts, which has no grounding in reality, and teaches a new generation of movie-goers to hate the Japanese. It is high time Hong Kong and Chinese filmmakers moved on from this sort of xenophobic nonsense and found something else to talk about.

Dorkarama VS Scott Pilgrim VS The World

My uncle used to live in Bermuda where he learnt a very handy phrase that has proven invaluable in a wide variety of situations in day-to-day life that I would like to share with you. Dilligas. It’s an acronym for Do I Look Like I Give A Shit? What a wonderful word it is. Please share it with as many people as you can.

Scott Pilgrim struggles to be more interesting than the blank wall behind him.

I bring this up because what I found essentially wrong with Scott Pilgrim VS. The World was that the attitude of all the characters in the film, bar one, can be summed up as Dilligas. The plot is extremely straightforward. 22-year-old unemployed slacker Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is dating 17-year-old high school girl Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). That doesn’t stop Scott from falling ass-over-tip for new-girl-in-town Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, in order to be able to date Ramona, he must first defeat her Seven Evil Exes. He does so. The end.

Like, y'know?

That’s the whole shebang right there. It is linear, very simple and untainted by the blemishes of suspense, surprises, twists, turns or even just an ill-considered Deus Ex Machina. There are some jokes scattered sparingly throughout the dialogue that should raise a smile, many of the best ones involving Scott’s gay roommate played by Kieran Culkin, but a handful of quips don’t really add up to a compelling screenplay.

While the opposite of a protagonist is usually an antagonist, Scott Pilgrim is the negation of a protagonist. He is less active than your average sponge when it’s tuckered out from a long day being absorbent and swaying gently in the ocean currents. Scott is entirely reactive and makes only one decision of any consequence in the entire story – to introduce himself to Ramona. Every other decision is made for him or forced upon him to the extent that in the final scene of the whole movie, Scott does not choose which girl he ends up with out of Ramona and Knives, the decision is made for him. Perhaps Scott considered being indecisive but then thought he’d just wait and see what happens. He is an emotional infant, eager to be told what to think and feel. Why is this character supposed to be appealing or engaging?

The whole enterprise is permeated by an attitude of disaffection so all-pervasive that no one cares about anything.

A study of studied ennui.

When Scott receives the email from the First Evil Ex announcing their impending fight he says, ‘This is so…boring’ and deletes it. Everything is boring to Scott and his friends. He plays in a terrible band called Sex Bob-omb and they all go to a party just so, in the words of their drummer Kim, they can have something to complain about. Later on Scott leaves the band, the only thing he actually has going on in his life, but clearly it never meant anything to him anyway. He can’t be bothered to be bothered. What does he do all day? He has no job, no ambition, nothing. The script completely avoids the issue of why girls are attracted to him in the first place. He has nothing to offer – certainly not passion. In his passive fashion, it falls to Ramona to seduce Scott. He just waits for the adult to take command.

Knives Chau smiling. Loser.

The emotional range on display runs the gamut from wry detachment to bored resignation. Everything that happens, no matter how outrageous, is greeted by the characters with no more than an archly raised eyebrow. The only character that ever shows any passion or enthusiasm about anything is an object of ridicule – Knives Chau. Her youthful excitement for Sex Bob-omb is meant to be laughable – she screams when they come on stage and passes out from sheer over-stimulation. Everyone else just looks at her, eyebrows cocked. What sort of loser actually shows enthusiasm for anything in public anyway? Oh right, an Asian one, because Asian kids aren’t cool. They’re dorks. The singer of Sex Bob-omb even explicitly says that he wants Knives to geek out over the band. Those geeky Asian kids, with their maths and their good grades, they’re freaking hilarious.

As a filmmaker Edgar Wright has shown considerable style in the past. Shaun Of The Dead is a great zombie movie and his TV show Spaced was inventive and often very funny. The basis for the visual style of Scott Pilgrim VS. The World is the aesthetic of video games, particularly fighting games, which is both under-whelming and yet completely appropriate. There is nothing at stake when you play a video game, especially on a home console where you don’t have to keep feeding coins into the machine. If you lose, you just re-start. Defeat has no meaning when you can just re-load where you left off. That’s the biggest problem with the movie. Despite all the onscreen fighting, there is no sense of jeopardy in the battles. The fights take place in an aura devoid of pain or even the possibility of injury. Scott gets kicked about, thrown through the air and walloped in his all-too punchable face but he never actually gets hurt. When he is defeated, he simply returns to the start of the level and picks up from there, just like playing a video game. Some sense of danger, of there being a price to defeat and perhaps even a cost to victory, would add some much needed tension to the proceedings.

Savour the intensity. Or don't. Whatever.

All the fighting serves no actual purpose but to fill time as the plot inches slowly in a straight line to its inexorable, inevitable conclusion of boy gets girl (and hopefully syphilis). A good fight scene is a drama unto itself, a dialogue between two bodies, an exchange of techniques and a chance for the hero to defeat both his opponent and himself. In Scott Pilgrim VS. The World, the fight scenes are eye candy, devoid of drama or menace. It’s all so hip and post-modern that it collapses under the weight of all the inter-textual references that attempt to fill the void at the heart of the film. I’d be angry if I wasn’t so lethargic. You know, like the cool kids. I mean seriously, do I look like I give a shit? No? Thank crap for that.

Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D – Or Milla Jovovich And My Private Shame

It could be argued that the following review contains spoilers. It could also be argued that the plot of Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D is beyond my power to spoil.

 

Run, Forrest, Run!

 

Why do I keep going to see the Resident Evil films? I was never a fan of the game, as I never owned a console until fairly recently and horror games aren’t really my cup of tea. The answer, of course, is Milla Jovovich. As a card-carrying member of the legion of Milla fanboys created by The Fifth Element, I am delighted and embarrassed by the fact that Milla’s movies quickly find their way to TV and keep me warm on a lonely night in. The first Resident Evil movie was a functional action/horror flick – no Romero classic by any means but if you were in the mood for zombies (and who isn’t?) it left you feeling just about full, but far from bloated. The second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, was awful. Not scary, not exciting, not action-packed, just dumb. It was the directorial debut of Alexander Witt, a very good cinematographer and, on the strength of this effort, a terrible director. It was full of things that looked almost-cool, but made no sense, like Alice (Milla’s character) crashing a motorcycle through the stained glass window of a church for no good reason at all. A clever critique of the materialism of the modern church? Or just, hey I know what would look cool – let’s jump a bike through that window?

 

Two Girls, One Cup. Sorry, One Gun.

 

The third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, saw Highlander director Russell Mulcahy re-inject some life back into the franchise. Plenty of different kinds of creatures, lots of zombies and new abilities for Alice. Sure, it was still a triumph of style over substance – struggling for survival in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by the undead, Alice decided that stockings and suspenders were a good idea and while food and shelter might be scarce, she never seemed to run out of lip gloss. Still, Mulcahy kept the pace charging along like a drunken rhino on a rampage so it was easy to overlook the plot holes.

 

The axe says, 'I'm here to kill you,' but the hood says, 'New people make me shy.'

 

Anderson returns to the helm for the fourth instalment and uses the first act to undo everything left over from Extinction. The legion of Alice clones and her psycho-kinetic powers are all gone inside of 20 minutes. That’s a bit surprising when you realise that Anderson wrote the previous instalment. Perhaps he felt he had written himself into a corner, making Alice too formidable, so hey presto, one reset button later, she’s de-powered and can no longer wipe out armies just by dilating her pupils. Despite now being ‘human’ again, she still manages to survive a fiery helicopter crash in a scene so completely devoid of logic and intelligence that somewhere, Stephen Hawking is weeping for humanity’s wasted potential.

So, now alone but still perfectly made-up, Alice goes looking for other survivors. She finds Claire (Ali Larter) up in Alaska then the two of them encounter a small band of humans holed up in a prison surrounded by a massive zombie horde. Inevitably, the prison is breached and a mad dash for safety ensues, with the humans battling their way towards a ship anchored off-shore that promises a haven from the T-virus.

 

You disappoint me, Mr Anderson.

 

As a director, Anderson is good at mayhem. The movie works best when it hurtles full-steam ahead, zombies lunging out of every shadow, lots of violence, the sudden deaths of characters just as you start to like them and little time to dwell on the weakness of the plot. Milla is a capable lead, but Shawn Roberts delivers a howler of a performance as the principal villain of the tale, Albert Wesker, a bigwig in the evil Umbrella Corporation. Presumably, Anderson sat Roberts down in front of The Matrix and said, ‘See this guy, Agent Smith? Be him.’ Roberts, bless his little heart, tries. But he fails. To be fair to the actor, he’s not helped by a script that seems to have been pasted together from The Big Book Of Bad Guy Clichés.

It is hard to decide whether Anderson intends his movie to pay homage to some of his favourite films, or whether he’s just ripping them off. References to The Matrix abound, including having Wesker, dressed head-to-toe in black and sporting wraparound shades, dodging bullets in slow-motion. Zombie dogs split in half in a manner eerily similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing. (Pointless side note – I much preferred the original The Thing From Another World to Carpenter’s remake. Carpenter had the gore and the special effects, but the original had all the suspense.)

 

And Contestant #4 in Miss Wet T-shirt 2010 - from Alaska, it's Claire!

 

It really does you no favours at all to pay too much attention. When Alice finds Claire in Alaska, Claire has been living alone and in the wild, her memory erased by a spider-like device on her chest, the purpose of which never actually becomes clear. Claire is a mess. Then, cut to the next scene, Claire is wearing eye-shadow and lipstick and her hair appears to have been washed. Did Alice give her a make-over between scenes? Did they have a slumber party up there in Alaska that will only appear in the Director’s Cut? The movie is Ali Larter’s second outing in the franchise and, on the plus side, she delivers one of the best action scenes in the film while battling a monstrous giant zombie armed with a colossal axe. In a shower. It’s sort of a wet t-shirt contest/fight scene thing. The fanboy in me was delighted on so many levels. Oh, the shame. It burns.

 

Ah, still waters run deep, eh? Who knows what she's thinking? Who cares?

 

Personally, I found the 3D distracting. I find it actually disrupts my suspension of disbelief as it draws too much attention to itself. I know we are all supposed to be ‘Wow, gee whiz’ about 3D but it’s just a ploy by the film studios to keep people going to cinemas. You can’t get the 3D Experience (mild, lingering headache, fuzzy vision, some dry mouth) from watching a film on the internet. So, by offering you a unique ‘experience’, film distributors want to bring people back to the theatres with more 3D films. Plus you can’t record a film on your camcorder and stick it online or make crappy DVDs if it’s in 3D. I don’t want an ‘experience’, I want to see a movie. Numerous films are currently being retro-fitted for 3D. The Green Hornet is being converted to 3D in post-production, while Titanic and Star Wars are both receiving the 3D treatment. When has 3D ever fixed a bad script, or made poor acting look any more convincing? Perhaps 3D will bring people back to cinemas. Then again, maybe making some really smart, engaging films that actually encourage you to think or make you feel something that lasts longer than your popcorn might be a good start. Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D is not that film. But if they make a fifth one (and let’s face it, they will), I’ll be back. Curse you, Milla Jovovich.

Kamui: The Lone Ninja WLTM Hot Girls. Must Like Lurking.

Ninjas. It’s not all black pajamas and glamour. Kamui: The Lone Ninja is adapted from the manga by Sanpei Shirato that first ran in Japan from 1964 to 1971. The series was one of the first manga to be translated into English when Dark Horse Comics brought it to Western readers in 1987. Now, two decades later, along comes this live action adaptation. If only the movie had stayed hidden in the shadows.

Kamui is an outcast, for he has broken the vaguely defined Code of the Ninja (always wear black, even when you’re not going to a formal event; don’t betray your clan; never put out on a first date) On the run from his ninja clan, Kamui (Kenichi Matsuyama) befriends a fisherman called Hanbei (Kaoru Kobayashi) who takes the lonely ninja into his home. Welcome! Share my home, soil my towels, lurk in my shadowy corners. Hanbei’s wife Sugaru (Koyuki) is another ex-ninja and fears Kamui has come to assassinate her because she too broke the code (that’s why she had to get married to a guy who smells of haddock). However the fisherman has problems enough of his own as local daimyo Lord Gumbei wants his head after Hanbei killed his horse to make fishing tackle (I wish I was making that part up. Worms must be at a premium in feudal Japan).

Director Yoichi Sai takes some well known and much loved source material, some big names stars – particularly Death Note mainstay Kenichi Matsuyama – and squanders them all with a truly incompetent screenplay. The movie opens and closes with a lot of running around and fighting, but the entire mid-section leaves Kamui with nothing to do besides looking lost and vaguely sulky. Over the course of a two-hour movie, the protagonist is left fundamentally unchanged. Kamui is an observer to the inter-personal conflicts that make up the meandering second act and he hovers on the edge of most scenes as little more than a bystander. Matsuyama struggles to bring any life to the character, but it is hard to blame the actor when the script asks nothing of him.

Kaoru Kobayashi manages to inject some spark into Hanbei, although his constant rasping laughter gets old very

This was not the sushi Kamui had actually ordered.

quickly and it is hard to feel too much sympathy for someone who goes around hacking up horses. Suzuka Ohgo brings youthful exuberance to Hanbei’s teenage daughter Sayaka, who develops a classic schoolgirl crush on the pouty ninja but again a perfectly interesting character is tossed away by the inane screenplay.

It all starts to get deeply preposterous when the Watari Shark Hunters show up. They don’t just hunt sharks – they wrestle them for kicks. As Fudo, Captain of the Watari, Hideaki Ito is pure ham, complete with a preposterous wig. His final scene is unintentionally hilarious and brings to mind the duel with the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Fudo’s actions make no sense and he seems to be used as a plot device to set up the final battle that wraps up the movie.

Sanpei Shirato’s manga had a strong element of social critique, attacking the injustices of the feudal system. While Lord Gumbei is shown to be decadent and capricious, he never faces any comeuppance for his cruelty. Perhaps Yoichi Sai hopes to return to the tale with a sequel, but it further weakens the movie to leave Gumbei completely untouched by the events of this story.

Haven't they suffered enough? For just $2 every month, this family will never have to watch Kamui again.

The special effects look shoddy throughout, particularly the computer generated animals. A scene of Lord Gumbei hunting deer is appalling, it looks like the deer have run onto the screen straight from the original Tomb Raider game from 1996 in glorious 16 bit colour, while the CG sharks are never convincing, a matter not helped by the director repeating the same shot twice in succession during the shark hunt sequence. The ship used by the Watari hunters looks both anachronistic and culturally suspect, resembling a modern whaling ship made entirely out of bamboo. Despite being massive, the ship somehow manages to sneak up on Kamui and Hanbei in another scene that suggests the director was asleep at the wheel.

There is a good deal of wirework and special effects in the fight scenes, which are generally awful. In one early scene Kamiu kicks someone so hard they are bent in half. It’s supposed to look like Kamui can kick harder than a mule with a migraine, but instead it looks goofy – as though his opponent was actually Gumby in disguise. With those sneaky ninja, you can never be too sure. Matsuyama brings a certain frantic desperation to his action scenes, but perhaps he simply wanted to get them over with as quickly as possible. No one could blame him. I watched this so you don’t have to. Don’t thank me. Just send money and beer. Actually, keep your money. Just send beer.

Geisha Assassin – Old School Action

Sometimes there is nothing wrong with kicking it old school, a fact brought home by watching Geisha Assassin (aka Geisha vs Ninjas – nice, right up there with Shaolin Challenges Ninja for film titles that don’t screw around). Back in the 1970s when kung fu movies were being churned out of Hong Kong and Taiwan just as fast as the performers could throw a punch, the standard plot was often little more complicated than ‘You killed my father, I want revenge.’ Popular permutations included ‘You killed my master, I want revenge’ and ‘You snubbed my wife at a dinner party in the Hamptons last season, I want revenge.’

Directed by stunt choreographer Go Ohara, Geisha Assassin is not afraid to embrace the cliché with both hands and take it home to meet mum and dad and to start picking out the flower arrangements for the big day. Kotono (Minami Tsukui) may be the picture of the demure, delicate geisha but she is the heir to the Yamabe School of sword-fighting. Her pop’s old pupil Hyo-e (Shigeru Kanai) killed Kotono’s dad in a duel and now she wants to sit down and talk about the mistakes of the past, the power of forgiveness and about buying a subscription to The Watchtower. No wait, she wants revenge.

To exact her retribution on Hyo-e. first Kotono must slice and dice her way through his various minions and defenders, which include a squad of ninja, a hulking monk, a priest, some weird zombie-like dudes who use a fighting technique that involves throwing their own heads at Kotono, and a Ainu woman spoiling for a scrap. That’s pretty much the whole deal. This is no place for subtext, introspection or monologues on the quality of mercy, this is the time for taking names and breaking faces.

Go Ohara knows how to shoot a fight scene and he covers the gamut from sword duels to a wonderful tussle between Kotono and the imposing monk Go-an (Satoshi Hakuzo), complete with dialogue

Are you sure you know shiatsu?

straight from the Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu. “Excellent, for a woman,” sneers Go-an. “You see me as a woman?’ replies Kotono, “Don’t cry over losing to me!” The only thing that could possibly improve this scene would be someone saying either, “Your fancy Western tricks are no match for real Chinese boxing,” or “You’re digging your grave with your mouth, my friend.” Still, we can’t have everything.

The movie was produced by Jolly Roger, the same good people who gave us Chanbara Beauty (a girl in a cowboy hat and a bikini fights zombies), on which Go Ohara was stunt choreographer. Like Chanbara Beauty, Geisha Assassin is very low budget and shot on video, but what it lacks in dollars (or yen) it makes up for with enthusiasm. The cast really hurl themselves into the action. The battle between Kotono and Go-an sees them knocking each other back and forth across a room in a fairly lengthy continuous take reminiscent in shooting style, if not choreography, of the Shaolin

Go Go Geisha!

films of Chang Cheh. The other stand out is Kaori Sakai as the Ainu warrior-woman, whose donnybrook with Kotono winds up with them both desperately slugging at each other in the rain.

For my money, you can keep your big budget historical martial arts claptrap like Hero (‘Ooh look, we’re flying over a lake and everything is perfectly colour co-ordinated.’ I don’t care – punch something!!!) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (‘I can never reveal my true feelings of love.’ Do I give a crap? Punch somebody in the nuts before the ennui kills me!!!) Geisha Assassin gives me exactly what I want from a martial arts movie. 78 minutes of almost non-stop mayhem. That’s old school, baby.

300 – A Love Letter To Adolf

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic 300 is wildly popular amongst young men of a certain demographic. As a fight journalist covering MMA, one question I often asked fighters was ‘What is your favourite movie?’ (hey, it made a change from ‘So, you like punching people or what?’) Time and again, the response was 300. Hell, even UFC ring girl Arianny Celeste picked 300 as one of her favourite films (although unlike the fighters, she admits to loving chick flicks too.)

Stay the hell out of my neighbourhood!

What is it about 300 that resonates so powerfully with these young men? It might have something to do with its ultra-macho message of no retreat, no surrender, fight to the death. However for a film that purports to be about a small brave band fighting to defend freedom against tyranny, 300 is a love letter to fascism and the ideology of the Nazis.

I’m writing just about the movie here, I haven’t suffered through the comic. It’s a humourless film, depressing in its dour and relentless carnage while historically suspect. The movie conveniently ignores the fact that the Spartans kept slaves or that the fall of Sparta came when they went to war against Thebes in an attempt to suppress democracy flourishing in a city-state Sparta considered its vassal. The script makes it very plain that the Spartans are the defenders of truth and justice against the aggression and oppression of the Persian Empire, embodied by Xerxes. “A new age has begun,” shouts Leonidas (Gerard Butler, in a typically understated and subtle performance that covers the full gamut from shouting all the way to yelling). “An age of freedom and all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it.”

Nothing says "Freedom" like a mountain of dead baby skulls

Wow, that sounds nice, an age of freedom. But underneath this talk of freedom lies an insidious message about racial purity. Take the opening narration – “When the boy was born, like all Spartans he was inspected. If he’d been small or puny, sickly or misshapen, he would have been discarded.” The Spartans cast out impure children to keep their bloodline strong and pure. Why does that sound familiar?

Rassenhygiene was a Nazi concept about racial purity coined by Alfred Ploetz, who was given a professorship at Munich University by Adolf Hitler. This idea was further expanded upon by Ernst Lehmann, Professor of Botany at Tubingen. Lehmann launched the publication Die Biologie which made the case for selective breeding. A regular contributor to the publication was Konrad Lorenz who later became a member of the Nazi’s Office of Race Policy (read John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact for more information). The notion of Rassenhygiene led the Nazis to forcibly sterilize anyone they considered to be an undesirable presence in the gene pool. From August 1939 to August 1941, 5000 “malformed” children in Germany were rounded up and killed, just like those heroic Spartans defending freedom in 300 casting out impure babies.

Ephialtes - 300's walking argument for Eugenics

300 offers a wholesale endorsement of the desirability of racial purity. Ephialtes is a deformed hunchback whose parents hid him from the Spartan authorities as a baby. Now fully grown and hideous, he betrays Sparta when offered the sexual delights available in Xerxes harem of freaks. The movie makes a direct connection between physical deformity and moral corruption. If only his parents had murdered him as an infant. Ephialtes is grotesque in startling contrast to the sleekly muscled and sculpted figures of the pure Spartans – the ubermensch personified by Leonidas himself.

Step off, white girl!

Notions about the master race are littered throughout the film. “We do what we were trained to do,” intones the narrator during another violent massacre as the Spartans slaughter their Persian enemies, “what we were bred to do, what we were born to do.” Born and bred to be the master race. Eugenics was what the Nazis called the science of selective breeding to create the Aryan master race. Is it coincidence that the Persians and their warriors are not white? From the first emissary who arrives in Sparta to the Immortals and Xerxes himself, none of them are white. “What makes this woman think she can speak among men?” demands the Persian emissary, who just happens to be black, when interrupted by Queen Gorgo. “Because only Spartan women give birth to real men,” replies the Queen. Swap Spartan for the word Aryan, just to see how it looks there.

I'm telling you, Leonidas, once you go black, you can't go back

Xerxes himself is black, androgynous and a sexual deviant. His personal guards are described in the following terms: “They have served the dark will of Persian kings for 500 years. Eyes as dark as night. Teeth filed to fangs. Soulless. The personal guard to King Xerxes himself, the Persian warrior elite, the deadliest fighting force in all of Asia – the Immortals.” So we’ve got two uses of the word “dark”, we know they are Asian but unlike the white Spartans, who lest we forget live hard lives governed by their warrior-code, they don’t have souls. Despite the avowed harshness of the Spartans childhoods, they never lose their souls. Why are only the white trained killers allowed to keep their souls? “Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans. Only the hard, only the strong.” Only the honky.

“This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine,” bellows Leonidas in his final rabble rousing speech to his troops. One of the reasons that the Nazis fell behind in the race to develop the atomic bomb was that Hitler initially dismissed atomic science as Jewish mysticism. Under the Nazis, Jews were forbidden from teaching and Jewish professors lost their jobs at universities. Luckily, here come the Spartans to rescue us from all that mysticism.

The dawning of a new Reich...I mean Age, A New Age...

“From the time he could stand he was baptized in the fire of combat. Taught never to retreat, never to surrender. Taught that death on the battlefield in service to Sparta was the greatest glory he could achieve in his life.” Absolute devotion to the military state. An entire way of life dedicated to preserving, protecting and propagating the state and its bloodline. If that is not a recipe for fascism, what is? Fascism is a religion of the state, a fetishization of the state’s power. “Freedom isn’t free at all,” says Queen Gorgo without the slightest shred of irony. 300 is one long blood-soaked hymn to the glories of fascism and racial purity. Adolf would have loved it.

Avatar – A Question Of Faith

In my own quiet way, I enjoy science fiction. I’m not obsessed by it, I don’t know a single word of Klingon, I’ve never listed my religion as Jedi on a census form and I’ve only read one book by Phillip K. Dick.  However, I’ve seen some really impressive science fiction movies in 2009, with District 9 and in particular Moon. For one glorious fleeting moment, it seemed like science fiction had rediscovered its brain and decided to appeal to adults again rather than be more concerned with Happy Meal merchandising possiblities. Then I went to see Avatar today. What a jumbo-sized bucket of suck of a movie.

No Smurfing Way!

Here’s the plot – humans go to the planet of the Smurfs looking to mine the deposits of the very valuable but never explained in any detail Unobtainium. One teeny problem, the smurfs, or Na’vi as they are called here presumably to avoid unpleasant legal wranglings, live in a tree on the biggest deposit of Unobtainium and aren’t very smurfing keen to move. Crippled Marine Jake Sully is given a remote control Smurf body (the Avatar of the title), befriends Smurfette (aka Neytiri) and meets her dad, Poppa Smurf, and mom, Priestess Smurf, while pissing off her betrothed, Angry Smurf. Eventually Jake Smurf decides life as a Smurf is better than life as a human and joins the Smurfs in the battle to protect Smurfland from the human invaders. A lot of things Smurfing explode.

Ostensibly Avatar is a science fiction film, but it’s actually the opposite – it’s an anti-science film because the science on screen is so appallingly stupid. Nothing stands up to scrutiny. The Na’vi ride horse-like creatures with six legs yet they live in a forest with dense undergrowth and uneven footing. Why domesticate horses in such an unsuitable environment? Horses are plains dwellers. There’s no damn point being a fast runner in a forest where there is no flat surface or open stretches for your speed to be any bloody use. This is why monkeys don’t live on the flatlands and horses don’t climb trees.

The Na’vi themselves are essentially blue humans with funny eyes and ears. Their skeletal structure and musculature are human – they have two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. They have deltoids, pectorals, biceps, triceps and even belly buttons. This is all fine, it makes sense in terms of how evolution works. Two eyes provide depth perception. Two ears enable you to work out the direction a sound is coming from. So why do the horses on the planet Pandora have six legs? Nowhere in nature do you find vertebrates with six legs, particularly with two front pairs right next to each other. How can the horses run without tripping over their own feet? The second extra set at the front would actually slow them down. The reason all the land dwelling vertebrates on our planet have four legs, not six or eight, is because four is the most functional number. It’s evolution. You know, science and shit.

Jake Wouldn't Even Look At Smurfette After Catching Her Smurfing Someone Else

Why are the Na’vi blue? They live in a world populated by large predators, where the predominant colours are green and brown due to all the fauna. Why be bright blue? And what purpose is served by their photo-luminescence? None that is apparent on screen. They don’t live deep underwater and have no need to generate their own light.

It goes on – the apex predator on Pandora is a flying reptile called a Toruk. Every single large predator on our planet is a stealth hunter – even great white sharks and tigers like to sneak up on their prey. It saves valuable energy that would be wasted in an extended chase and avoids the risk of injury in a fight. This is why even something as massive as a tiger goes for the neck first – for a quick kill. Predators don’t have time to mess around and need to be sneaky. Yet on Pandora the apex predator is bright red – it could hardly stand out more against the blue sky and green foliage if it carried a bullhorn and shouted “Be a winner, not a sinner” at the top of its reptilian lungs. Just on that note, why are all the bloody reptiles in these crappy movies so damn noisy? Seriously, when was the last time you heard a crocodile or an alligator roar? They don’t.

Rambo Smurf Knows That Violence Solves Everything

I understand that Pandora is a made-up planet, but evolution is evolution and there are compelling reasons why certain basics work across the board. Physiologically the Na’vi make some sort of sense at least (besides the blue thing and the glowing) but none of the other creatures on Pandora work biologically. Why are all these creatures so badly designed with so little regard for the basics of evolution? The answer is that Avatar is not a hard science fiction film that takes its science seriously, a fact borne out by the name of the mineral the humans have come to gather – Unobtainium. What kind of grade school crap name is that? Avatar is not science fiction at all. It’s a religious film. The ultimate message of the movie is the triumph of faith over technology. The Na’vi worship a diety called Eywa and in the final battle between the Na’vi and the humans, the animals of Pandora miraculously join the battle against the humans, turning the tide in favour of the Na’vi. This comes after Jake, the human-turned-Na’vi, has prayed to Eywa for help. Jake’s prayer is answered – in one particularly ridiculous scene a large vicious land predator called a thanator lets Neytiri ride on its back and leaps into battle at her behest. Why? Because Eywa makes it so. In true Hollywood fashion, a film that purports to be about living in harmony in nature culminates in an orgy of violence and destruction. Victory through prayer, triumph through divine intervention. That’s the message of Avatar. Science can not be trusted. Only God is real. That’s not science fiction, that’s something far more frightening.