Ong-bak

[barsoomcore]

I just watched Swordsman 2 and Once Upon a Time in China for work. Loved the latter. Perhaps the subtitling hurt my enjoyment of the former.

Managing subtitling problems is a skill. I don't ENJOY crappy subtitles, but I've learned to just scan them for plot details and not worry about their grammar or usage. I liken them to notes on the story rather than translations of the dialogue.

But then my first few viewings of Swordsman II were with JAPANESE subtitles -- we were living in Tokyo and English subtitles were unavailable. So we just kind of made up stories for a lot of those films (can't read Japanese).

Ironically, I don't always like Li's kung-fu (snip) I'm guessing it's a dancing background or something.

?

Li is a five-time Chinese national wushu champion. He doesn't have a dancing background.

Also just recently watched The One. That was a tragedy.

Oh yeah. Don't watch The One.

 

[JVisgaitis]

This movie is awesome. I got this around last Christmas as an import and just picked up the US version. Totally sweet!

 

[takyris]

?

Li is a five-time Chinese national wushu champion. He doesn't have a dancing background.

Yeah, definitely an issue of choreography for me, then. There were a lot of times where he's looked really graceful and beautiful, but then his actual strikes have had this kind of "push" look to them. It's arguably harder to do than the U.S. action convention of just punching near people and using camera angles to avoid showing the miss, but watching the graceful push-off-the-body kick always messes up my suspension of disbelief.

I suspect that this is a cultural thing -- I was brought up on Western cinema, so I'm going to want the strikes to look full-contact and real, even if it's just tricks of camera angles. The Hong Kong tradition, while probably harder to do well, just doesn't look as real to me.

(Purely my opinion. No objective "XXX is better than YYY" about it. And a lot of times, it doesn't bother me. It's just certain parts of certain Jet Li movies where I stop thinking "This is a skilled fighter trying to stop, defeat, or destroy his opponent" and start thinking "This is really graceful choreography, but they are obviously just doing a two-person kata, not fighting.")

 

[barsoomcore]

Keep in mind you haven't seen very many of his films, and Swordsman II is NOT a "kung-fu" movie -- it's a classic swords-n-sorcery wuxia film, so the fight scenes aren't intended to look brutal and realistic. To see Li unload, check out Fist of Legend and Bodyguard From Beijing and the incomparable My Father Is A Hero.

But definitely Swordsman II is not an example of "realistic" fight choreography.

 

[takyris]

Fist of Legend is the one where he's a Chinese monk who learns how the Japanese fight while China is occupied during WW2, yes? I've seen that one. That one was pretty rockin' -- and I remember being impressed by how Li was versatile enough as a martial artist to really show the audience that he was fighting in two different styles (much like The One, only without the monumental sucking).

Saw Fang Sai-Yuk (sp), too, and also loved it -- the sheer silliness of the fights in terms of how crazy they got to be was a lot of fun.

Heck, I even liked many of the fights in Kiss of the Dragon, although I didn't fall madly in love with the plot.

 

[diaglo]

it was okay. a bit on the poor acting side. but i didn't get it for the plot nor acting.

the girl showing up to cry in the end was also not right. the two guys were supposed to go to the cave alone. why she was there was... meh...