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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mog Elffoe" data-source="post: 1581231" data-attributes="member: 793">I agree wholeheartedly (except that I'd choose Iron Monkey or Kung Fu Cult Master over Dragon Inn, but that's just me.)  There's something about the *way* they showed it back then that had its own charm and had its own visual language.  And I do agree that shoestring budgets can stimulate creativity and that if some of the same filmmakers had real money to make their film with I might not like them as much.  I certainly wouldn't want to see a single change in my Mr. Vampire, for example.  Sometimes, though, it's just cool to see guys actually DO those super stunts without the old-school camera trickery.  I thought it worked pretty well in Hero, which I personally enjoyed much more than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film that it will most likely be compared to over here in the States.  I also loved the effects in Shaolin Soccer.  A good example of over-reliance on special effects was Legend of Zu.  I think I read somewhere that Tsui Hark had something like a $100m budget to work with for that one, and while some of the visuals are really, really nice, it isn't near as good as his own Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain which was made for a teensy little fraction of that amount back '83 or so.How about this hypothetical?  Swordsman 2 (or Dragon Inn, or whatever) with only the *cinematography* budget of these newer films, like Hero or CTHD?I don't think that we'll see the kind of energy that we got from HK in the 80s and 90s again either.  It's too bad.  I still enjoy the newer films coming from HK, but they don't have quite the verve or the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-ness of the old stuff.Now I'm getting all nostalgic and wistful...I miss Lam Ching Ying.  And Anita Mui.  And Leslie Cheung.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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