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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5561737" data-attributes="member: 4937">Fine, I'll answer on his behalf.Well, first of all, most Chinese stage fights are supposed to look like a dance.  Especially the traditional Chinese martial arts movies where you have little western influence are going to be choreographed like elaborate precision dancing.  Often the intention is not to show any sort of real fight, but to allow the martials artist to showcase the precision with which they can perform certain forms and the range of knowledge that they have.  The connoisseur of this art form isn't expecting it to look like a real battle; he's expecting to see a great diversity of very clean, very rapid, very controlled movements.  In many cases the choreography of the scene is designed to run through the full series of forms associated with a particular style of fighting.  Now real fighting even with Eastern martial arts doesn't look like that, and we would be very ignorant to assume that real Eastern martial artists were always unaware of the visual difference between a real fight and stagecraft.  But the makers of these movies made a choice to emphasis what they believed was important about martial arts - not the bloody chaotic reality of actual combat, but the artistic expression of martial arts in a way they felt was beautiful.Hense, 'dance'.  An example that is highly admired by people who care about such things and which might be very instructive is this one:[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkXtlObWQH0&feature=related]YouTube - Invincible Pole Fighter aka Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (clip)[/ame]Now, that is obviously dance, but what about 'crazy'.  Well, the above is 'crazy' in the sense that you'd have to be crazy to think that real fights are like that, or to think that most of what happens in the fight is practical and realistic.  However, when we get to something like Jackie Chan, we can use 'crazy' in a more intuitive way.  The reason is that Jackie Chan is and always has been a comedy star.  Most Hong Kong action flims are intended to be highly funny to the audience, and Jackie Chan is a master of it.  In many cases, a fight in a traditional martial arts flick is intended to be the equivalent of a Buster Keaton movie or a Three Stooges slapstick reutine.  There is a lot of physical comedy, a lot of physical sight gags occurring that are supposed to draw laughs from the audience, and quite often the protagonist is deliberately clowning around in a very literal sense.  Jackie Chan is the acknowledged master of this.  He almost always plays what amounts to a clown or jester, who in one way or the other makes a fool of his 'straight man' partners in the scene whether they are the overly serious villains or the stern masters (or love interests) who take martial arts very seriously and are trying to instill the same displine in their wreckless and unserious charge.  Jackie Chan's fight scenes are almost always deliberately silly.  You are supposed to both be in awe of the skill and agility he demonstrates, and guffaw when he hits someone with a ladder, has to fight while juggling something he doesn't want to break, knocks his foe down the divider between the escalators, or takes a shot to the crotch.  The overall effect is well silly by design.Hense, 'crazy'.  So when you show a Jackie Chan scene to someone looking to inform his game with realism and gritty combat, even if individual moves within the scene might be probable, the context around them is so improbable and so obviously staged and so unserious that its distracting.  Why should we expect the viewer to be able to pick out the fraction of a second of realism in he midst of 5 minutes of stylized comedic stagecraft?  Why wouldn't we expect the viewer to focus not on the very quick very subtle moves of realistic combat acrobatics, instead of the elaborate set peices of gymnastics and wire work in both western and eastern action movies?  Can't we at least try to be charitable and understanding here?</blockquote>

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