Old Martial Arts Movie With Figures Using Different Weapons
10. Once Upon a Time in China
The film that kick-started Hong Kong cinema'southward kung-fu renaissance and launched Jet Li towards a future of substandard western action movies. Its subject was already well known to local audiences: Wong Fei-hung was a existent person: a turn-of-the-century martial arts master and healer who's become something of a folk hero. Similar Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood, he'd been portrayed many times before. Jackie Chan played him in Drunken Master, and a long-running Wong Fei-hung film series during the 1950s and 60s gave roles to the fathers of Bruce Lee and Yuen Wo-ping, amidst many others.
Transposed to 1990s Hong Kong, with the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty on the horizon, this story of a Chinese rebel fighting oppressive colonialist powers had extra resonance. Its British and American baddies are cartoonishly demonised, and the plot is often convoluted to the point of impenetrability, admittedly, simply what this flick chiefly provides is dazzling, colourful, kinetic, epic, pre-CGI spectacle. Managing director Tsui Hark, schooled in both the United states of america and Hong Kong, fills the screen with movement and energy. The wire-assisted fight scenes – choreographed past Yuen Wo-ping, inevitably – are ingeniously staged. Earthbound reality is left far backside.
And Li is simply incredible. He'south got gravitas as an actor, simply when he's in action, he really takes some beating. He does it all: fighting with hands, feet, sticks, poles, umbrellas. He kills one baddie with a bullet – without using a gun. But Li is a gymnast, as well, pirouetting and somersaulting across the screen with the agility of a cat. He's surely the most graceful martial artist out in that location. Those skills come to behave in a jubilantly athletic final duel, which takes place in a warehouse conveniently full of bamboo ladders. It'southward one of the most celebrated sequences in martial arts movies, and it leaves you wanting more, of which in that location is plenty: they made four sequels in the next two years. Steve Rose
9. Yojimbo
Akira Kurosawa drew upon American pulp sources for Yojimbo's plot, principally the Hollywood western but too Dashiell Hammett's cleaved-city melodrama The Dain Expletive. Here a solitary, probably disgraced, certainly hungry samurai (Toshiro Mifune, the Wolf to Kurosawa's Emperor) wanders into a town where two factions are in eternal conflict, glaring at 1 another from their matching headquarters on opposite sides of the town'southward wide, western-like main street. Since each faction lacks a distinguished warrior with whose help they might tip the remainder of power in their favour, they each badly want the newcomer on their side, something the samurai figures out within moments, and exploits throughout the movie.
As the ability games play out to their nihilistic, corpse-choked conclusion, Kurosawa demonstrates a mastery of his medium in almost every frame. His sense of spatial relations is across compare: panels in interior walls slide abroad to reveal whole exterior street-scapes and crowd scenes perfectly framed within the smaller new frame. Intimate conversations take place as a turbulent skirmish rages in the deep background eye-screen, between the talkers' faces in the foreground. And what faces! From the moronic warrior with the M-shaped unibrow and the giant wielding a huge mallet to Mifune's increasingly battered countenance, sardonic, cynical and ever defiant, every single confront is at in one case a landscape and an epic verse form unto itself.
Along with all that comes Kurosawa's furious visual energy, his virtuoso choreography of moving camera and bodies of warring men; and his talent for adding enriching layers of kinetic, elemental motion – pelting falling, leaves or smoke blowing in the unceasing winds – to the violence already in play. Yojimbo led to the Italian A Fistful of Dollars, which in time completely remade the American western, completing a circle of international cultural exchange that foreshadows a give-and-take among international filmmakers that we have for granted today. John Patterson
8. A Bear on of Zen
We accept A Touch of Zen to give thanks for Harvey Weinstein's interest in Asian movie theater; it was later on Quentin Tarantino screened Rex Hu's 1971 wuxia that the mogul began a controversial spending spree in the east that led to his electric current controversial involvement with Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. It's not hard to see why: Hu's film is unusually epic for the genre, clocking in at over three hours, and made cinema history by existence the commencement Chinese film to win an award at Cannes, missing out on the Palme d'Or but taking home the Technical prize.
A Touch of Zen is nigh notable present as the template for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, being the 14th century story of an artist, Ku, who encounters a beautiful adult female living in a rundown house with her elderly female parent. In truthful wuxia manner, even so, she is non all she seems, and so the story grows, until Ku realises that he is in the center of a major dynastic war between rival factions. And as the story develops – effortlessly arresting elements of comedy and romance – so does the spectacle, increasing in scale and scope in means that would be unimaginable today.
It is these fight sequences that accept endured, and although wuxia briefly fell out of favour shortly after, it is easy to see Hu's influence on the striking martial arts films of recent years. More so than Crouching Tiger, A Affect of Zen casts a long shadow over the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose House Of Flying Daggers direct references Hu'south motion picture in its bravura bamboo woods sequence. Only it is Hu's deadpan sense of the k that keeps this astonishing moving picture fresh, with its themes of justice and nobility, shot through with a foreign spirituality that earns the film its championship in a sequence involving a pack of bouncing, boot-donkey Buddhist monks. Damon Wise
7. The Raid
As a breathless and brutal martial arts thriller shot in Jakarta and directed by a Welshman, The Raid would already have been worthy of note. That information technology is a flick of precision and inventiveness, taking fight sequences into the realm of horror, slapstick comedy, even the musical, guarantees its identify in activity-moving picture history. The plot is equally uncomplicated as its choreography is complicated. A constabulary unit of measurement sets out one forenoon to seize command of a tower block in Jakarta that has fallen into the hands of a gang. Just not just any gang: this mob has kitted out the high ascension with sophisticated CCTV and public address systems monitored from a top-floor command room. The gang-lord, presiding over the CCTV screens, broadcasts a telephone call to his tenants: "We have company. Y'all know what to do." He doesn't mean put the kettle on and crack open the custard creams.
In the absence of much dialogue, the weapons do the talking: guns, knives, swords, hammers. A man receives an axe to the shoulder, which is then used to yank him across the room. A fridge doubles as a flop. The gang's most barbarous member, Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian, who besides served every bit i of the film's fight choreographers), acts equally mouthpiece for the film'southward philosophy. Casting aside his firearms, he explains: "Using a gun is like ordering takeout." If that'due south the case, Mad Dog would merit a fistful of Michelin stars.
Some of the fight sequences are enclosed claustrophobically in hallways where the but option is to use walls as springboards, Donald O'Connor-style. Others, such as a grit-up in a drugs lab, expand like dance numbers. Evans'due south prime achievement has been to make a berserk gamble characterised by clarity. In dissimilarity to almost action movie house, the frenzy arises from the performers rather than the editing; no matter how frenzied things get, we never lose sight of who is karate-chopping the windpipe of whom. Ryan Gilbey
6. Ong-Bak
Hands and feet are one thing in martial arts; elbows and knees are quite another. And after seeing this Muay Thai showreel, you lot'd put money on Tony Jaa against any other screen fighter. Fifty-fifty in the scenes where Jaa isn't fighting anyone at all, merely going through some moves, he's awesomely formidable.
Ong Bak as a movie is fairly straightforward: city baddies steal a hamlet'south Buddha head; a humble peasant goes to get it back, individually crushing each adversary with his blank easily in the process. That's all it needs. Ong Bak's prime objective is to say, "Can y'all believe this guy?" and with the added note that no special furnishings or stunt doubles were used, information technology more than accomplishes it. In fight after fight, Jaa unleashes moves that go out you lot thinking, "That's gotta hurt", if not "That's gonna crave major cranial reconstruction". No holds are barred and few punches are pulled, but rather than brute violence, you're left marvelling at Jaa's speed, technique and pain threshold. The fights are skilfully staged, particularly an exhilarating, three-round barroom ball that leaves no opponent or piece of furniture standing.
Jaa shows off his physical prowess in other ways, too, from an opening tree-climbing race to a Bangkok street chase that sends him forth a hilarious attack course of cafe tables, marketplace stalls, children, cars, trucks, sheets of drinking glass and hoops of barbed wire. He's nearly too much to believe, and Ong Bak acknowledges our incredulity by oftentimes rewinding the action to show us Jaa's moves in boring motion, as if to say, "Do you want to run across that once again?". We practice. SR
5. The Matrix
Cocteau imagined the mirror as a gateway to another earth in his 1930 picture The Blood of a Poet, and it's a testament to the durability of this image that when it turned upward again in The Matrix, it had lost none of its allure. The film clocks up a further debt in its plot, which proposes that what nosotros perceive every bit reality is actually a cosmetic facade synthetic to muffle a terrible truth about our existence. Neo, a figurer boffin played by Keanu Reeves, is selected to deport the burden of enlightenment. Reeves's blankness in the part is perfect, mainly because Neo is required to display merely those skills and qualities that are downloaded into his encephalon. Required to chief jujitsu, he is merely installed with the relevant computer programme. In no time at all, he is pulling off those tricks from 1970s martial arts movies, where a man can launch himself in a flying kick and somehow manage to set a cocktail, read a brusk novel and fill out his tax return, all earlier his anxiety bear on the ground.
The moving picture's Cocteau-esque concept is harnessed to some Ten-Files-fashion paranoia, only information technology is the dazzling martial arts piece of work that gives the film its special elevator. The directors, the Wachowski brothers, were already having ideas above their station when they came up with The Matrix (their only previous film, after all, was the sweaty, claustrophobic thriller Spring). It was the martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping who helped them reach the next level.
The movie's fight sequences provide its purest source of pleasure for a number of reasons. Showtime, the violence doesn't come with redemptive overtones; it is played out for the thrill of the choreography, not the anticipation of injury or righteousness. Death is flippant, but information technology provides no moral kick. Second, the movie introduced a strange new effect, much copied or parodied since in everything from Charlie'due south Angels to Shrek: a character freezes in midair while the camera circles the tableau like a computer imagining a 3D representation of a second image. When the photographic camera has completed its movement, the physical motion of the scene resumes. Of a sudden the humdrum vocabulary of the action movie has been extended earlier our disbelieving optics. RG
4. Business firm of Flying Daggers
Scout the opening twenty minutes of House of Flying Daggers and it's not hard to meet why the Chinese picked its manager, Zhang Yimou, to direct the opening anniversary of the Beijing Olympics. Even though the action unfolds inside a reasonably sized brothel waiting room instead of a stadium, at that place's all the elements that Zhang would multiply by the thousands in 2008: traditional Chinese music, dancing, swathes of brightly coloured silk fabric, drummers and, of class, martial arts. It makes for a magnificent spectacle that'due south sets a high bar for the balance of the picture show. Fortunately, in that location'southward more dazzle to come in this follow-up to Zhang's showtime wuxia film, Hero. Zhang'southward 2006 Curse of the Golden Flower ended the trilogy, but for many the romantic, operatic notwithstanding satisfyingly meaty Flying Daggers represents the all-time of the 3.
Prepare during the Tang dynasty, 2 police force captains, Leo (Andy Lau, best known for the thematically-non-dissimilar Infernal Affairs trilogy) and Jin (hunky Takeshi Kaneshiro) are searching for the leader of the Flight Daggers, a counterinsurgency grouping. They suspect bullheaded courtesan Mei (Zhang Ziyi) may exist a underground fellow member of the Daggers, so Jin, posing as a citizen, busts her out of jail and goes on the run with her, pursued by Leo and numerous expendable officers. Beloved seems to bloom between Jin and Mei, but no one and nix are every bit they seem hither.
Although the fights are terrifically choreographed by Tony Ching Siu-tung – especially a bamboo-forest hunt that tops Crouching Tiger, Subconscious Dragon and a final mano-a-mano in the snow – judged against other classic martial arts films, Daggers is actually a footling calorie-free on combat scenes. Indeed, the fighting is so stringently stylized it's more than like dancing with knives. No matter: the love story may be near equally schematic equally the film'southward rigorous use of color, still the acting is so powerful from the core trio that deep emotional depth is created seemingly out of null. Leslie Felperin
3. Police force Story
Although it was obvious at the time, it seems strange at present that Jackie Chan was originally groomed by at least one Hong Kong producer as a successor to Bruce Lee, the lithe master of martial arts whose style was virtually laughably serious in its grim-faced intensity. After a few tryouts in the genre, however, Chan took things in a much more than comedic, but no less athletic route, which is why, afterward breaking out in the Yuen Woo-ping classic Drunken Principal, the former stuntman found himself in Hollywood, calculation lite relief to The Cannonball Run in 1981.
Chan'due south Hollywood career, even so, didn't pan out, and after a disappointment in 1985 with The Protector – a collaboration with neo-grindhouse manager James Glickenhaus, perhaps not the most sympatico of all possible talents – Chan returned to Hong Kong to accept matters into his own easily, directing and cowriting Law Story, in which he played a disgraced cop who is forced to go undercover and clear his name subsequently existence framed by drug barons.
Making a direct rebuttal of the Hollywood way of doing things (in his listen, sloppily and half-heartedly), Chan prioritised the fights and stuntwork, using the genre elements mostly every bit filler. Refusing to apply a torso double for every scene (bar 1 that involved a motorcycle), Chan began to earn his reputation as a fearless and pioneering activity star. On this film alone, he was hospitalised with concussion, suffered severe burns, confused his pelvis and was nearly paralysed by a shattered vertebrae. The resulting film was a huge hit and spawned five strong sequels. Seen now, it seems remarkably straight given what was to follow – the cartoonish Rush Hr serial – although Chan certainly must accept enjoyed the irony of being embraced by Hollywood for a film that is, essentially, a critique of everything it was doing incorrect. DW
2. Crouching Tiger, Subconscious Dragon
Why is Ang Lee'south moving-picture show Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon such a sublime feel? Perhaps considering every os in your body tells you it shouldn't piece of work. It's a tranquil activity picture. Whoever heard of 1 of those? And it'due south a love story with a boot: a kung-fu kick. Information technology begins with the theft of a fabled sword, the Green Destiny. Every bit the sword is stolen, the camera takes flight along with the thief, for whom gravity is a restricting garment to be cast off at a moment'south notice. The warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) gives chase, skipping blithely across rooftops that glow silver in the moonlight. When the pursuit gives style to combat, the rule book of action cinema is not only discarded simply sliced to ribbons. For viewers besides young to recall, the shock of seeing a Sam Peckinpah shoot-out back when slow motion was an innovation rather than a nasty virus, then the sight of these warriors levitating calmly to nosebleed-inducing heights will provide something of that aforementioned liberating jolt.
The midair skirmishes of martial arts movies were brought to mainstream audiences past The Matrix, and Lee enlisted that moving picture'south choreographer, Yuen Woo-ping (who later on worked on Kill Bill and Kung Fu Hustle), to have that style even farther. The resulting fight routines evoke Olympic gymnastics, break dancing and those cartoon punch-ups where i of the Tasmanian Devil's limbs would sally briefly from within a frantic cyclone. And if Yu occasionally steps on her opponent's foot, she'southward not fighting dirty – it's simply the merely way of ensuring that the boxing remains at basis level.
For all the finesse of the choreography, the activeness sequences would exist superficial without the emotional weight Lee brings to the pic, notably in the largely unspoken tenderness betwixt Yu and her fellow warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat). Equally a director he doesn't differentiate between the way he shoots tenderness and violence. In his hands, a love scene tin can come to be brutal, with a human'south claret forming a fork beyond his lover'due south chest as they embrace, while a struggle between opponents in the forest treetops, with the supple branches doubling as nests, catapults, rungs and bungee ropes, achieves a sensuous repose. RG
one. Enter the Dragon
Bruce Lee purists may or may not hold that Enter the Dragon is his greatest film. But this is the 1 that has passed into legend: it was the jumbo box office smash of 1973 and the most famous film of that unrivalled martial arts superstar who had died the summer before its release of a cognitive reaction to painkillers. He shared with James Dean the grim stardom of appearing posthumously in his most famous picture. After a career every bit a child star in Hong Kong cinema – almost the Macaulay Culkin of his day – and a spell on Boob tube's The Green Hornet, Lee exploded into activity pictures that were merely and so popular and profitable that Warner Brothers agreed to make Enter the Dragon, with Lee every bit star and coproducer: Hollywood's first martial arts movie. Robert Clouse directed, and the script was past Michael Allin, who wrote the Isaac Hayes moving-picture show Truck Turner. Lalo Schifrin composed the music.
Bruce Lee was possessed of extraordinary physical grace, balletic poise, lethal speed and explosive power. He was a master of kung fu, judo and karate, and is considered the spiritual godfather to today's mixed martial arts scene. He was not a large human being, and then his presence was meliorate captured by the photographic camera lens. Moreover, he had a delicately handsome, most boyish face up and had a charm and verbal fluency as he expounded his Zen theories of combat in interviews, something more similar dynamic motivational philosophy than any fortune-cookie cliché. Lee had a presence and charisma comparable to Muhammad Ali, and that was perhaps never better captured than in Enter the Dragon. Perhaps only Jackie Chan now rivals him as an Asian star in Hollywood – and Hollywood has not shown much interest in promoting an Asian-American A-lister since Enter the Dragon.
Lee plays a Shaolin chief who is recuited by British intelligence to enter a martial arts tournament undercover. This outcome is being run past a sinister megalomaniac chosen Han who is suspected of involvement in drugs and prostitution. Lee has a personal beef with Han, whose goons terrorised and attempted to rape Lee'due south kid sis – she committed suicide rather than submit. He shows up at the island with a couple of American fighters: Williams, played by Jim Kelly, provides some Shaft-fashion street cred while Roper, played past John Saxon, is a playboy type who is close to the James Bail template. In truth, of form, it is Lee himself who is the James Bond, simply he is no womaniser. Bruce Lee has a monkish purity and spirituality, with a laser-similar focus on exposing Han – and of course kick ass.
The look of the movie is exotic and extravagant, especially its inspired hall-of-mirrors showdown, with Lee sporting the weird, almost tribal slashes beyond his midriff. His strange, beast quavering cry and piercing gaze are entirely unique. Only what makes Enter the Dragon outshine the residue is the serene, almost innocent idealism of Lee himself. In the opening scenes, Lee speaks humbly to the aged Abbot at his temple, coolly takes tea with the British intelligence principal Braithwaite, and interrupts their conversation to instruct a teenage male child in martial arts. When this immature hothead is easily bested in combat, Lee says to him with inimitable seriousness: "We need emotional content – non acrimony." Information technology is the philosophy of this martial arts classic, and its unique star. Peter Bradshaw
More Guardian and Observer critics' elevation 10s
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/06/top-10-martial-arts-movies
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