Family movie night.
11 year old: Ted/Ted. She likes Ted. Ted is her. Ted is her soul animal or whatever it’s called. She liked when they went to the mall because she likes going to the mall. She liked how they tried to play and they sounded really poorly. She says my hair looks like Beethoven. She liked every scene where they were stupid and that was pretty much every scene.
9 year old: The coolest movie ever made on…
A solid entry in the 21st century digital wuxia cycle we’ve been living in for the past decade or so. The closest analogue may be Derek Yee’s 2016 Sword Master, a remake, like Kung Fu Cult Master, of a late 70s Chor Yuen film (in that case, 1977’s Death Duel). Both films feature a large cast of actors in gorgeous costumes acting in fancy, digitally-enhanced environments and occasionally in engaging in something that looks like the kinds of things that…
A solid entry in the 21st century digital wuxia cycle we’ve been living in for the past decade or so. The closest analogue may be Derek Yee’s 2016 Sword Master, a remake, like Kung Fu Cult Master, of a late 70s Chor Yuen film (in that case, 1977’s Death Duel). Both films feature a large cast of actors in gorgeous costumes acting in fancy, digitally-enhanced environments and occasionally in engaging in something that looks like the kinds of things that…
Four years and many, many crises ago, The Wandering Earth became one of the biggest Chinese blockbusters of all-time. A sci-fi epic about family and sacrifice for the collective good, it effectively welded Hollywood-style disaster effects action to a PRC-friendly message and dominated that year’s Lunar New Year season. This New Year, director Frant Gwo and mega-star Wu Jing are back for a follow-up, not a sequel but rather a prequel, chronicling the series of disasters and heroics that led the Earth, in 2058, to begin its 2,500 year journey to Alpha Centauri to escape the soon-to-explode Sun.
Review at The Chinese Cinema.
Ideal Saturday afternoon viewing, just hanging out with my buddies Walter and Donald, watching them break some songs apart and put them back together again.
Family movie night.
11 year old: Confusion/10. In the beginning it said that Truman played himself, and now we’re telling her it was Jim Carrey?!? Wonders if the cameras saw every moment, like when he went to the bathroom. Will he not be able to do anything in the real world because everyone knows everything about him? She would like to be the star of her own show, but only if she could turn the camera off for some parts,…
Serendipitously, this proved to be an excellent pairing with the movie I watched yesterday, Chor Yuen’s Swordsman and Enchantress. Both star Ti Lung and freely mix the delights of genre filmmaking with a profound disillusionment with wuxia ideology and the world in general. Ti plays a former rebel leader now working in hiding at a textile factory owned by sort-of widow Maggie Cheung. They are soon joined by a young bumpkin, played by Aaron Kwok, the son of Ti’s former…
Perhaps the most Chor Yuen of Chor Yuen movies, or at least from the cycle of baroque wuxias he made for Shaw Brothers in the latter half of the 1970s.
Review for subscribers only at The Chinese Cinema.
Subscribe today for only $1/month or $10/year.
Rewatched this in three parts over five days on Netflix. Good movie. I miss that decade when Tom Cruise was trying to be an actor.