Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Breathless: There Are Lots of Different Ways to Be Great

Wow, everybody, I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is the 300th movie I've reviewed on I Probably Liked It. That's a lot of movies for someone to probably like in only 20 months! I haven't slowed down at all since watching it either. I still have almost 30 movies to review. I'm really wanting to be caught up by the end of this month, but writing takes a lot of time that I don't necessarily have, so we'll see.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, by Lam Nai-Choi, 1991


I've been hearing about this movie since I was in 9th grade. Back in the early, pre-Stewart days of The Daily Show, they always used to show a clip of a guy smashing another man's head with his fists like Ghallagher smashes a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The older geeks who were more in the know than I told me about The Story of Ricky, and thus a legend was born.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, set in a hellish not-too-distant future of 2001, is about a good guy who is imprisoned for killing a crime boss. The prison is just as corrupt as the outside world, as Ricky soon learns when he comes to the defense of a poor old man who is just shy of parole. In doing this, he makes enemies of not only the worst of the prisoners, but also the evil warden and his lackies. Now Ricky must fight his way through these guys and out of the jail that would rather see him dead.

This movie is nuts! I don't know why it took me so long to see it. I guess because it was never sitting directly in front of me, until it popped up on Netflix. The violence is super over-the-top and hilariously fake looking. It's like if Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi made a science fiction kung fu prison drama/comedy. We're in a world where pretty much anything can happen. We see Ricky smash his fists through heads and torsos, and one of his foes tries to choke Ricky with his intestines at one point. Ricky has superpowers and is basically indestructible, unfortunately for these bad guys. You never feel like the odds are overwhelming for the hero, you just watch to see how he's going to eviscerate one boss after another.

I'm guessing my description isn't really selling Riki-Oh. You're probably wondering what's so appealing about it. It's hard to do this movie justice with words. Let me just say that it's weird and funny and culty and great to watch with a group of friends (inebriation optional). Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is off its rocker, and totally awesome for it.

Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960


While I think you could say the Story of Ricky achieves a kind of greatness, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is the real deal. Sure, it doesn't have a scene where the hero shoves a bad guy into a meat grinder, but it has its own non-meat-grinder related merits. There's a reason this film is frequently voted by critics as one of the best ever made.

One of the films that kick started the French New Wave, Breathless is the story of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a guy who steals a car and shoots a cop and now needs money to get out of the way. He goes into the city to find someone to give him a loan. While he's there, he also tracks down Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he's slept with a few times, and wants to come with him. Much of the movie is set in her apartment, as they smoke cigarettes like they're in a French movie and discuss their situation and she tries to determine whether she loves him or not, while the cops are out there tracking him down.

It says something about a movie when it is the source of all the stereotypes of what a certain kind of movie is. Breathless is like that. Every American parody of an "artsy" French film on TV, in cartoons, and in movies, is just doing its own version of Breathless. This is that movie. The philosophical voice-over narration of the hero, the frequent use of jump-cuts. Not only often parodied, but often used for serious. The way Godard used jump-cuts in his editing was a brand new thing at the time, though it's become recognizable and commonplace over the last 50 years.

I had seen Godard's Alphaville before this, and I liked it, but now that I've seen Breathless, Godard seems much easier to get into. It's bold, groundbreaking, and personal and it still feels that way half a century later. This would have been a much better film for me to start off with.

Ip Man, Ip Man 2

Ip Man, by Wilson Yip, 2008

Biopics, as a whole, just might be my least favorite genre. There are good ones out there. I love Ed Wood, and Bound for Glory, and Amadeus, for example. But for the most part, we in America get Oscar bait that glorifies rather than humanizes the subject, plays fast and loose with historical accuracy, and throws just about every cliche in the book at us.

Well, in Hong Kong, they appear to make biopics pretty much the exact same way, but for one thing: a real sense of fun. Ip Man is the story of the great 20th century martial arts master: Ip Man, best known as the teacher of Bruce Lee. Donnie Yen plays Ip Man, a peaceful, mannered family man in 1930's China. He is frequently visited by other masters eager to prove themselves for a fight, and he takes it in stride, though he refuses to teach his trade, which is the Wing Chun style. That all changes when the Japanese invade and occupy China. Ip Man trains his people in self defense and face off against the invaders.

Yes, the movie glorifies Ip Man. He's treated as almost saintly. The only character flaw I could really find was that he loved Martial Arts so much that he didn't have much time for his wife and children, a trope not too different from the heroes in our rock and roll biopics. And no, I don't know much about the historical Ip Man, but I doubt his life really played out like this, a perfectly structured Martial Arts movie. I really don't mind, though, because none of it feels cynical. It doesn't feel like a product manufactured for awards. What Wilson Yip made was an entertaining and reverent action movie based on a life of an interesting 20th century Chinese figure. The fight scenes are great, and Donnie Yen is extremely charming in the lead. The movie was very successful in China, making tons of money and winning tons of awards, and it led to...

Ip Man 2, by Wilson Yip, 2010

That's right, a sequel! How many biopics get sequels? I guess Che was split into two movies, but usually all the greatest hits of someone's life are covered in one movie, but the first Ip Man only covered a few years in his life, and the sequel picks up right where it left off. Master Ip Man has fled the Japanese occupation in mainland China for Hong Kong, where he opens a school.

The problem is, all the heads of the other schools run a tight racket on the Martial Arts business. He must first prove himself in battle with these guys before they allow him to teach Wing Chun in their territory. There's a great fight sequence between Yen and Sammo Hung where Yen must stay on top of a wobbly table for the entirety of the duel in order to keep teaching.

Then, Ip Man is roped into fighting an English boxer, boxing vs. Wing Chun. The fight seems a little absurd. Seems to me since Ip Man is fighting with his bare fists instead of with gloves, and is allowed to use kicking, that it should be no problem. But the English guy is apparently super strong and nigh-invulnerable, and a big mean jerk to boot, endlessly spouting out swipes at the Chinese.

Like the first entry, Ip Man 2 is a lot of fun. It doesn't try to make things realistic, it's a purely movie world these characters are living in. I didn't think it was quite as good as the first one, but they do play great as one big movie. I'm again impressed with how entertaining and watchable Donnie Yen is as the hero. Oh, and by the end of this movie, Ip Man is still well shy of meeting and teaching Bruce Lee. There's a knowing nod and a wink to the audience at the end that would seem out of place in a serious Hollywood biopic, but works great for the popcorn fun of the Ip Man movies. Maybe someday they'll make an Ip Man 3 with Bruce Lee as a character. I'd watch that.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

I love when a whole bunch of different genres get mashed together into something strange and new. I love it more when it works, but I still appreciate the attempt when it doesn't. Tsui Hark's film, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is a historical fantasy murder mystery kung fu adventure movie, and for the most part, it clicks.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is set in 7th Century China, during the reign of the controversial first female Emperor. A massive statue of the Buddha is being built in preparation for her coronation. But when an official visiting the construction site spontaneously combusts, Detective Dee is called in to use his deductive reasoning to solve the mystery. We then follow him on his mission, and we see fantastical cities under cities, completely hidden from the sun, talking deer Gods, and people who can change their appearance via acupuncture pressure points.

Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs, a million billion billion other movies) portrays "Detective Dee", a fictionalized version of a real historical figure. He's a bit of a Sherlock Holmes type, well ahead of the curve in a lot of ways. When we meet him, he's been imprisoned for eight years for opposing the rule of the Empress that he is enlisted to help. I thought that aspect was interesting, his willingness to help a ruler he ideologically opposes for the good of China. In a way, it kind of reminded me of D'Artagnan of the Three Musketeers fighting so hard to protect the Queen's honor, even though he knows she's been sleeping around on the king. Does that make sense? Maybe just in my head.

My favorite character was Jing-er, played by Li Bing Bing. She acts as the Empress' right hand, and is sent to keep an eye on Dee. Her weapon of choice is a whip, and she's all sorts of awesome, and you're not quite sure where her loyalties lie.

As a whole, Detective Dee is an entertaining fantasy adventure with an interesting engaging mystery. I thought it would be a stretch to have a skeptical Holmes-ian character integrated into a world full of Chinese mysticism, but the mysticism is accepted as fact in the context of the movie and is all kind of taken in stride by the characters, and it actually works rather well.

The one element in the genre mish-mash that didn't really come together for me was the Kung Fu. Pretty surprising, right? There are some fun sequences and fights, but the way they were shot felt very Western to me. So much of it was done in tight close-up, with more cutting than is necessary. The best martial arts scenes in movies are shot in a way that we can see the fighters' whole bodies at work. If it's just patched together in editing, it's far less impressive.

Besides that aspect, though, the action sequences are all a lot of fun. They just feel more Hollywood than Hong Kong. Overall, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is an interesting and original piece of popcorn moviemaking, and totally worth a watch.

The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan Maut)

Gareth Evans' The Raid: Redemption is about as intense as a movie can get. It grabs hold of you within the first 15 minutes and doesn't let go until the very end. I shouldn't have to say much more to convince everyone who loves action movies to go and see this movie right away, so the review portion of this entry will be short. But I have a special surprise at the end!

The Raid: Redemption stars Iko Uwais, the star of Evans' previous film, Merantau, as Rama, a rookie in the B-Unit of a SWAT team attempting to raid a building swimming with criminals. The crime lord in charge of the building is Tama, a paranoid man who hides out on the 15th floor and has rigged up his building with security cameras and henchmen. The SWAT team must make their way from the bottom to the 15th story in order to capture Tama. All hell breaks loose when Tama learns of their presence and sends everyone in the entire building to take them down.

From then on, it's a non-stop barrage of violent shootouts, stabouts, punchouts, and kickouts. One great battle ensues after another, as Rama quickly reveals himself to be a one-man beatdown machine, working his way to the top of the building on his own. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but I don't want to ruin them, and really, the movie focuses on delivering to us exactly what we want to see: Carnage.

I love the way the battles progress. The SWAT team relies heavily on their guns, but they only have so much ammo. Once they run out, the movie shifts into martial arts mode, as Iko Uwais uses his tremendous skills to evade the blades of machete-wielding tenants. The scene stealer baddie is Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), a guy who, when given a choice between shooting someone and fighting hand-to-hand, will throw his gun away in a heartbeat. Crazy as he is, you've got to respect him.

The Raid is a pretty amazing feat, from a technical standpoint. It's action filmmaking at its purest, and Gareth Evans deserves the praise he is getting. To make a movie that never gives the audience a chance to rest, to shoot and put together in editing all these action sequences that are clear and easy for the viewer to track, is a difficult challenge indeed.

There's already buzz that Gareth Evans is hard at work on a sequel. While I'm sure it's in good hands, and have the utmost faith in him to pull it off, I thought it couldn't hurt to throw out a couple of scene suggestions. It's going to be hard to top the first one, so here are a couple of moments of pure ownage that just might do the job, as horribly rendered by yours truly in MS Paint.

Here we have Rama kicking a guy's head clean off. The head flies through the air, clear over to a nearby basketball hoop. The head goes through the hoop, NOTHING BUT NET, with a SWISH sound effect, and then falls into the open mouth of a hungry monster, or possibly an alligator or a dinosaur. I'm not sure what that is that I drew.

And here we have a bad guy slicing open Rama's throat with a long knife. Little does he realize that even Rama's blood is badass, as it flows out of the wound on his neck, forms a blood fist, and wallops him one.

If you read this, Mr. Evans, I just wanted to let you know, you can have these ideas FREE OF CHARGE. I already owe you one for giving us The Raid.



And for everyone else, if you're interested in seeing a couple more of my illustrated reviews, check out my popular Logan's Run entry, and Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, which is actually my favorite of all the reviews I've done.

Merantau

Director Gareth Evans' new film The Raid is currently taking the geek world by storm, inspiring memes and all that stuff. My review for that is still forthcoming, but while you wait, hey, have you seen his previous film, Merantau?

While The Raid is wall to wall action, Merantau takes a more character and plot oriented approach. It is the story of Yuda (The Raid badass Iko Uwais), a young Indonesian man on his way to Jakarta to follow his dream of becoming a teacher of a martial art called Silat. Things aren't easy for him in Jakarta, he winds up homeless, sleeping in a large pipe at a construction site.

Fate intervenes when a boy steals Yuda's wallet and he chases him into an alley, where he finds Astri, the boy's sister, being roughed up by her boss. Yuda beats the guy up and saves her, though he cost her her job in the process. Unfortunately, this raises the ire of Astri's boss, and in turn, his boss, a European gangster of some kind. In order to get Astri and her brother out of trouble, Yuda must now face off against the Eurogangster and his men on his own.

The martial arts in Merantau are pretty damn great. I like how Gareth Evans directs the action sequences. There isn't a great deal of cutting, and he places the cameras in places where you can easily follow what is happening. It's refreshing to see action like this, since so many Hollywood action movies are a jumble of quick cutting and tight close-ups.

The story, while fairly standard for a Martial Arts movie, is effective, and serves its purpose as a setup for a ton of beatdowns, while still giving us likeable characters that we can root for. Iko Uwais is easy to like as a hero. At the start, he comes across as young, fresh-faced and open to the world. When he's given something to fight for, you're right there with him and want to see him win.

There are certain leaps a viewer must take and facts we must accept when watching a martial arts movie like Merantau. One is that nobody ever seems to get tired during a fight. Iko Uwais will finish a giant showdown and run at top speed into the next without ever even stopping for a quick breather. Another is that everybody knows martial arts too. Where's the fun in beating up a bunch of gangsters if they can't put up a fight? Heck, even the European guys seem to be masters at some fighting style or another. I don't mind taking these leaps. They're pretty silly when you stop and think about it, but they're all part of the fun.

So if you liked The Raid, will you like Merantau? I would have to say, yes, I think you will. It offers a lot of action, and a lot more in terms of character and story on top of that. It's much less of a ride than The Raid is, but it makes up for that fact in other ways. Some people, say, Roger Ebert, for example, might argue that Merantau is actually the better movie of the two. It all depends on what you're looking for, really.

Kiltro

A few months ago, I discovered Mirageman, a low budget martial arts superhero comedy from Chile that was a whole lot of fun. It was directed by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and starred Marko Zaror in the title role. Well, as luck would have it, it was not their first collaboration. Kiltro is much more of a standard martial arts film than Mirageman was, but it still has the same sense of fun.

Kiltro is the story of Zamir, played by Marko Zaror, a young punk and a fighter. He has a pink mullet that is pretty hard to get over as a viewer. It's not just that he has a mullet and his hair is dyed pink. ONLY the mullet is pink! I better stop now before I get diverted and write my entire review about Zamir's pink mullet, so let's get back to the mullet-- I mean the movie.

Anyway, Zamir is infatuated with Kim, the daughter of a local Korean martial arts teacher. Unfortunately, he has a misplaced way of showing his affection: by running over and beating the shit out of any other guy who talks to her. He tries to impress her by challenging her dad's entire class to a fight--and wins-- but you know, he has a lot of natural talent, and none of the discipline.

When Max Kalba, another old martial artist, comes to town to take vengeance on the martial arts teacher, Zamir is defeated, so he takes the girl and flees, going into hiding with another member of Kim's father's old martial arts bros. In order to rescue Kim's father, Zamir must train himself (with yet another of Kim's dad's old buddies, this one the classic drunken master archetype) to defeat Kalba.

What I like about Espinoza's movies is that, even though they don't break new ground, they are really well made, and they proudly are what they are. The stories are presented with a straight faced sincerity not often seen in movies like this these days. Espinoza clearly loves Quentin Tarantino, and wears it on his sleeve, even lifting some of the music from the Kill Bill movies for his own use.

The final brawl is pretty great, with Zamir painting a symbol over his face like a badass, attaching blades to his feet like a badass, and proceeding to slice open a bunch of Kalba's henchmen's throats with his kicks. Like a badass. Sure, the blood is CGI, which inevitably always fails to sate a moviegoer's bloodlust, but hey, I know the movie was made on the cheap.

Kiltro is worth watching if you like the martial arts, though I personally liked Mirageman better. I like the sincerity Espinoza and Zaror have put into their little kung fu movies, and the sort of D.I.Y attitude of the filmmaking. If I could some up my thoughts on Kiltro, it would go as such: Pink mullet.

Haywire

Over the last two decades, Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be the most versatile and chameleon-like film director currently working. He can jump from genre to genre, tell a great story, while still keeping his trademark style at the forefront. In the past, he's made slick heist movies (the Ocean's 11 series), sweeping crime epics (Traffic), a science fiction romance (Solaris), tiny improvised independent films (Bubble), and so on. Just four months ago, he gave us an apocalyptic medical thriller with Contagion. What I'm saying is, you could find a Steven Soderbergh film in just about every Netflix category. I suppose that's why he plans on retiring a few movies down the road.

Haywire is Steven Soderbergh's martial arts movie, starring MMA fighter Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a mercenary on the run from her employers who set her up for a fall. There's more of a story, but that's kind of all you need to know. She kicks lots of ass and tells her story to a 19 year old kid she takes with her. It's like a smart, slick, and stylized Steven Seagal movie, but with a hot girl mercifully put in Seagal's place.

Gina Carano is not an actor (or wasn't before this), but she did alright. She did better than I probably would have done if I ever tried acting. I thought she was better in some scenes than she was in others, which made me wonder if her better scenes were the ones that were the ones that were shot later on. Soderbergh wisely surrounds her with a lot of big talent, including Bill Paxton as her military father, Ewan MacGregor and Antonio Banderas as those plotting against her, Michael Douglas as the government man who hired them, and Michael Fassbender as a British agent she must work with.

I liked Haywire. It's not one of Steven Soderbergh's best works, but you can tell he's having a good time, and I found it infectious. Lots of cool camerawork, great editing, and a funky Out of Sight-esque score by that movie's same composer, David Holmes. The action sequences are really cool too, choreographed to play to Gina Carano's strengths as an MMA fighter. I'm not sure if this movie made a star out of her, but I bet she'll continue to find work based on it.

I'll always gladly go see a Steven Soderbergh movie upon release. I hope his talk of retirement is just talk. I hope he takes a couple years off, gets bored and comes back to filmmaking. I'm sure there are still a couple of minor subgenres he hasn't tackled yet.

Mirageman

It's not fair that every superhero lives in New York, is it? People need rescuing the world over, right? Well, now Mirageman is here to fill that void in Chile.

Directed by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, Mirageman is another entry in the "normal guy in the real world, inspired by comic books, puts on a mask and decides to fight crime" genre that we're getting more and more of these days. I've heard about a few other independent ones, but I suppose the most recognizable entry in the genre would be Kick Ass.

Mirageman is the story Marco (played by Marko Zaror), by day a lowly bouncer at a sleazy night club, who spends all of his spare time exercising and training in martial arts. You see, three years earlier, Marco's parents were murdered and little brother raped (!!!) and traumatized, now catatonic in a home. One night, a ski-masked Marco stops another home invasion and rescues Carol, a beautiful news reporter from certain rape (!!!). Carol thanks him publicly and calls him a hero. When he next visits the hospital, he finds that the news of this mysterious rape-preventing hero has brought his brother a little bit out of his shell, the first positive response in years. Inspired by this, Marco dons a costume and becomes Mirageman.

Visually, the movie is as gritty and down to earth as the silly subject matter allows. It has a near documentary style, and relies heavily on news reports to fill out the narrative. In fact, the anchors and reporters often give Mirageman advice on what he should and shouldn't do, and even downright manipulate him for their own gain.

Though Mirageman strives for a certain kind of realism, at the same time, it doesn't take itself too seriously. There's a great deal of comedy mixed in with the violence and awesome martial arts. Marco's trial and error attempts at superheroics offer a lot of laughs, poking fun at comic book nonsense, such as the length of time and difficulty one would actually encounter when trying to change into costume while a crime is in progress. He also has a hilarious sidekick figure, who goes by the name "Pseudo Robin", who is not much of a fighter, but all heart, and he has an extra motorcycle.

Mirageman has some fun with the audience, undercutting our expectations at times. At first, it seems like a typical martial arts movie is happening, where every opponent he faces, every gang of crooks, appears to be a martial arts master himself. But then, when Mirageman attempts to bust his Holy Grail, an evil pedophile child trafficking ring, he realizes how out of his element he is when facing people carrying guns.

Marko Zaror is awesome as Mirageman. It's hard to say how good he is with dialogue, as he only had a few lines in the whole movie. His actions speak for him, and he's a killer martial artist. Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and Marko Zaror have made two more movies together, and I believe I'm going to have to watch those as well.

Mirageman was one of those movies that I knew next to nothing about and had no expectations for. I was very pleased with what I got. It is action-packed, funny, self aware, and a little bit cheesy, all in all a movie worth geeking out over.

Check it out! It's on Netflix Instant if you're in America.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

When it comes to Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, I'm still learning. I've seen a few Kung Fu movies here and there, a couple of Wong Kar Wai movies, lots of Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan. Oh, and Infernal Affairs, I own that. Not much else. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin seems like a good place for me to start. It is considered one of the great martial arts movies of all time.

Made in 1978 as a Shaw Brothers production, and directed by Liu Chia-Liang, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin made a star out of a young Gordon Liu, a huge star in his own right, but best known to me as Johnny Mo and Pai Mei in the Kill Bill movies, in the role of San Te. San Te is a young man who joins the monks in Shaolin to learn their brand of Kung Fu, with the goal of introducing it to the oppressed people, and giving them a means to fight back against the Tartars.

A large bulk of the movie basically plays as the most awesome training montage ever. Over half of the movie is San Te's training, succeeding in difficult and painful trials, and climbing the ladder from the 35th Chamber all the way to the top. His first trial is simply finding a way to jump across a pool of water with a bundle of sticks floating in it, in order to get his food.

You'd think it would get boring, but it never does. San Te's single-mindedness and dedication to his goal, and the promise that his lessons will pay off in the end makes the training very engrossing and downright fun to watch. Not to mention the diversity and creativity behind each of the trials. At one point, they strap downward pointing knives to his biceps and make him carry buckets with his arms straight out. If he lowers them, he gets cut. Later, San Te invents a new weapon in order to defeat a higher ranking monk in a duel. Totally awesome.

I was really happy to see it subtitled on the DVD, rather than dubbed. The dubbing is one of the things that keeps me from watching a lot of Chinese movies. I really hate dubbing, and it seems like it's the only way a lot of these old movies are available.

So that's that. Another classic I can now say I've seen. Another gap in my knowledge filled. Next up, I suppose I should probably see Master of the Flying Guillotine, or maybe Hard Boiled or The Killer.

Wing Chun

My knowledge of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema is pretty shameful. While I have seen and enjoyed many Chinese films over the years, I was never able to put them into any kind of historical context. I'd love to know which directors most influenced the distinct style of Kung Fu movies in their early years. Did it all start with Bruce Lee? I somehow doubt it. One of the reason's I'm so ignorant is the difficulty of finding older Chinese films in their original language. They're almost all dubbed, and I have little to no patience for dubbing.

When looking for a Kung Fu movie to watch, I pretty much picked Wing Chun at random, because I recognized some of the names in it. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Yim Wing Chun, a girl who uses her Kung Fu mastery to save her friends, family, and even her entire village from a gang of bandits. It also stars Donnie Yen as her love interest.

Wing Chun is a pretty light-hearted movie, with a lot of comedy and a twisty little romance. It's pretty PG-rated. The humor is a little more over-the-top than I usually like, but I'll admit that I did laugh out loud a couple times.

The real centerpiece of the movie, is of course, the Kung Fu battles, and surprise! This movie is directed by the master choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping, the guy behind The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, and countless other martial arts spectacles. It goes without saying that the fights are a real treat. His trademark wire-fu is still in it, but it's a little older than those other movies, so the wires themselves are still very visible.

My favorite fight was probably the one where another master challenges Wing Chun to prove males are superior fighters. She sets up a tray of tofu and challenges him to smash it if he can. Then she effortlessly (ok, a little effort) keeps the tofu tray away from his blows by blocking him and tossing the tray itself around. It's a lot of fun, and there's a good deal of Jackie Chan-ish physical comedy involved. There's another great fight on top of a giant spear stuck in a rock wall, too.

Wing Chun was pretty enjoyable, though the story didn't really blow me away. It suited my needs, though, since, at the moment, I was looking for something light and breezy to watch, and something shorter in length than a lot of the more epic, House of Flying Daggers types of movies (I still haven't seen House of Flying Daggers, so you might see a review of that coming up in the future). Still, the fight choreography alone made the movie worth watching.

Next time, I might check out something more serious. I have it on good authority that Ip Man is a good one.

Circle of Iron

I've been a little disappointed with the way some of my recent reviews have been turning out, so I set out to find a movie that I would have no trouble at all talking about. I always have the most fun writing about unintentionally funny, so-bad-they're-good movies, and as luck would have it, Richard Moore's Circle of Iron is the very best kind: the well-made bad movie.

Admittedly, it's a lot of fun to laugh at the ineptitude on every level inherent in something like The Room or Battlefield: Earth. But Circle of Iron is actually a clear, coherent, and very watchable film. The badness comes not from the filmmaking, but goes all the way back to the ridiculousness of the very concept of itself. Not only is it ridiculous, but it is done completely in earnest, and that innocence is why it's so unintentionally funny and so enjoyable.

The story for Circle of Iron was actually conceived by Bruce Lee before he died. He never managed to get it made, but as often seemed to happen with Bruce Lee, David Carradine was called in to save the day. I don't know what Bruce Lee's version would have been like. Maybe completely different, maybe legitimately good. I don't know, though, this movie is pretty silly.

The setting: a fantasy world, where men with 70's mustaches fight each other with martial arts for entertainment as what appears to be the Pope of Kung Fu (Roddy McDowell!) looks on. Our hero, manlily named Cord, clearly the manliest of these manly men, is on a quest. He must find and defeat the man named Zetan and learn the secrets from the book he possesses. On his journey, Cord is apprenticed by a blind master (Carradine), and put through various trials (also mostly Carradine), at the end of each, he learns something about himself (Carradine? No, Cord.).

Cord is hilarious from the get-go. He has his long, flowing, feathered 70's hair. He is clad in only a furry loincloth and furry boots (it's that kind of fantasy world). He wears a gold medallion around his neck. He's clearly not the best actor, but he plays the role sincerely.

David Carradine plays four characters throughout the film. He was an interesting actor. He's been great in things (Bound for Glory, Kill Bill Volume II), and pretty bad in other things. Even at his worst, though, he's kind of mesmerizing to watch. I think he's actually pretty fun in this one. His blind guru character is kind of both awesome and hilarious. He's the cliched Zen Master, speaking only in heavy-handed platitudes and answering every question with a question in turn. He plays the exact same wooden flute that he plays in Kill Bill. Not only that, but he uses it as his cane, AND as a weapon. And get this: It whistles when he twirls it! Come on, that's legitimately cool. Additionally, Carradine plays a monkey man, a nomad, and Death itself. The monkey costume is pretty embarrassing.

There's a random scene in the middle of the movie where Cord meets Eli Wallach, playing a man trying to disintegrate the lower half of his body in a vat of oil. It's played with a sense of humor, and it's supposed to be a parable (it probably really is a parable). It just winds up really bizarre and out of place, but it's part of the crazy fun of the movie.

The parables are one of the funniest aspects. The whole movie is really about enlightenment, (trust me, it's not subtle when you find that bit out at the end) and I'm sure each step of his quest is probably some ancient Confucian story or something. They really hammer it home on you. It's like Man Philosophy, very rudimentary but seemingly profound riddles that the nerdier breed of Martial Arts enthusiasts probably love because it makes them feel both masculine and sensitive at the same time.

Before I go, let's talk about the filmmaking. The director, Richard Moore, was a fairly accomplished cinematographer. It shows. It's a very well shot film. I was shocked by how good it looked. Most Martial Arts movies and Barbarian movies look like they were made on a $50 budget. This one probably was too, but Richard Moore hides it well.

The fight scenes are pretty good too. I know Carradine was the star of Kung Fu, but I guess I'd never seen him at it. If he didn't know martial arts, and I'm not sure if he did, he fakes it convincingly.

So, how do I grade a movie like Circle of Iron? With a couple of the bad movies I've reviewed, I just refused to grade them, because my motives for watching them were not pure. If I enjoy a movie even though it's bad, I can't possibly give it a high grade, can I? I laughed a lot at the absurdity of Circle of Iron, and I really did enjoy it, on a kind of stupid level. I don't think I'll give it a letter grade, but I will recommend it as a fun movie to laugh at with your friends, if that's the kind of thing you like to do.

By the way, if my review interested you, and you want to read a funnier opinion of Circle of Iron with less punctuation, follow this link to my buddy Kent's blog. We're doing a little crossover.