July 31 movie: Fist of Legend. Georg and I had seen this movie before, when we showed it at the Starlite Drive-in as a benefit for the Asian film festival. But it showed up on IFC so we had to watch it again.
I think this is probably the best martial arts movie I've seen. The fighting is excellent, more realistic than a lot of HK films but still full of impressive moves. The big fight scene between Morpheus and Neo in the first Matrix movie owes a lot to this film (both were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping). I think I read an interview with Jet Li where he talked about developing a modern fighting style for Fist of Legend that incorporated Western boxing moves, to contrast with the historical films he'd been doing previously.
I could go on and on about the fighting, but there are a lot of martial arts movies with great fighting. What I really love about Fist of Legend is the story. (And I don't often say that about a HK action film!) It's set during the Japanese occupation of China and the plot focuses on conflicts between Japanese soldiers and the members of a Chinese martial arts school.
Fist of Legend is a remake of the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury, which I haven't seen. I've heard that Fist of Fury was fairly one-sided and anti-Japanese. (Not that I can hold that against them under the circumstances: Fist of Fury was made only a few decades after the occupation, which was brutal to say the least.) But Fist of Legend is more nuanced: the Chinese characters aren't all heroes, and the Japanese characters aren't all evil. The story is about racism and conflict on both sides.
The IFC version was dubbed so some of the acting was lost, but at least the dubbing wasn't horrible. And I must thank them profusely for showing it in letterbox! Pan and scan would have ruined some of the best fight scenes.
6 Comments
If you liked Fist of Legend... just wait till you see Jet Li in Hero. Best movie I've seen this year -- and working in the film biz, I see a _lot_ of films.
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James
They were running ads for Hero during Fist of Legend. I can't wait! It looked SO good. I'm envious that you've seen it already!
ps: When I called Fist of Legend the best martial arts movie I'd ever seen, I was forgetting Iron Monkey, which is equally brilliant.
other movies at the top of the list, along w/ Fist of Legend: Supercop, Drunken Master, New Legend of Shaolin, Wing Chun, Chinese Ghost Story
Really, Hero is a league apart. It's taken $100m before it's opened anywhere significant in the English-speaking world, and there's very few movies that can claim that. It is truly spectacular -- unlike any martial-arts movie I've seen before. Hero is to Crouching Tiger is as the Bolshoi Ballet is to a Vegas chorus-line.
While I'm bragging, I've also seen House of Flying Daggers, the next movie by Zhang Yimou (after Hero). Awesome in parts but not as good overall.
The IFC dub version significantly detracts from the film. The 'Action Channel' was showing a substantially differnt dub verison last year, but I cannot find any documentation of that and which might be on which distributor's DVD. The dialogue was different, the sound effects, the music. In IFC's version, these all sound slike cheap HK work. The other version, was as well-done as the visual composition and choregraphy. I appluad IFC for showing martial arts movies, but 'boo' them for choosing this lesser version.
The IFC dub version significantly detracts from the film. The 'Action Channel' was showing a substantially different dub verison last year, but I cannot find any documentation for it. THe dialogue was different, the sound effects, the music. In IFC's version, these all sound like cheap HK work. The other version, was as well-done as the visual composition and choregraphy. I applaud IFC for showing martial arts movies, but 'boo' them for choosing this lesser version.