May 12 movie: Drunken Master. I'm going to cheat and link to Georg's write up because he said everything I would like to say. It's an early Jackie Chan movie, amazing fight scenes, no wire work because they hadn't developed the whole wire fu thing yet, and Jackie's character is a total dick. Still somehow basically likeable, I think because I'm so used to Jackie playing likeable good guys that I superimposed that persona on this character.
In both this movie and the sequel Drunken Master 2, Jackie has to get literally drunk to do the "drunken fighting" style. I don't think that's what drunken fighting really meant; I think it was a fluid, off-kilter style of movement that seemed discoordinated or unpredictable, and that's why people called it "drunken" fighting. Georg said that these movies were a radical departure in depictions of Wong Fei Hung, who had previously always been portrayed as a very serious, heroic figure. It's sort of like if Hollywood made a movie in which young Abraham Lincoln was a drunken lout.
He wasn't?!