Recommend Martial Arts Movies

Come Drink With Me must be the oldest martial arts film I've seen (1966). Good film, lovely in places, some singing, some surprising brutality but the fights aren't edited very smoothly, I don't know whether this is just the rough early days of complex Hong Kong fight scenes or what King Hu fans would defend as good choices?

The early days of East Asian cinema are sketchy for a lot of casual viewers but I just realised I know nothing about when Hong Kong martial arts films started or found their form. Were female main characters who can fight always there?

Watched on youtube Art Of Action: Martial Arts In The Movies (2002). It's pretty poor overall but it did fill me in on the things I wanted to know most and some of the interviews are interesting.
Samuel L Jackson presents it, there's lots of silly editing and music choices, the camera is right up in Jackson's face most of the time, too much about the western films influenced by Hong Kong.

There's a decent amount of footage of silent martial arts films and stuff up to the 50s, I get the impression they were always popular but it doesn't really say. To be honest, not much of this footage was very dynamic.
It did say that women were mainly the stars until the mid 60s because male actors considered films beneath them, so women were usually playing men. Or were they? From the footage I saw, it didn't look like they were trying to be men. At the start of Come Drink With Me, the main character is bafflingly mistaken for a man (that actress is interviewed here and I had no idea she was the older woman in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). So it seems that King Hu in the 60s was the main turning point in the genre?
The very biggest directors and actors are discussed. Annoyingly, it never tells you who the people being interviewed are.

Another documentary, Kung Fu Fighting, from the late 90s and its only half an hour but was quite good considering it was a third of the length of the other documentary.
It talks quite a lot about how dangerous it is to make these films. I guess this could be the main reason these films have declined, people are generally less willing to take that kind of risk today, even though that annoys me, I can't really blame them.

In both documentaries, Bruce Lee and Donnie Yen talk a lot about martial arts as self expression. I never completely understood this.

It can be as much self-expression than ballet or wrestling. Many martial arts movies are very much about physical expression of ideas. Have you seen Dirty Ho?

I haven't seen that, but I got the impression they weren't just talking about their performances, but the entire discipline as self expression.

I just watched King Hu's Dragon Inn. It's good in places, it feels like a Kurosawa film to me but far too long and I didn't like it as much as Come Drink With Me.

Saw the restored early '70s genre klassik A Touch of Zen yesterday. If wuxia rocks your world you'll undoubtedly love it. There are at least a couple great sequences but i was bored about half the time; don't expect any 'action' in the first of the 3 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Qd3UicjPs

I got the Eureka edition recently. I haven't finished watching it yet. I have been bored most of the time but there is plenty of great images to compensate me.

if you like art movie martial arts this is on netflix now. slow and dreamy and cool to look at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKFtNsQ78oI

been wanting to see that, thanks for lmk

one of the very best martial-arts films -- nay, one of the very best FILMS -- ever made, tsui hark's THE BLADE, is finally out in a decent DVD edition. unfortunately, as with a number of other Golden Harvest films released by Warner Archive in recent months, the subtitles are actually closed-caption titles, so they have things like "loud music plays" in addition to translations of the dialogue. but still, everyone should see this film -- and Sammo Hung's PEDICAB DRIVER, which is also newly out on DVD.

also dr morbs you might like "dragon inn" a little better than "touch of zen." it definitely is also a slow-boil film, but it gets to the action more quickly, and it's more concise in general.

("dragon inn" is out on a dvd/blu-ray in the UK, not terribly expensive to import)

Thanks for the headsup
http://cityonfire.com/have-yourself-a-golden-harvest-christmas-warner-archive-dvd-collection/
This is the fullest listing I can find.

yeah, it's amazing that those are actually easily (and cheaply) available in good-quality editions (at least in terms of visual quality, uncut prints, etc.). the subtitles thing is pretty head-scratching though.

all of the films in that series are worth seeing, but THE BLADE and PEDICAB DRIVER are the standouts. the latter is just a great, compact, hilarious and exciting action film. the former is a flat-out visionary masterpiece. (HE'S A WOMAN, SHE'S A WOMAN is good lowbrow fun, too.)

UK netflix currently has some good seventies Shaw Bros classics to stream, all yr Shaolin Temple, Deadly Venom etc faves.

Anyone seen Downtown Torpedoes? Is that considered a modern classic?

"dragon inn" is out on a dvd/blu-ray in the UK

Yes, from Eureka/Masters of Cinema - they've also issued Touch of Zen in a nice edition. I know Criterion are planning their own Touch of Zen set, wonder if it will share the same source material/supplements etc as the Region 2

As much as I have complained about these films being neglected and it's really nice to see several King Hu and Golden Harvest films get rereleased on disc, I can see why they might be a hard sell despite their obvious attractions.
Watching some of the Shaw Brothers film's recently, it's easy to get frustrated and bored with the cliched characters and plots. It wouldn't matter if the duration was more fight scene dominated but there's so many dragged out character drama where you know exactly what's going to happen. I wasn't that taken with One Armed Swordsman, it is pretty good in some ways but all those scenes demonstrating how virtuous the main character is (virtue signalling haha) grow pretty tiresome.
The charisma of the later more comedy orientated actors goes a long way.

i would have to think so, WF

US is also getting a new digital iteration of Dragon Inn

Still haven't finished Touch Of Zen, but I hope Eureka also puts out more King Hu. I'd like Legend Of The Mountain.

Just about anything with Donnie Yen is worth seeing. All the Ip Man films are great fun. "The Lost Bladesman" and "Dragon" are very cool.

lol did you see Ip Man 3? I enjoyed it for the fantastic fight sequences, but the story was a bit weird, and I couldn't not laugh at Mike Tyson. still...fun for what it was.

Yeah I've watched them all. I mean - you don't go into watching these films expecting a great acting performance from anyone least of all Iron Mike! They're supposed to be hammy and fun.

And the stories are usually always weird, aren't they?

I had a blast (saw it in the theatre) but Mike Tyson in anything makes me LOL, much less an HK martial arts film.

don't feel like it was as solid as the first one, and I actually don't think I saw the second?

I've seen the first two. The first felt very much like a fairly serious prestige film, the second was a bit sillier and falling back on old habits of the genre.

Agree with RAG here. Also both had some ridiculous nationalism/propaganda - at least IM3 toned it down. Thought it was better than the second if just for having that dude from The Grandmaster (let alone the insanely goofy fake-Brit villain of IM2).

I don't remember any propaganda. The Japanese and the goofy brit boxer were bastards but that seemed fair for the context.

What I disliked was the way both films use (better than Jesus) Bruce Lee to validate Ip Man.

Amazingly, there's been like 5 or 6 different Ip Man film and tv series in the last decade. Anyone seen the Wong Kar-Wai one?

Are you kidding? Though kung fu movies have a long long history of anti-foreign sentiment, the Ip Man movies (hardly alone in this in the past 20 years of mainstream HK/Chinese filmmaking) love to paint an idyllic pre-WW2 picture of unified Chinese patriotism, staving off the European and Japanese devils, almost as if they're trying to paper over a certain enormous conflict that happened about that time...

(See also the ridiculous final act of True Legend which had nothing to do with the rest of the film. And good lord, the "first" Ip Man 3 origin story where the huge twist revealed is that Ip Man had a brother who was secretly a Japanese spy, infiltrated since birth as a sleeper agent.)

The use of Bruce lee is pretty corny in all of them. Thank goodness we didn't get CGI Bruce Lee in Ip Man 3 like they planned...

I thought The Grandmaster was worthwhile. If you've seen WKW's other films it's got plenty of his trademark style, lots of intense closeups of Zhang Ziyi looking agonizingly pretty...

Kuro Obi (2007) gives an interesting perspective on the "evil Japanese" trope; it's a Japanese movie about karate practitioners caught up in the Imperial Army in Manchuria. The training and fight sequences are quite different from Chinese martial arts movies (some of the actors are high-ranking karateka). I think it's on YouTube.

Nhex- I don't know enough about China in that period to really criticize but I would have guessed it was simplified. You're saying the propaganda was mostly about what was happening between Chinese people? Having Ip Man make a polite speech about tolerance between Chinese and British in the second film didn't seem too controversial.

I thought it was interesting that in real life, Ip Man initially refused to teach Bruce Lee because their ethnicity was different.

The two main things I heard about The Grandmaster are that WKW is holding back from making political statements now and it's getting more like a shampoo commercial.

Also heard that the big studio Japanese films are being are being increasingly influenced by the government to have nationalistic messages.

yeah the whitewashing of history that occurs in so many popular chinese films (going way way back) would be offensive if it didn't seem so transparent and silly much of the time.

the idea of foreign powers (often acting through chinese intermediates like warlords etc.) being the driving force behind keeping china divided is the basic background (generally taken completely for granted) of a million hong kong melodramas and action films that otherwise don't have a political thought in their minds.

of course i'm excepting mao-era PRC propaganda films in which the nationalists /and/ the japanese are often equally insidious, and pre-1980s taiwanese films in which the communists are the bad guys.

i know that's true, but in the last couple years i've been catching up on a lot of kung fu movies and gooooooood it gets tiresome. often seems like the higher the budget, the more they have to shoehorn in this stuff...

new re-release of Dragon Inn is Friday in NYC

To whoever recommended Sammo Hung's "Pedicab Driver" way upthread: Thank You!Thank You!Thank You!
Managed to track down a very murky quality rip of this on a torrent and laughed my ass off watching it last night. Completely off the wall film.

that was me. yeah, it's nutty in the best hong kong tradition.

maybe i'll rewatch it tonight, or maybe i'll watch "dragons forever"

Finished A Touch Of Zen and all its extras. I like it far more than Dragon Inn. Dragon Inn's "end boss" might be more impressive but this has many more great images, much better locations, the heroine diving across the forest with her sword, the main character laughing after the battle for a ridiculously long time, the psychedelic monk stuff.
It is far too long but the photography of the settings are head and shoulders above any wuxia film I've seen.

Bring on more King Hu.

SPOILER ALERT

dragon inn has that remarkable climax where the bad guy is dispatched almost offhandedly, in extreme long shot. i remember that as being literally breath-taking.

and yeah the choreography of camera and actors in king hu's film is virtuoso and miles above what almost any other director was doing in the early 1970s

filmS

Anyone seen the Detective Dee films?

Big thank you to Amateurist for recommending both these films.

PEDICAB DRIVER was fun. I can't say anything about it was particularly unusual but it feels like an odd mixture nonetheless. Got the new DVD version of this.

THE BLADE reminds me of a lot of the things that made Asian film attractive in the 90s for a lot of people including myself: it's mad, energetic, stylish and dark in a specific way I really like. I really miss stuff like this and it's always a pleasure to find more. Great soundtrack, so many good visual flourishes, a lot of it confused me but it's quite bizarre and beautiful. I doubt anyone's making anything like this today. Unfortunately I got an older DVD copy that wasn't the best quality so I might even seek out the newest version.

it's definitely a little bit confusing as a story -- very elliptical at times. but it's so visually dynamic that i never minded much. glad you enjoyed the movies... have you seen tsui hark's peking opera blues or shanghai blues?

I haven't seen those but I've seen Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain, Green Snake, Chinese Ghost Story trilogy and Iron Monkey. I know he's only listed as producer on the latter 4 but I've heard he basically co-directs anything he produces.

I didn't like Green Snake much (didn't matter that it isn't really a martial arts film) but the rest are great.

I've seen that some martial arts fans resent his influence and think he's a hypocrite for complaining that Hong Kong films have become too Hollywood blockbustery.

well he was known as the "spielberg of hong kong" in the 1980s/early 1990s -- i think that tsui at his best is better than spielberg, but he's not always at his best, esp. not since the mid-late 1990s.

the two i mentioned aren't martial arts films, either, btw. but they are a lot of fun.

yeah i'm kind of mixed on him tbh

I'm going to watch his first Detective Dee film soon. I thought people didn't like his newer films at all but some people seem to love Seven Swords (2005) as much as his earlier stuff.