Post by Shonokin on May 5, 2007 19:30:31 GMT -8
Never been too crazy about the Wuxia style Chinese action/dramas. But started watching Return of Condor Hero on the local asian public TV and it's pretty interesting. Nice mix of drama, comedy and modern wirework/sfx.
That got me sort of interested in looking at some other Wuxia stuff, like the movie Curse of the Golden Flower, which I think I would have more fun driving nails into my toes than watching again. There'd be like 3 minutes of super cool action and then what seemed like hours of talking heads churning out mindless Shakespearianly tragic exposition and then another 3 minutes of cool action. My special note to any movie director who wants to make action movies: use action to tell your story even if it's not ACTION scenes. Talking heads spewing exposition is mind-numbingly boring. Especially when talking about hopelessly complicated and overly contrived soap opera bs.
Then I saw Tsui Hark's SEVEN SWORDS which is really interesting. The premise is (not surprizingly) fairly similar to Seven Samurai except on a more epic scale, and with the swords having certain powers. The movie was really low on back story on the main characters, enough to where it's pretty distracting and weird, but the overall movie showed some promise, if there was more to come. And there is because Tsui Hark also produced a 39 episode tv drama from the same story, but with 39 eps I'm hoping it'll actually flesh out the main characters a bit more.
It takes me a while to get through any tv series where I just start watching the whole thing fresh out of the box but I'll let you know what I think once I'm done.
That got me sort of interested in looking at some other Wuxia stuff, like the movie Curse of the Golden Flower, which I think I would have more fun driving nails into my toes than watching again. There'd be like 3 minutes of super cool action and then what seemed like hours of talking heads churning out mindless Shakespearianly tragic exposition and then another 3 minutes of cool action. My special note to any movie director who wants to make action movies: use action to tell your story even if it's not ACTION scenes. Talking heads spewing exposition is mind-numbingly boring. Especially when talking about hopelessly complicated and overly contrived soap opera bs.
Then I saw Tsui Hark's SEVEN SWORDS which is really interesting. The premise is (not surprizingly) fairly similar to Seven Samurai except on a more epic scale, and with the swords having certain powers. The movie was really low on back story on the main characters, enough to where it's pretty distracting and weird, but the overall movie showed some promise, if there was more to come. And there is because Tsui Hark also produced a 39 episode tv drama from the same story, but with 39 eps I'm hoping it'll actually flesh out the main characters a bit more.
It takes me a while to get through any tv series where I just start watching the whole thing fresh out of the box but I'll let you know what I think once I'm done.