Wuxia resources

[Zenshiite]

Seven Swords has huge promise if it ever gets released in theaters here. Other than that I'm looking for the Hong Kong dvds. I got the television version that Hark produced, and the story is great. It's HUGE. The movie, with higher budget and better actors and action stars(like Donnie Yen), is undoubtably pretty great.

[doug maverick]

actually the weinstein, is releasing it or rather have released it on dvd, under there dragon dynasty banner the co own with QT.

[zhangxihuan]

I think that the "genre" is not dying out... its just that the Chinese keep producing crappy movies and trying to sell it to the US as "Chinese" films, while (i would go as far as to say) betraying their older originality and appeal to a Chinese audience....
"Curse of the Golden Flower" was terrible! It was probably the worst wuxia movie I have ever seen-if it can be categorized as such...
"The Banquet" was much better....although not released in US theaters it had better cinematography, story etc....
"Seven Swords" is a fairly good film, but not quite as well done as "Hero" or "House of Flying Daggers."

Future Wuxia movies will probably fare better- Andy Lau is working on Three Kingdoms and there is another film being done by John Woo concerning the same time period.....

I think where wuxia goes wrong is when there is too much flying and no plot..
People like good plot lines....

The recent film "Battle of Wits" had a realistic plot and was well made, but didn't rely to heavily on "wirework."

The problem with transnational cinema is that sometimes it tries to hard to be transnational- and abandon's its original fan base, and alienates new ones.

[Jimbo]

Another weak point of these films, as far as American audiences, is most people I know tell me they HATE having to read subtitles when watching a movie. When you tell them it is an acquired habit, that after watching enough such films the subtitles are easily understood without sacrificing watching the movie, they say, "Well, I guess we're not all geniuses."

Now I'm not talking about people who are familiar with watching foreign subtitled films, or even your general art house crowd. It seems most of average persons want to just sit back and watch a movie and not have to "work" at reading the bottom of the screen. Yet the same people are the first to complain when a film is obviously English-dubbed.

The question was also asked about who might be an up-and-coming star to rise up. The ironic thing is, Donnie Yen, a seeming front-runner, is an old-school, established star (overseas), with a 24-year career thus far. He also lived many years in Boston, and his familiarity with English is of course top-notch.

Chow Yun-Fat is the better actor of the two, is even older-school, but only plays a martial artist on screen. But for an American audience, he was another advantage; Chow is taller than Yen, at least 6' or a little over. It CAN make a difference onscreen as far as American audiences are concerned (Tom Cruise notwithstanding). Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the Donnie Yen thread, Chow is forced to play Asian-themed stories in the U.S., and in Bulletproof Monk had to even spout fortune-cookie proverb crap. A long way from his better works such as Full-Contact, Hard-Boiled, etc. I believe Chow's acting would be suppressed or stunted by co-starring him with a "real American actor" like Mark Wahlberg in The Corruptor, or with a rap star like what happened with Jet Li.

I heard that Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon did not do very well overall in Asia. I suppose the basic theme had been there done that, albeit without the high budget. Sammo Hung mentions in the SPL extras that action-type movies are the least popular now in HK (I take that to include martial arts and/or swordplay/period films as well).

[zhangxihuan]

Crouching Tiger is not well liked by most Chinese.... they think the movie is either "lame" or "terrible." Most wuxia films overwhelmingly these days that we end up seeing in the US are not considered good by Asian viewers. I think mainly because they portray Chinese society inaccurately, and this is the main reason why they are disliked in Asia.

[Li Kao]

Jimbo -- my dad is someone who is militantly against subtitles with non-English movies, to the point where he simply refuses to watch anything, in a foreign language, with subtitles. The irony is that as his hearing has declined, he now puts up English subtitles on English movies. I have to say it makes me laugh every time we get together for a movie now. Myself, like you, I am so used to reading subtitles that I don't even give it a second thought. And if I am given a choice to watch it in English-dubbed or Mandarin/Cantonese with subtitles -- I go for the subtitles.

Regarding the premise that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon bombed in Asia and was not liked very well by Chinese audiences -- it's very true for the most part. Though that movie was truly shown across the world, over half of its gross came from America. I came across a really good assessment of American tastes in cinema vs. Chinese tastes, and how the current Wuxia films play into all this. It's fairly long, so I'll just post the link (http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue...iors/kim2.html), but it brings up some really interesting points, and I'll include a few of the quotes from Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu that I thought were pertinent to this discussion:

"The greatest irony of contemporary Chinese cinema seems to be that some films achieve a transnational status precisely because they are seen as possessing an authentically 'national,' 'Chinese,' 'Oriental' flavor by Western audiences. In the meantime, the domestic Chinese audience dismisses the same films as 'misrepresentations' and 'mystifications' of China" (Lu, 1997).

“Now, in a remarkable reversal of fortune, it is the West that points out what is outstanding and characteristically Chinese in artworks from China. In the same process, the position of Chinese viewers is decentered, and the field of vision of the West takes the central seat” (Lu, 1997).

And another take on why Crouching Tiger fared so poorly in China:

“Weaned on gun battles and hyperkinetic action of Jackie Chan, people did not have the patience for Mr. Lee’s moody, contemplative look at the trials of heroic warriors in legendary China” (Landler, 2001)

And finally, an assessment of Ang Lee (not saying I totally agree though):

“Kung fu reached such levels of enthusiasm in the West that some Chinese now scoff at what they see as naïve U.S. infatuation with it. And some critics accuse Ang Lee of “orientalizing” his film. That is, choosing images of the East that play to over-romanticized images that Americans supposedly want to see” (Marquand, 2001).

It's all food for thought ...

[Jimbo]

Li Kao:
It does make sense what you quoted in your post. In fact, those are things I have 'felt' about the recent, brief "infatuation" the West has been having for Chinese and "Oriental" themed films of late. I think I could go a step further on that: The West has long had a fascination for Asian women. You can see the ideas in old movies, where the Westerner, usually American, is the rescuer of the Asian woman from her own "repressive" culture. All the way up to the mini-series' based on novels of James Clavell (such as Shogun, Noble House, etc.). Western women, in turn, often seem intrigued by the stories of Chinese women's lives (such as Joy Luck Club, etc.).

The exotic image of "the Mysterious Orient" still seems alive today. Although it wasn't so popular, the recent Memoirs of a Geisha seems a good example of the Westerner's fascination with Asian women. And it doesn't matter to them if Japanese performers are switched for Chinese or vice versa. Gong Li has become the idealized Asian female lover to the male romantic lead in American/Euro films. Lucy Liu and Bai Ling, Shu Qi, Maggie Cheung, and Michelle Yeoh also play/played those roles.

The Orientalizing was also seen in The Last Samurai, with Ken Watanabe portraying the exotic Asian Wise Man, speaking like a zen self-help book. When you know in history that life for your typical Chinese or Japanese living in those times was anything but artsy-smartsy and exotic.

I personally like the low-budget old Shaw Brothers wuxia films directed by Chu Yuan a lot better than CTHD and the other new ones. They lacked the budget, but there was, IMO, a more pure(?) feeling to them (not sure if that's the right word for it).

[lonewolf]

i'm still waiting for donny yen to make some kind of grand appearence in the US rather then getting crappy movie roles. those of you that have been to the donny yen underestimated? thread already know this. as for curse of the golden flower (cgf) it played in my town in one theater for a week and it was gone. by the time that i knew it was here it was gone. no advertising on television or anything. i know that we can say that asian films are doing bad in the box office but has anybody here looked into the decline of ticket sales in the US over all? they have nobody is going. they charge too much for a movie people can now watch at home on a flat screen plasma TV with surround sound. i work in a hospital and everybody has seen most of the MA films that have come out since CTHD, people are watch, at home. theaters are over priced and people aren't willing to go anymore.

[Zenshiite]

Yeah, there's that. I mean, I went to a kiosk in a local shopping mall and bought House of Flying Daggers long before it hit US theaters. A guy I work with saw Fearless like a year before it hit theaters in the US. In a global marketplace it's pointless to wait so long to release a film over seas when it's going to be on DVD before you even know it and I can get it in Chinatown, or at the local kiosk in the mall that sells kung fu movies almost exclusively... or hop online and buy those DVDs from almost any site.

I'll admit, I am dazzled by certain imagery. I do, however, tend to prefer older wuxia over the new now. Nothing really beats Shaw brothers work. On that note. You guys gotta check out www.jaman.com... you download a player and become a member to the site and you can download like 45 classic Shaw films for free and have a liscense to view them for 7 days. Or you can buy it for 5 bucks. Great stuff on there like the Sentimental Swordsman.

[doug maverick]

stumbled upon this haven't really looked through it but it looks interesting:

http://wuxiapedia.com/

[Zenshiite]

I love this website.

Lots of mostly partial fan translations of classic wuxia novels from Jin Yong, Gu Long etc. A few informative articles too.

[GeneChing]

The Anatomy of a Wuxia Novel by Simon McNeil

[Zenshiite]

Good article. I was pleasantly surprised to see it when I logged on yesterday.

[ghostexorcist]

I started a thread a while back about a book called Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel, which lays out the origin of the wuxia novel.

See here:

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/foru...051#post946051

I never finished reading the book, though. It was just so darn scholastically dry that I lost interest in it. And when I say dry, I mean Sahara desert dry. I read alot of scholarly books, so I know all about the various levels of literary aridness and this book tops the chart.

[SimonM]

Hey there,

I've got a few letters in response to my Wuxia article. Most of those have been simple comments of appreciation. To those of you who did so I have to say thank you.

I have also had a spirited discussion with a reader who feels that my statements to the effect that Confucian ethics inform Wuxia are incorrect.

I invite this reader to discuss this topic here as I am interested to understand why he feels that novels in the genre, such as Return of the Condor Heroes and Datang Youxia Zhuan represent a separate philosophical corpus as distinct, as he put it, as Mohism from Confucianism.