© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 91
One of my personal treats during the preceding week was ‘The House of Flying Daggers’. As you can probably guess from the lurid title, it was a martial arts movie, full of wire stunts, flying kicks and voices that sound as if they are fresh out of some Pokemon anime during the kids’ afternoon programming segment.
I have always been partial to martial arts movies. My love of them was born in the Saturday afternoon show at the older independent cinematic dives when I was a kid. When there was no really ‘big’ movie to draw in the popcorn crew, the owners of the cinema would show a martial arts film as grainy and corny as any farmer’s field. No doubt the choice was due to the low cost of acquiring the screening rights, not the merits of the movie, or the genre.
“Hee-yaaaaiii!!!” Bruce Lee kicked butt, and other body parts.
Lately the martial arts movie, also know as ‘chop-socky’, has been undergoing a renaissance of sorts, fueled by the Oscar for ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, a couple of years ago, and mainstream recognition for the genre through Quentin Tarantino’s much vaunted direction of the ‘Kill Bill movies’ and his association with the breathtaking ‘Hero’. But I miss the older movies.
The plots tended to be rudimentary. They went something along the order of ‘a gang of bandits raids a village, insult the hero’s aged father, upon which the hero goes out and has endless fights with all of them, and their dog’. The two bumbling sidekicks were optional, as was the squeaky voiced heroine. The hero would seek out some fabled, cynical and embittered ‘master’, learn a new style and use this to defeat the villain and an army of his henchmen in a desperate, badly worded, beautifully choreographed fight.
Dialogue tended to be beside the point, a device to fill in the gaps between the fights and to explain the reason for the fight. With the recent crop of movies, they seem to have got the lip-synching right. It’s a shame: watching the lead hero mouth words in the voice of the heroine or the bad guy whom he was fighting was a big part of the fun.
Actually it was the fights and the wire stunts that mattered. I’m sure a lot of kids managed to damage themselves and their pride trying to demonstrate a ‘rabid squirrel’ somersault flying kick to all their friends.
The other thing that made old martial arts movies interesting was the stylization of the shots. I can almost swear that those older directors spent hours watching Fassbinder movies to get their scenes just right. When not in fight scenes, characters used to take their positions on set and would stay in the same place as if nailed to the floor. Still, nobody thought it was art at the time.
The use of colour was another vital part of the whole thing. Asian directors would suddenly turn the whole world green or red to enhance the specific emotional context of a single shot. Nowadays, it’s art though. Watch the ‘Kill Bill’ movies if you don’t believe me. If you are ‘arty’, watch the amazing scene in ‘Hero’ in which a single drop of blood, falling from the delicate tip of a sword turns the whole world into a melancholy blizzard of red, beautifully executed in a style reminiscent of Van Gogh. The fight choreography and wire stunts are amazing as well.
For all the clichés that the genre has spawned, and in spite of its terrible image, the martial arts film has one redeeming trait: respect for form and style. The innovations have been gradual, painstaking and have resulted in the perfection that can be seen in films like ‘Hero’, Jet Lee’s ‘Once Upon a Time in China’ series and the mainstream fight scenes and wire stunts that have been adopted via John Woo and Chow Yun Fat’s Hollywood crossovers.
But I miss the breathless corn of the old directors. Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’ and Jackie Chan in ‘Drunken Master’ were exceptional.
Fortunately ‘The House of Flying Daggers’ missed the ‘arty’ boat entirely. “Hee-yaaaaiii!!!” It was awful, but it kicked butt, and other body parts.
Back to the archive • Previous • Next • Home
