Chinese wuxia films directed by Ronny Yu and David Wu, starring Brigitte Lin and Leslie Cheung.
A swordsman from Wu Tang Clan falls in love with a woman raised by wolves who is now working for cult leaders who want to destroy the 8 clans. Because of confusion over conflict between alliances, the wolf girl's hair turns white and she turns evil. The Wu Tang swordsman spends the next 10 years waiting for a blossom on Snow Mountain which will heal the wolf girl. Meanwhile, she has created her own all-female, man-hating cult.
The first film was great and the second was terrible. I blame the change of directors. What I would like to deal with here is the video techniques which made the original unique. By use of heavy back-lighting, the characters separated from the backgrounds in a stark manner. The midgrounds were mostly black, with slightly lighter far backgrounds and even lighter characters. See the image for why I think back-lighting was used. I don't know all the details, but some of the backgrounds looked to be manipulated in a way to produce this set of value contrasts. Motion blur was also used in action scenes. With modern digital editing, it could just be added easily. With older equipment, the film would be run slower to get less frames per second. Dutch angles were also used in some sections. The original had some flying and what I call "long sleeve technique" (long fabric, hair, etc. being cast out to full length as a weapon). Rotten Tomatoes audience score dropped from 75% for the original to 43% for the sequel and I agree.
The original was unique and the plot made me care what happened. The sequel seemed like a mockery of what made the original good. I rate them good and bad.
A Chinese romance directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
Two men having a hard time dealing with relationship breakups meet other women. One of them is obsessive compulsive. He buys cans of pineapple with a certain expiration date and meets a woman involved in drug smuggling. The other man likes flight attendants and talking to inanimate objects. He meets a woman who works at the snack bar where both men eat. The snack bar woman gets keys (which are never seen or mentioned) to his apartment without him knowing and begins going there when he is not around.
The video professor where I went to school would be in awe of this. I saw lots of Dutch angles and selective focus. Too bad the $5000 school cameras were too crappy to do selective focus. I'm usually not into romance films, but the plot and characters held my attention. It doesn't matter that I thought it was all one continuous plot about the same man. This also featured a Cantonese cover of an American pop song, "Dreams" by The Cranberries. It's very odd to hear a song that was overplayed when I was in high school sung in Cantonese. There were some humorous moments to mention: the first man eating 30 cans of pineapple and the second man talking to a bar of soap and a towel. What really made me laugh about the latter was when Faye replaced these items and he was talking to them as if they had changed, not been replaced. Lecturing soap about gaining weight is comical. I rate this adequate. You may want to read the plot first, but it's worth watching.
A Chinese wuxia directed by Raymond Lee, starring Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen.
Opposing groups meet at an inn run by a woman. One of the groups is lead by a woman with a flute and they want to rescue children who are political prisoners. Another group is military from the organization that was holding the children prisoner. A lone swordsman also shows up who was the flute woman's boyfriend, but he becomes entangled with the inn owner.
Pretty standard for the genre. The plot was full of holes. The biggest being: where did all those guys on horses go at the end? The main characters were mostly identifiable. I liked the inn owner most, but she tended to get mixed up with sword boy's ex. The reason that I liked the inn owner was that her dialogue and acting were most expressive. The head chef from the kitchen was comic relief and he was acted well too. The sets and costumes looked great, as they should in wuxia films. Camera-work and editing were not to my liking quite so much, though. The style of editing was like a new, American action film. There were lots of close shots and very quick editing cuts. It's possible that early '90s Chinese action films started the style that post-2000s American action films lifted from them. When things slowed down, I could tell that everything was staged and composed correctly. The special effects consisted of impossible jumps with rope rather than real flying. There was also blood and a goat cutting scene with item replacement across an editing cut. Audio was in Chinese, but I found good English subtitles. Dialogue was mixed correctly and the sound effects didn't repeat as much as in older Chinese action films. There were multiple sword sounds to vary the sonic landscape. IMDb lists a rating of 7.3/10, AllMovie lists 0 AllMovie rating with 3.5/5 User Ratings and Rotten Tomatoes lists 78% Audience Score for an average of 55.25%. It looks low because AllMovie possibly did not rate it? Without the zero, it would be 73.6% which I agree with. I rate this adequate. You might want to watch it, mostly if you've seen the original Dragon Gate Inn (1967).
