Cinephile’s Notebook: Martial Plan
by Mark AschArticle Tools
Celestial Picture’s triple-digit library of pristine Shaw Brothers restorations continues to be the single most compelling reason to buy a region-free DVD player, but with Walter Reade’s fist-and-sword “Heroic Grace II” the most recent retro in a not unsteady stream, N.Y.C. rep houses do pennypinchers just fine.
Featured director Zhang Che has long stood for Shaw quintessence, but the program’s sequel status spreads the spotlight. Of the other helmers, Chu Yuan comes off as a bit of a pictorialist, enamored with the arch splendor of fey-hued studio sets. But he’s also speed-freaky, running truncated opening credits on jump-start fight scenes, and flashing actors’ names alongside their first close-ups to keep things moving thereafter. The Magic Blade veers towards its genre’s most mocked tendencies — lickety-split exposition of arbitrary plot reversals, a preference for the zoom over less eager methods of frame relocation — but Chu’s fondness for nocturnal scenes keeps it from spinning completely out of control. Clans of Intrigue does better to space out the identity switches of its plot mouthpiece characters for a sense of anticipation — and then, with about 30 minutes left, goes completely batty, distilling its haywire mythology into an omnisexual power-grabbing quadrangle, in a garishly diaphanous grotto replete with rope swings hanging down from who knows where, tip-of-sword-cam shots, and spurned lovers tearing off their own hands to fling across the room as weapons. The Jade Tiger stays (comparatively) measured all the way, even postscripting its so-far-steeped-in-blood vengeance plot with a lesson in pacifism.
Lau Kar-leung offers a mustache-stroking Gordon Liu as Dirty Ho’s royal aesthete in disguise. It’s an ideal showcase for his compact talents: Liu parries the assaults of assassins disguised as wine merchants and antique dealers while maintaining a veneer of civility. The latest film in the series at a 1982 vintage, Lau’s Legendary Weapons of China feels it at the outset, oily pecs twitching amid an arena’s worth of rock show pyrotechnics, wire acts, and capes. But it quickly, thankfully, jettisons all but the anachronistic score in favor of primary colors and a robust, proto-Stephen Chow sense of parody (the breathably plebian back alleys and woodcutter’s yards are, by this point in the series, a welcome change of scenery). Best scene: with the aide of accomplices, an opportunistic bon vivant imitates a weapon-repelling “spiritual boxer” in a public display no less impressive for its obvious artifice — sort of a microcosm for the whole martial arts genre, innit?
Featured director Zhang Che has long stood for Shaw quintessence, but the program’s sequel status spreads the spotlight. Of the other helmers, Chu Yuan comes off as a bit of a pictorialist, enamored with the arch splendor of fey-hued studio sets. But he’s also speed-freaky, running truncated opening credits on jump-start fight scenes, and flashing actors’ names alongside their first close-ups to keep things moving thereafter. The Magic Blade veers towards its genre’s most mocked tendencies — lickety-split exposition of arbitrary plot reversals, a preference for the zoom over less eager methods of frame relocation — but Chu’s fondness for nocturnal scenes keeps it from spinning completely out of control. Clans of Intrigue does better to space out the identity switches of its plot mouthpiece characters for a sense of anticipation — and then, with about 30 minutes left, goes completely batty, distilling its haywire mythology into an omnisexual power-grabbing quadrangle, in a garishly diaphanous grotto replete with rope swings hanging down from who knows where, tip-of-sword-cam shots, and spurned lovers tearing off their own hands to fling across the room as weapons. The Jade Tiger stays (comparatively) measured all the way, even postscripting its so-far-steeped-in-blood vengeance plot with a lesson in pacifism.
Lau Kar-leung offers a mustache-stroking Gordon Liu as Dirty Ho’s royal aesthete in disguise. It’s an ideal showcase for his compact talents: Liu parries the assaults of assassins disguised as wine merchants and antique dealers while maintaining a veneer of civility. The latest film in the series at a 1982 vintage, Lau’s Legendary Weapons of China feels it at the outset, oily pecs twitching amid an arena’s worth of rock show pyrotechnics, wire acts, and capes. But it quickly, thankfully, jettisons all but the anachronistic score in favor of primary colors and a robust, proto-Stephen Chow sense of parody (the breathably plebian back alleys and woodcutter’s yards are, by this point in the series, a welcome change of scenery). Best scene: with the aide of accomplices, an opportunistic bon vivant imitates a weapon-repelling “spiritual boxer” in a public display no less impressive for its obvious artifice — sort of a microcosm for the whole martial arts genre, innit?
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