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Saw this at the Varsity last night with holyoutlaw. I had previously seen Ashes of Time a couple of times on a VHS dub of the laserdisc, but it has been so long since I saw it that I couldn't tell you what the differences are. This is a re-edited version, with changes in the music as well, from what I've read. One thing I will say is that overall it seemed a ( Read more... )

So I finally bought the French DVD of King Hu's Raining on the Mountain (Kong shan ling yu, 1979), on the Films Sans Frontieres label. It has English sub-titles as well as French, and it's a high quality image as well. So now I've seen all the movies from King Hu's prime except for The Valiant Ones (Chung lieh tu, 1975), which is not available on ( Read more... )

King Hu is widely considered the first great director of wuxia, or martial chivalry (or, as I first thought of them, flying swordsman), films. His movies have been very influential on later directors, and some of us first became aware of him after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) came out and Ang Lee spoke of how the scene in the bamboo ( Read more... )