Movies: Kingsman and Wing Chun
My wife and I went and saw Kingsman on Friday night. Excellent movie. It's based on a comic book series, and it's a series that I want to buy. The basic premise is a private spy organization fighting nastiness around the world.
We really enjoyed it. Nicely developed story, great training montage/time compression, and the gadgets were great. I especially liked the genre self-referential, but I won't spoil it. Excellent action sequences, and also some occasional very graphic violence: we're talking actual head explodey.
Definitely fun, one that I'll buy when it comes out on DVD.
Wing Chun is a classic Chinese Kung Fu period piece from 1994 starring Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen. This is a tremendously fun movie that I got on Laserdisc 15something years ago. Michelle is Wing Chun, a young woman working in a tofu shop who is also uncharacteristically a Kung Fu master. The fact that a woman is a Kung Fu master is a recurring theme throughout the movie and the subject of, in my opinion, one of the best martial arts fights that I've seen: the "smash the block of tofu" fight. It is absolutely awesome. The story complicates with the women running the tofu shop bringing in a very young widow, mistaken childhood identity. and a bandit gang.
It was very interesting seeing it again last night. It's been a long time since I watched my Laserdisc version and I bought the DVD off Amazon to simplify my collection, last night I watched the DVD for the first time. Most of the details on the case were in Chinese, the back cover blurb was English. So I assumed Chinese language with English subtitles. The movie starts, I'm reading the subtitles, then I realize that not only is the audio track English, but what they're saying doesn't match the subtitles! This was really weird because I had four movies running through my brain: the one that I was watching, the subtitles that I remembered, the subtitles that I was reading, and the audio that I was hearing. Very surreal.
Between the audio and subtitles, I think the subtitles were more accurate. I should pop it in again and see if I can turn off the English audio and turn it back to the Chinese.
Anyway, Wing Chun is an excellent movie. To be honest, it's not a great movie, but it's huge amounts of fun with some fantastic fight sequences. HIGHLY recommended, but you probably won't be able to find it locally without a special order.
We really enjoyed it. Nicely developed story, great training montage/time compression, and the gadgets were great. I especially liked the genre self-referential, but I won't spoil it. Excellent action sequences, and also some occasional very graphic violence: we're talking actual head explodey.
Definitely fun, one that I'll buy when it comes out on DVD.
Wing Chun is a classic Chinese Kung Fu period piece from 1994 starring Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen. This is a tremendously fun movie that I got on Laserdisc 15something years ago. Michelle is Wing Chun, a young woman working in a tofu shop who is also uncharacteristically a Kung Fu master. The fact that a woman is a Kung Fu master is a recurring theme throughout the movie and the subject of, in my opinion, one of the best martial arts fights that I've seen: the "smash the block of tofu" fight. It is absolutely awesome. The story complicates with the women running the tofu shop bringing in a very young widow, mistaken childhood identity. and a bandit gang.
It was very interesting seeing it again last night. It's been a long time since I watched my Laserdisc version and I bought the DVD off Amazon to simplify my collection, last night I watched the DVD for the first time. Most of the details on the case were in Chinese, the back cover blurb was English. So I assumed Chinese language with English subtitles. The movie starts, I'm reading the subtitles, then I realize that not only is the audio track English, but what they're saying doesn't match the subtitles! This was really weird because I had four movies running through my brain: the one that I was watching, the subtitles that I remembered, the subtitles that I was reading, and the audio that I was hearing. Very surreal.
Between the audio and subtitles, I think the subtitles were more accurate. I should pop it in again and see if I can turn off the English audio and turn it back to the Chinese.
Anyway, Wing Chun is an excellent movie. To be honest, it's not a great movie, but it's huge amounts of fun with some fantastic fight sequences. HIGHLY recommended, but you probably won't be able to find it locally without a special order.