More movies I wouldn't usually watch.
Aug. 19th, 2009 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWatched Kiss of the Dragon, a Jet Li martial arts film in English set in Paris.
... the accent mix was interesting.
The only women in it are hookers. Oh, and one lady giving directions. And a child hostage.
It's about how creepy man is exploiting the hookers and stuff. There's a couple hours of beating people up and then he gets killed for it.
I think I like much better the martial arts movies where people are elegant in clothes with long sleeves and pretty symbolic things happen to trees. I also think that needs thinking about some, because am I liking the exotic, or the fantasy layer, or the symbols, and just ignoring the part where lots of people get beat up? I think I like that there were kick arse women in the ones I watched. *shrugs*
So, things I noticed about modern martial arts movie: It's actually a bit SF. Because the theme of the action is unarmed man vs industrial, technical, machine wielding men. There is on the one hand elegance and economy of motion, careful aim and care for bystanders, and on the other a bunch of idiots with machine guns blowing shit up. So it is, at least a little, about a human resisting the uncaring influence of the machine age. As expressed by beating crap out of people.
There's also levels about how people interact with their environment that I have noticed before. You can tell which one the movie thinks is the good guy because the world around him is on his side. Doors slam in the face of the other guys. Random bits of metal crunch into the others. Bad guys will attempt to use improvised weapons, especially if they're painful, like picking up a steam iron. Good guys will bounce things right back at the bad guys, and successfully improvise with whatever is to hand. The inanimate world chooses sides.
There's things about how you can tell who is in control. Whoever moves most has least control, whoever can just sit still until the exact moment they act is control.
Adaptability and reading others is also key. The bad guy will use the exact same predictable if flashy techniques over and over. The good guy will learn, anticipate, make them crunch. Use the other person's efforts against them. There was one sequence where flashy acrobatic martial arts guy was being all flips and kicks and that, and good guy just finds a confined space between desks and gets him to tangle in the desk legs. World working for good guy, adaptability, observation. Audience gets a chance to observe and predict too. But good guy goes one better.
A thing I haven't noted in random action movies but have seen in a few Jet Li films now is the good guy also being skilled at relieving pain, healing. The use of pins to fix people is, well, not something I'd want to rely on, but in this film it was clearly solid fact. He used them to restrain people, but also to relieve pain. Skilled knowledge, empathy, good guy stuff. And then at the end a really nasty way to die for the worst of the bad guys, achieved in one self sacrificing move. Nice.
I love the visual language of a good fight. Show not tell with a sharp edge. Action sequences reveal so much about a character just from their moves. I don't know how to write it, and I been trying since Highlander fandom, but I do appreciate it when it's done well. Unfortunately it also jars when I notice it done badly, or see a fight that's plain ripped from context and redone on the cheap, which has happened a couple of times on TV. ... I reckon I know which is ripping because of the dates and the not actually making sense on the TV. I can't remember what I was watching though so I probably shouldn't say that bit. Insufficient references. But, point is: Fights are a language too, and it's jarring to watch a character you know well start moving with a new accent, or quoting stuff that just isn't relevant right then.
I keep trying to figure out how to get martial arts into my space dystopia. They totally belong there. You've got a restrictive society, high control rating, low chance of weapon shaped weapons, but high dissatisfaction, so high chance of people wanting a fight. Plus they put humans central in a way that idealises acrobatics and dance and choral singing, things that don't need anything but a human to do, which goes back to when they were on spaceships with a mass limit and didn't have such things to hand. So lots of logic that puts movement and elegance and team and stuff that ought to go into martial arts language.
... I just haven't found an excuse yet to have them start kicking.
Clearly I should work on that.
... the accent mix was interesting.
The only women in it are hookers. Oh, and one lady giving directions. And a child hostage.
It's about how creepy man is exploiting the hookers and stuff. There's a couple hours of beating people up and then he gets killed for it.
I think I like much better the martial arts movies where people are elegant in clothes with long sleeves and pretty symbolic things happen to trees. I also think that needs thinking about some, because am I liking the exotic, or the fantasy layer, or the symbols, and just ignoring the part where lots of people get beat up? I think I like that there were kick arse women in the ones I watched. *shrugs*
So, things I noticed about modern martial arts movie: It's actually a bit SF. Because the theme of the action is unarmed man vs industrial, technical, machine wielding men. There is on the one hand elegance and economy of motion, careful aim and care for bystanders, and on the other a bunch of idiots with machine guns blowing shit up. So it is, at least a little, about a human resisting the uncaring influence of the machine age. As expressed by beating crap out of people.
There's also levels about how people interact with their environment that I have noticed before. You can tell which one the movie thinks is the good guy because the world around him is on his side. Doors slam in the face of the other guys. Random bits of metal crunch into the others. Bad guys will attempt to use improvised weapons, especially if they're painful, like picking up a steam iron. Good guys will bounce things right back at the bad guys, and successfully improvise with whatever is to hand. The inanimate world chooses sides.
There's things about how you can tell who is in control. Whoever moves most has least control, whoever can just sit still until the exact moment they act is control.
Adaptability and reading others is also key. The bad guy will use the exact same predictable if flashy techniques over and over. The good guy will learn, anticipate, make them crunch. Use the other person's efforts against them. There was one sequence where flashy acrobatic martial arts guy was being all flips and kicks and that, and good guy just finds a confined space between desks and gets him to tangle in the desk legs. World working for good guy, adaptability, observation. Audience gets a chance to observe and predict too. But good guy goes one better.
A thing I haven't noted in random action movies but have seen in a few Jet Li films now is the good guy also being skilled at relieving pain, healing. The use of pins to fix people is, well, not something I'd want to rely on, but in this film it was clearly solid fact. He used them to restrain people, but also to relieve pain. Skilled knowledge, empathy, good guy stuff. And then at the end a really nasty way to die for the worst of the bad guys, achieved in one self sacrificing move. Nice.
I love the visual language of a good fight. Show not tell with a sharp edge. Action sequences reveal so much about a character just from their moves. I don't know how to write it, and I been trying since Highlander fandom, but I do appreciate it when it's done well. Unfortunately it also jars when I notice it done badly, or see a fight that's plain ripped from context and redone on the cheap, which has happened a couple of times on TV. ... I reckon I know which is ripping because of the dates and the not actually making sense on the TV. I can't remember what I was watching though so I probably shouldn't say that bit. Insufficient references. But, point is: Fights are a language too, and it's jarring to watch a character you know well start moving with a new accent, or quoting stuff that just isn't relevant right then.
I keep trying to figure out how to get martial arts into my space dystopia. They totally belong there. You've got a restrictive society, high control rating, low chance of weapon shaped weapons, but high dissatisfaction, so high chance of people wanting a fight. Plus they put humans central in a way that idealises acrobatics and dance and choral singing, things that don't need anything but a human to do, which goes back to when they were on spaceships with a mass limit and didn't have such things to hand. So lots of logic that puts movement and elegance and team and stuff that ought to go into martial arts language.
... I just haven't found an excuse yet to have them start kicking.
Clearly I should work on that.