The Deadly Duo

<i>The Deadly Duo</i>
This 1971 Shaw Brothers martial-arts flick is definitely full of action — energetic camerawork, gallons of stage blood, and a widescreen frame full of gracefully choreographed movement on the part of dozens of performers wielding an impressive variety of weapons all contribute to the film’s sense of urgent forward motion.

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Forbidden Kingdom, The

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It pains me to note that The Forbidden

Kingdom has the feeling of a valedictory about it. The film is a

generally westernized recitation of archetypal martial-arts legends

and themes that uses an alternate-realities hook to palm off its main

character arc on Michael Angarano, a good-looking kid who comes off as a variation on a theme by Shia

LaBeouf, in a bid to give a generation of teenaged American

moviegoers a point of emotional entrée to the story of the

Asian other. That director Rob Minkoff had the sense to retain the

great Asian martial-arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping and lyrical

cinematographer Peter Pau is to his credit - they give the

film notes of beauty and authenticity that play against the inevitable Hollywood gloss slathered across the story (think

Karate Kid: The Next Generation) and characters.

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Kung Fu Hustle

85/100

Stephen Chow’s newest — about a small town in pre-revolutionary China populated by kung-fu masters who are drawn out of retirement by the arrival of a criminal gang — is being compared to Buster Keaton and Chuck Jones, correctly enough, but its cartoon-come-to-life visuals put me in mind most immediately of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. Then again, it’s clearly a Stephen Chow film more than anything else, with broad slapstick undergirding typically impressive martial-arts choreography by the amazing Yuen Wo-ping and Sammo Hung.

By itself, the opening sequence — a near-musical set piece involving a group of well-dressed, ax-wielding thugs that come on like the gangs in “Beat It” — is pretty amazing, but the rest of the film is an ever-escalating, near-joyous expansion of the possibilities offered by Chow’s particular brand of homage and parody coupled with a willingness to try anything with CGI. (If you’re watching carefully, you might notice an actor transform into a digital double right before something terrible happens to him.)

Like the other Chow films I’ve seen (only Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery) Kung Fu Hustle is a fresh, contemporary take on Chinese storytelling traditions, and few directors in world cinema are working so competently and consistently in any mode as Chow is in this one. A really good time.