Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002)

In honor of the Lunar New Year, we leave our teenage angst perspective for one with a different color, a foreign taste. Enter our Eastern friends with Chinese kung fu. When exploring the realm of martial arts, the first noticeable trait that the eye catches is no doubt how ridiculous these actors look flying in the air with their unrealistic swordsmanship. In fact, Hero is an entire spectacle of ridiculous notions. From a warrior warding off thousands of arrows with nothing but her sleeves to a battle taking place solely on water, Hero upholds the standard that has somehow become essential to any kung fu movie.

I used to hate that about my favorite Asian films. As a child, my movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I worshipped every scene and every score of music as if I was its creator. Frankly I still do, and I cringe whenever I hear someone talking about it as if it was just another movie. It lures me in with an intense and emotional pull that I cannot describe other than nostalgia. But one day (the first and last), I decided to share this personal treasure of mine with a friend who had never seen the film. The only reaction from her was laughter. For how could anyone take a movie like this seriously, where people are ricocheting off roofs and balancing on bamboo trees?!

I used to think that this ridiculous aspect took away from the important themes and lessons that one can find in a martial arts film. But honestly, the immense fakeness is necessary. It is a mirror of ourselves as people, who do ridiculously evil things to each other all of the time as nations, as races, and as opposites (who are not as opposite as we think).

If you are new to the martial arts scene, I suggest Hero as the perfect starting point because it exquisitely incorporates the inescapable sense of hysterics with the realization of deep morals. This may seem like an odd pairing to put together in a movie, but is perfectly balanced with an immense and indescribable beauty that renowned director Zhang Yimou has once again created. It may then be surprising to learn that the most beautiful movie I have ever laid eyes on is about nothing but war. Let me explain.

Hero takes place during a time in China’s history when the warring states were still struggling for control over one another. Though it is a period film, the movie’s underlying messages transcend any time or culture barriers because it is about war, an ugly complex that humanity fails to avoid again and again. War is the dirty little secret behind civilization and remains an inescapable truth throughout world history. And because death is a part of life, it is also beautiful in its twistingly human way. Hero magnifies that beauty and morphs the crude nature of humanity into a simple lesson of morals. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert states that it is violent only incidentally. But perhaps the movie suggests that violence itself is incidental in the grander scheme of understanding ourselves.

Peace and honor are hard words to take seriously in our time and society. Laughable even. Possibly the root to why kung fu movies seem so ridiculous. But for me at least, this movie brought back the inspiration that is hidden in these concepts. If anything, watch Hero to fall back in love with the romanticism behind honoring one’s country or with the primitive instinct to put your love over yourself. Watch the movie for the colors, the cinematography, the music, everything that is so brilliantly put together in order to give us a sense of who we are and how we can learn to do the right thing.

Gina Nguyen
Guest Commentator

Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993)

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Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine (1993)

To the Chinese, history is the most important teacher. There is a Chinese saying: 前事不忘后事之师 (qiánshì bú wàng hòushì zhī shī) or “The past not forgotten is a guide for the future.” In order to understand the present and predict the future, one must look to the past. Some of the most well-known Chinese novels, plays, and movies illustrate the importance of history to the Chinese. Farewell, My Concubine is no exception. The film is an exploration of Chinese history and the place of the individual who is caught up in its epic sweep.

2011 marks the completion of the first century of a Chinese republic. The overthrow of the Qing Dynasty was the end of two-thousand years of imperial rule. China was thrown into chaos as warlords and imperialist powers divided it up. Growing up, I always heard stories of my grandfather’s childhood in China, before his migration to Jamaica, West Indies. He was born in the last years of the Guangxu Emperor, and was a young boy when Puyi, himself only three years old, was crowned the Xuantong Emperor. He was to be the last emperor of China. My grandfather’s youth in early republican China was marked by battles between warlords and bandit raids. Indeed, China had been thrown into turmoil. My grandfather chose to emigrate and left his ancestral land for the stability found in the British Empire, of which Jamaica was a colony.

My grandfather’s story is not unusual for those of his generation. Born in the Qing Dynasty, millions of Chinese were thrust into the brutal twentieth century. They suffered through civil and world war, as well as political and social upheaval. This film shows in stark realism and even brutality the revolutionary nature of recent Chinese history.

Throughout the film, we follow two actors, childhood friends, as they are caught-up in the traumatic events of twentieth-century China: the period of the warlords, the rise of the Republic of China, the second Sino-Japanese War, the rise of the Communists and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and finally the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The commitment of the actors to the Beijing Opera, a Chinese art form rooted in traditional Chinese history and culture brings them into conflict with a rapidly changing China. They become confused and disheartened as Chinese history comes crashing into their lives.

Because actors, alongside prostitutes, fell at the bottom of the traditional Chinese social ladder, the film is able to capture Chinese history through the lens of the marginalized. This includes not only actors, but homosexuals as well. There are no proscriptions against homosexuality in Confucian philosophy, and it has a long history in China. As long as a son or daughter married and produced grandchildren, they were fulfilling their filial duty. However, with the rise of Communism in China, with its emphasis on conformity, homosexuality was suspect. This stark treatment of homosexuality and its realistic and horrifying depiction of the Cultural Revolution led to the film being banned in China.

In 1966, Mao Zedong declared the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in an effort to expand his personal power. He came to believe that there must be a perpetual revolution in order to usher in the Communist utopian society. Mao declared the removal of all that was traditional in Chinese society. Writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers, religious leaders, and intellectuals had to conform to strict revolutionary norms. Those who did not demonstrate proper revolutionary enthusiasm were persecuted. Thousands of families were torn apart. Schools closed down. Teachers and parents were turned in by their own students and children. “Struggle sessions” were held in order to accuse and mock counter-revolutionaries. Palaces, temples, libraries and churches were turned into storage places or destroyed. Thousands died at the hands of others, or at their own. The Cultural Revolution was ten years of social turmoil from which China is now only beginning to recover.

Farewell, My Concubine not only explores Chinese history, but also the interplay between art and life. The Beijing opera Farewell, My Concubine is itself quite short; about fifteen minutes. Its protagonist is the concubine of the King of Han, whose kingdom is about to fall. As soldiers surround the city, his favorite concubine offers him wine and asks for his sword so she can dance with it. Fearful of the troops who will soon storm the city, the concubine commits suicide with the king’s sword. Surrounded by animosity, and fearful of being outcast, the concubine dies. In the movie, the play becomes a timeless depiction of fierce loyalty in the face of adversity. Parts of the play echo events in the actors’ lives. Art and real life become intertwined until it becomes hard to discern where one begins and the other ends.

Farewell, My Concubine is ultimately about the decision of ordinary people to survive and adapt or to recoil from the events around them. In the end, the film leaves us with these questions: how do we treat those who differ from us, how do we remain loyal to our friends, what is the relationship between art and life, and how do we shape our own destiny in the midst of history’s grand sweep?

Mr. Aaron Bohr
Guest Commentator

Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Editor's note: Once the Shaw Brothers and Chang Cheh introduced us to the one-armed swordsman hero in the late 1960s, a trend was born. One-armed heroes cropped up all over the martial arts film world, teaming up with each other, fighting each other, going it alone. Some of the more popular one-armed titles were even remade or rebooted within the mere space of a decade. The following essay refers to one of the one-armed swordsman works, but not the one we ended up watching. We apologize for any confusion.

“So the other day I was walking through the country side minding my own business when some dude (I later found out he was an emperor) comes out of nowhere and lops my arm off. WHAT THE HELL, MAN?!?!?

“At this point I’m pissed. Who goes around chopping people’s arms off at their leisure? I really couldn’t do anything at the time so I just ran away. I wasn’t going to beat some dude in a fight with just one arm. So, you know, I bided my time making money as a mystical one-armed waiter until I could gain enough money to teach this guy some manners about cutting people’s limbs off. Little did I know he has like a million followers who would throw down their lives for him.

“And throw down their lives they did. Jeez, I must have murdered at least 100 people on my way to this emperor dude. When I finally got to him I had to use three swords—YES THREE SWORDS—to end his sorry life; it was super raw. An arm for a … life. That’s how the saying goes right? Actually including all of his followers it was more like an arm for 101 lives. Either way, I taught him a lesson about walking around cutting limbs off. He will be able to use it plenty of times in the after life at the bottom of some hell pit."

One-Armed Swordsman has to be one of the best kung fu movies of all time. It’s a story, like most kung-fu movies, of revenge. If you like Quentin Tarentino this is where he stole a lot of his stuff from. Cheap dialogue, ridiculous plot, awesome action: that’s what kung-fu is all about. If you don’t like this awesome form of entertainment, that’s fine (but you are insane) – even so I would give this movie a try because it is one of the pinnacles of the genre.

Just the scene where the one-armed swordsman is trying to get to the emperor and cutting down a bunch of people to get there is supermegaawesome. And then after that it shows all of the dead that he left in his wake from an overhead camera shot which just blows me away. If you are looking for lots of passion and emotion, One-Armed Swordsman won’t have any of it. In fact it may even remove some emotion from your body and make you a harder, tougher person. If the goal of the movie industry is to entertain, this movie does the job quite well.

So what kind of actor could be a big enough badass to star in such an awesome kung fu movie? Move over Bruce Lee and enter Jimmy Wang Yu. This guy was not only insanely awesome on screen (often playing one armed characters for some reason) but he was even cooler off screen. He got in plenty of bar brawls and had a love affair with a famous actress whose husband ended up hanging himself rather than go through a divorce. Most people think of Bruce Lee as the first well known kung-fu hero but Jimmy Wang Yu was well known before Bruce Lee (One-Armed Swordsman made one million dollars at the box office). He paved the way for Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. For the longest time I thought he only had one arm in real life because all of the movies (3) I had seen with him he only had one arm. But he has the normal amount of limbs which raises the question why does he play so many one-armed characters? Maybe you can find out!

When you get home after watching this move you should tie your arm behind your back and try some kung-fu tricks. I bet it’s far harder than it looked on screen. That’s probably why Jimmy was one-armed in so many movies. He just wanted to prove to the world that disabled people could do just as much killing as any normal person. What a valiant statement, Mr. Yu. In fact, more directors should make disabled people action movies. Ray would have been so much better if Ray Charles went on a murder rampage.

Alec Nordin
Film Club co-President

Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006)

What hath Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wrought? Nothing less than the American breakthrough of a whole genre of films at precisely the time that genre left its adolescence and reached full artistic maturity.

Time was you had to stay until very late at night to watch Chinese films (“Kung Fu Theater!”), raw stories of Shaolin temples destroyed by gangs of martial arts proficient and nunchakus-wielding or qiang-thrusting or sai-throwing gangs. Your hero often survived, but just barely, the only remaining member of his school, and it’s rare but efficient fighting method. Survived to recover and take on, usually single-handed the entire martial arts army of his school’s enemy. It was a sort of quest, a test of honor. This is the wuxia story.

You know wuxia. Perhaps you’ve seen Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, or Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair. If so, you’re already a Hong Kong martial arts film devotee. But if not, then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the Zhang Yimou films that succeeded it – Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower – are all examples that have noticeable American releases. The form even has reached the parody level, as all genres do when their conventions become recognizable by a general populace: Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle. (Maybe a good choice for Film Club next year?)

Tonight’s film, The Banquet or, as it’s being renamed in America, The Legend of the Black Scorpion, has all the earmarks of traditional wuxia – a superior martial arts skill, a magical force such as the ability to move swiftly up walls, over water or through trees, the ability to control a variety of objects as precise weapons, and highly defined sense of honor even when faced with villains.

But The Banquet has one other interesting characteristic; it also falls into that oddball genre of “Shakespeare adaptation,” uniting it with such disparate films as Ten Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, Forbidden Planet, and West Side Story. The Banquet is a retelling of Hamlet, a young Emperor’s son is studying far from home (not at Wittenberg) but at a school for artists. When the Emperor is murdered, his brother ascends to the throne and sends troops to murder the prince. He survives and returns to the palace. In this story it is not his mother who has married the new Emperor as it is in Hamlet, but his former girlfriend. Trouble ensues.

Beautiful trouble. The Banquet may be one of the most beautiful films you ever see. It’s the kind of movie you walk out of actually wondering who the cinematographer is and whether you can buy a poster to hang on your dining room wall to make the room look better. Top quality Asian movies have looked great for years – think about Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, or Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou, or Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host – and Feng Xiaogang’s film is no exception.

So, beauty. Shakespeare. Wuxia. This film has it all. Enjoy The Banquet. It’s a feast for your eyes.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire (1985)

Zac: Hi, I'm Zac Lutz, co-President of the SPA Film Club.

RF: I'm Randall Findlay, adviser of the SPA Film Club.

Zac: And we're here to discuss Mr. Vampire, a 1980s Hong Kong martial arts vampire comedy horror flick starring Ching-Ying Lam, who has made over 90 martial arts films including Gui Meng Jao, Mi Zong Cheng Long, and Huang Fei-hong Xi Lie Zhi Yi Dai Shi.

RF: Wow. I didn't know you spoke Chinese. What's Mr. Vampire about?

Zac: Mr. Vampire is a movie that is both exciting and funny while still trying to be nothing but itself, something that seems increasingly rare in modern film. It is about a man, who is a sort of vampire-expert priest guy in charge of the morgue and who sports an aggressive uni-brow. It's also about his two assistants, whose names are strangely very American. The two assistants are quite easy to relate to, as they keep on trying to do their work right, but constantly mess up or fool around, and yet the morgue master guy keeps them around for some reason.

RF: Man, you're right about that uni-brow. I see that the sequel to this movie, and there are five, is entitled One-Eyebrow Priest. And he's a great martial arts master. But he does leave a lot be desired when it comes to hiring employees. The whole plot in Mr. Vampire is moved along by the incompetence of the people who work for him.

Zac: In a way, this seems to be a sort of underlying idea, that despite the comically bumbling nature of the assistants, the morgue master guy still sees how they try so hard to please him, and most of the time they manage to do things right. All of the characters in Mr. Vampire work together very well, and their relationships to one another are definitely believable.

RF: It is interesting that you would say that. After all, the genre of this film is fantasy. I mean, hopping vampires, seductive ghosts, bumbling servants who release zombies because they're screwing around rather than doing their job! Realism is a noun I wouldn't have applied to this film, or the others in the same genre, like Sammo Hung's Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind.

Zac: As far as that goes, there aren't really any parts that seem cheesily unrealistic except for the ghost lady who shows up a bit later and a bit randomly.

RF: Point taken. I remember the first time I saw the film. I saw the vampires hopping, and I started laughing out loud. I thought it was so funny. But at the same time, it's a little creepy. How would you rate this film?

Zac: The vampires themselves are actually fairly menacing, and their stiff hopping seems quite natural as far as how a dead person might move. Overall, the story is easy to follow, although the beginning is a bit confusing, as well as the introduction of the ghost lady, and some of the translations are rather abrupt.

RF: Speaking of abrupt, that's all the time we have. Enjoy the film!

Zac Lutz and R. Findlay
Film Club