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Column - Mucha Wuxia

Kaiming:

Good posts. Thanks.

You are correct that the influence of Bruce Lee on not just Asian pop culture, but as the zeitgeist of his time, cannot be overstated. I do however want to point out that when it comes to cinematic influence, it's a two way street. While you can see the effect of Bruce Lee on Hokuto no Ken or Jackie Chan on Dragonball, two benchmark shonen action series, samurai films had an unmistakable role in the development of the new wave wuxia movies since the 50s.

So great was the influence of jidai films and Kurosawa that I would go on to say that without it, King Hu's distinct visual motif for all wuxia movies to come would have looked very different; without Zatoichi, the One Armed Swordsman might have come in both arms; and without Sugata Sanjiro, the action in all the old B&W Wong Fei Hung movies (about 90 of them) might be a lot less athletic, stepping aside for fantasy wuxia which had been the main stay of martial arts movies since the 1920s instead of pushing the envelope. Indeed, it is easier to do fantasy wuxia as all it needs are camera tricks and special effects (i.e. power beams and rays usually drawn directly onto the celluloids), requiring far less actual martial skills and athletic prowess from the stars themselves. This last point is especially important since it is these Wong Fei Hung movies that had the greatest effect on the young Bruce Lee. So much so that he went on to invite Shek Kin, who always plays the villain in every B&W Wong Fei Hung movie (think Republic serials), to be the main villain Khan in Enter the Dragon.

The world is indeed a small place, as it just goes around and around. While it's totally cool to influence (lift if you like) by other filmmakers, genre, or culture, I have big problems when that influence comes in the form of censorship from a self-serving totalitarian opaque government who's more interested in protecting their own and the powerful. That's why I found so many of these wuxia, or xianxia, or kung fu films coming out of the PRC and Hong Kong so hard to stomach. It's not like old school kung fu films didn't have its xenophobic moments, i.e. Japanese characters always being villains in 70s movies, but with good reason given memory of the war and atrocities were still within the memory of the living. However, 40 years later, they are still doing it, only this time I found it incredulous as majority of these guys/ladies weren't even born during WW2. Mostly, I can't sense the heart of the filmmakers in these new films as I used to. In the past, even a bad film was enjoyable (i.e. crazy Cat III exploitation movies like The Untold Story or Daughter of Darkness or The Ebola Syndrome.... they were totally gross, completely camp, unapologetic bad taste, but they were also genuine and 100% fun). Now all I feel are cowards trying to please / placate the PRC government censors. It's always Chinese the good guys foreigners the bad guy. Rah rah rah go China.

Well, nationalism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
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Is ANN being outright paid to talk this series up? Just seems to be getting unusually favorable press and coverage and "interest" articles like this almost as if it's contracted PR work.