Andy Lau and Gong Li team up for a Mandarin-language remake of Nancy Meyers’ box office mega-hit, What Women Want (2000). The original U.S.-made romantic comedy starred Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt and grossed $374 million. Of course, this was before we truly knew how terrible the former Mad Max could be. Man, if you thought the racist jokes in Lethal Weapon 4 were bad enough before, try watching it now. But I digress.

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Wind from Storm Riders

Many moons ago, I received two statues in the mail from my family in Singapore — Wind, one of the main characters from Ma Wing-Shing’s popular comic book, Storm Riders, and Hero Hua, the protagonist of Ma’s earlier manhua hit, Chinese Hero (aka: A Man Called Hero, The Blood Sword). Both characters have a Hong Kong movie connection as they were each famously portrayed by Ekin Cheng in the respective film adaptations.

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Despite my professed love for Hong Kong cinema, sometimes a movie slips through the cracks. For some odd reason, I never got around to watching Tsui Hark’s 2005 wuxia epic, Seven Swords, even though I’ve owned the movie since it was first released on DVD quite a few years ago. I gave the movie a try one weekend when I lived in Hawaii, but I seem to remember being somehow vaguely put off by the look of the film (or, more likely, the running time of 2.5 hours when I had a master’s project to finish) and moved on to other Hong Kong movies that had captured my interest in a way Seven Swords didn’t.

Recently, I had a chance to finally watch Seven Swords, and in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t waited so long, as Hark delivers a mostly entertaining, if overstuffed swordplay epic. It’s not one of Tsui’s best, but it’s a film that’s rousing in small passages, coasting on a handful of intriguing characters and some stellar wuxia iconography that it never quite capitalizes upon.

You can read Kozo’s full critique of the film here, while I share my thoughts below.

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After a failed bid for Hollywood success, martial arts megastar Jackie Chan returned to Hong Kong for 1980’s The Young Master, a film that marked the beginning of a long and successful relationship with Golden Harvest. After a great deal of backstage wrangling thanks to Golden Harvest head honcho Raymond Chow and Jimmy Wang Yu, the young Chan was finally released from all contractual obligations to director/producer Lo Wei, and consequently became free to do his movies the “Jackie Chan way.” And while The Young Master certainly hearkens back to the old school charms of his previous work in terms of plot and setting, the film possesses more than enough of Chan’s trademark slapstick humor and high-energy stunts to make it a noteworthy transitional film in the Jackie Chan filmography. As his first film for Golden Harvest, this is one of Chan’s best from the pre-Police Story era.

Not only can read my full review here, but you can actually watch THE WHOLE MOVIE  for free online. Although it is a dubbed version, I’ve gone to the trouble of embedding  The Young Master below. Apparently, this is all legally kosher, but if you happen to know otherwise, please throw me a line.

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Ever since 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, there has been a steady flow of movies that toss together famous characters from different films just to see what would happen if they met. More often than not, these characters end up fighting one another – usually by mistake, but not always. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zatoichi Meets the One Armed Swordsman, the twenty-second installment in the long-running Zatoichi series, does not deviate from this formula. But while the two famous characters do meet, and do eventually draw swords on one another, what’s covered in the distance between those two points is pretty compelling in its own right, a feat that separates Zatoichi Meets the One Armed Swordsman from the rest of the pack. Shintaro Katsu and Jimmy Wang Yu shine in this engaging tale of swordplay, mistaken identity, and cross-cultural (mis)understanding. My full review for the film can be read here.

Kenichi Matsuyama and Kazunari Ninomiya have a fetish for leather in GANTZ

Two nights ago, I was checking movie times in Ann Arbor, and saw that GANTZ — a live-action adaptation of a popular sci-fi manga and anime series — would be screening on January 20th in one of the local theaters. Puzzled by this very peculiar turn of events, I did some additional digging and found out what many fans already knew — GANTZ was making its international world premiere in 334 movie theaters across the United States in an exclusive”one-night only” event thanks to the fine folks at NCM Fathom, New People, and Dark Horse Comics.

I plan on writing a full review of the film soon, but in the meantime, I’ll give my initial impressions of the film, as well as a rundown of the event itself.

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They say a picture says a thousand words. What’s this one saying?

After starring in a host of movies including two successful One-Armed Swordsman films and his hit directorial debut, The Chinese Boxer, Jimmy Wang Yu bolted Shaw Brothers for greener pastures. Unfortunately, due to the fact that he broke his contract, Wang Yu was effectively banned from making films in Hong Kong. In Taiwan, he set up shop with rival Golden Harvest, and debuted a new, albeit familiar character, The One Armed Boxer (1971), who proved to be just as popular as his sword-wielding predecessor.

That very same year, the Shaw Brothers decided to relaunch the One-Armed Swordsman franchise and recast the lead role with a new actor, David Chiang. The resultant film shares no continuity with the original, aside from the fact that the new protagonist is also missing a very important appendage while still being amazingly adept with the sword.

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