Reply With QuoteGoogle is such a bitch to use, ain't it?
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...bidden+Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_For...om_%28movie%29
Really looking forward to this. I guess Chan is playing the Daoist type character and Li is playing the Buddhist character.
Google is such a bitch to use, ain't it?
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...bidden+Kingdom
Which one is the monkey?Originally Posted by Dirt
Neither Chan or Li are the monkey. I believe their characters are on a journey to save the monkey. I think that it would be ultra cool if the Monkey was Bruce Lee.
From the wiki article it sounds like Li is Sun Wukong as well as another character.
They lost me when they threw in a slow white guy as one of the leads, lame.
Every friggin' year the studios seem to want to make the same movie twice. Armageddon and Deep Impact. Volcano and Dante's Peak. Infamous and Capote. Tucker: A Man and His Dream and The Aviator. And now according to QT3's movie forums there're two movies called The Forbidden Kingdom coming out this year? Sheesh! Get some new ideas, Hollywood!
I don't know what you classify these movies as (serious, dramatic, floaty-style martial arts movies?), but I'm kinda getting tired of them.
Wuxia.
Chan is going to be a drunk, a nod to his Drunken Master character.
Yeah, same here.
Jet Li and Jackie Chan and wire-fu and teahouse smackdowns and white-haired demon ladies?
Yes please.
Third-string Shia LaBeouf knockoff as Neo, savior of ancient China?
Um. Thanks, but I already saw Bulletproof Monk.
I just saw the trailer.
Wow, Liu Yifei is looking good. I was always hesitant to drool over her because the stuff I've seen her in, she was either 15 or 17. I guess she's 21 now.
It's a wuxia trope to have 2 powerful martial artists fight over a student. Alot of Chinese (particularly wuxia) stories are about a bildungsroman. Sun Wukong (arguably) was a bildungsroman, albeit a very powerful one. Whether that student is white or Asian is irrelevant.
In Jiang Hu, it's not what you look like, but how much ass you can kick.
Last edited by Dirt; 03-13-2008 at 03:11 PM.
I read a review on aintitcoolnews and if it's right, then this is what a wuxia film should be about. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a snooze fest.
Yeah, with Li and Chan, if the producers absolutely must put ina Western actor for legitimate plot reasons, he better be an honest-to-god martial arts badass. Would have been cool if Chuck Norris was 20 years younger and made a surprise appearance in it.
Are Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielson in this?
Ok, apparently Walter died in 1984, so no on that one.
Also, I guess it's some kind of karate film.
Crouching turkey, hidden drama.
Okay, wtf. How sad is it that it takes a Dirt post about a wuxia film to make me realize that Bill Dungsroman isn't just a silly name for a funny forum poster.
Christ, I'm really questioning my education at this point.
Dunno, M5, but that point's been raised many times since Bill started posting here. You probably just missed it. But the fact that you don't know about a German literary term is no reason to question your education.
What's more surprising is that Dirt is the least racist person in this thread (of those noting the race of the actors).
It looks like Jet Li is going to be the "hard" kung fu. Jackie Chan will use a "soft" kung fu.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24189326/
Jackie Chan speaks candidly about the script.
I just saw the movie, and I went in with full-on negativity in mind. I was expecting some kind of lame, poorly choreographed Eragon-styled fantasy/wannabe Kung Fu movie and instead, what I saw was the complete opposite.
It had great fighting scenes, and a mixture of strong elements of lighthearted comedy and character drama that I've come to know and love in movies like the Once Upon A Time in China films with its small, close-knit party of characters.
The plot of the movie is pretty much nonsense, but the rest of the movie is good enough that you stop caring about why certain things make no sense. It's basically good Wuxia.
Having the newbie character didn't degrade from the quality of the storyline. In fact, it kind of enhanced it because it allowed us to fully experience a Wuxia film from the perspective of a Wuxia fan (which he is, just as most of us here are, I think) and properly familiarize ourselves with the strange and interesting setting of the world. There's nothing worse than being thrown into a story with no 'guide' to show you around.
Overall, I felt that was very entertaining, and that's what's important.
The acting would've been better if the characters spoke in Chinese more often, though. The delivery of their lines in Chinese is much superior to their English. But overall, it's just a minor hitch.
Short spoiler:
I especially liked the bit where Jackie's character is pouring water into the newbie's cup until it overflows, and uses it as a lesson to teach the newbie that in order to learn Kung Fu, he has to empty his cup, which happens to already be full from all his preconceptions of Kung Fu which he learned about either from movies or from games like Virtua Fighter 2... and because he doesn't grasp the metaphor (at the time), he empties his cup. Literally.
Last edited by Sol Invictus; 04-19-2008 at 08:50 AM.
I agree with you, I was pleasantly surprised. It was not a ground breaking movie, in terms of originality, but it was a treat to watch, and some parts of the plot were quite good. Definitely worth $8 to see on a Saturday afternoon.
It'll be strange to see that film, for me... The kid who used to live down the street from me -- a bit of a punk; ran with a bad crowd -- has a minor role as a thug (Lupo, I think, is his character's name). I'm glad to see he's found a better path, but, for reasons too long to get into here, it would be weird and uneasy to see a former thug who used to menace my friends menacing Jackie Chan's friends (or whomever).
He and John Fusco, the screenwriter, reportedly train at the dojo next to my local Radio Shack. I wonder what those guys think of it?
I have to agree that it is a fun movie. Definitly not a croching tiger/hidden dragon level film, but a nice diversion on a friday afternoon.
Spoiler:
Did anyone else feel uncomfortable during the scene where Chan went to "summon rain"? Although I assume that was intended as a major laugh spot it fell completly flat in our theater with most people being disgusted by it rather than getting the humor (including myself for no reason I can fathom).
I laughed, and so did much of the theater (albeit uneasily), so thankfully the scene was very mercifully short.
In the next scene, when Chan's character was sipping wine and wiping his mouth with his sleeve, a few people said "ewwwwww" because it finally hit them.
It had some good moments. Overall, it's not a good film. Many scenes were awkward and some language choices (Sparrow referring to herself in the third person) were odd in English. I wish they'd have hired more better English speakers. Obviously, you can't replace Jackie or Jet (Jet's English was particularly bad), but I had trouble understanding some of the bit players. I was surprised that Liu Yifei had the best English, especially at the end. But I guess she lived in the USA for 4 years when she was younger and returned to China to become a star.
Just got back from seeing this, and I thought it was well worth the extra price to see it on the big screen. It falls short of classics like Big Trouble In Little China (which it strangely felt closest to), but was fun nonetheless. In particular, "The Traveler" held up much better than I expected, the choreography was nicely done, and the sets/props/cinematography were all sharp.
If you had any interest at all in this, it's well worth seeing. If you don't like Kung Fu flicks, I'd shy away.
Disappointed. This film just does not cut it for this kung fu film fan. Mainly I am let down by the fact that none of the trailers or info I had seen had indicated the 'Karate Kid' factor of the present day Boston kid getting transported back to kick things off with this Mcguffin staff of monkey kingness. If I had paid to see this I would probably be railing against it much more strongly.
Highly westernized.
They had some good kung fu fights, some (brief) nice photography, but they never managed to combine the two.
All in all, underwhelmed.
To paraphrase what one reviewer wrote about Troy: the movie is far from great, but much further from terrible. In hindsight, I'm surprised they didn't go for a PG rating, especially given how popular shows like Naruto and Avatar are these days. A few tweaks to tone down the violence and tweeners would probably gloss over the movie's shortcomings and eat up this wish-fulfillment / empowerment fantasy.
Curiously, FK reminds me of Last Action Hero by way of Karate Kid: dorky loner escapes his crappy life by immersing himself in the heroic movies he loves; he gets magically sucked into his fantasy world and partnered with a mentor / father figure (to sub for his missing real father); along the way, he has to stop wallowing in escapism and grow up by studying kung fu and caring about other people. For him, it's ultimately a redemptive arc: he has to atone for his initial cowardice near the beginning of the film.
And I think I did the kid a disservice by calling him a "third-string Shia LaBeouf knockoff," because frankly his character is more sympathetic than Shia's in Transformers. Damning with faint praise, I know, but there you go.
In the first trailer I saw, the white kid figured pretty prominently, which prompted my cutting remarks about him. So I came at it from the opposite end: I was relieved to discover I didn't hate the kid nearly as much as I expected I would.
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