Michelle Yeoh just won her Oscar, and that's awesome and I love Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I wanted to celebrate by watching the films that first made me fall in love with her and this is right at the top of the list! Well, except for Crouching Tiger, but I just saw that in the theater so it can wait.
How many Best Actress winners have ever jumped a motorcycle onto the back of a moving train, I wonder? I haven't researched this, but I suspect the answer only just became "one."
A cold wind howls through the midnight courtyard of a martial arts school. A man (Tung Tsai-Po) surreptitiously enters, but lights come up to greet him; he buries his surprise and calls for Qi Rufeng, the Magic Swordsman, the Golden Blade. Master Qi (Tien Feng) steps out onto the porch and the messenger hands him a sealed letter, saying it is from “the brigand chiefs Ma and Xu of Huainan.” When the master opens it, a cloud of smoke blows…
Well, I had to watch one of 'em, didn't I? And this one does contain the single most artistic moment in the whole series (when they're shutting Jason into the drawer in the morgue, and just for a second we see his breath steaming). I love this movie, is what I'm saying, and today's the day for these crazy things.
It really isn't just nostalgia.
I saw this in the theater when I was ten. I didn't know anything about genres then, but if I had, I would enthusiastically have said that this set the standard for action/adventure films. Watching it now, more than thirty years later, it is still the standard. It has simply never been equaled. There's not a casting choice, not a plot development, not a line of dialog, not a single frame I would change about…
The catapult...oh, the catapult. I love how much they get out of such simple premises in the Road Runner cartoons.
