No actors were harmed in the making of this film, only egos

[muckefuck]

At least being home feeling crummy gave me a chance to catch up on some reading and film watching. Years after first hearing about Bruno Schultz, I've finally read some of his work. You know that feeling you get when you pick up a paticular writer for the first time and realise you're dealing with a singular talent? Yep, it was like that. A lot of people can write a short story recalling a roof-rattling gale and make it poetically beautiful, but it takes a visionary to preface it with an account of atticfulls of cast-off saucepans and empty bottles congregating under cover of darkness to call down the gale in the first place.

Saturday night, we watched 霍元甲 a.k.a. "Jet Li's Fearless". It was odd to see the featurette with Ronnie Yu talking about how they wanted to do something "different" with a wushu film when the only real twist to the founder-myth plot was killing off the hero. I must confess, I was taken aback to find that all the hype about it being "based on a true story" wasn't simply guff. The life of Huo Yunjia is so perfectly suited to HK cinema, it's amazing I haven't already seen a couple versions of the story.

But then, I guess Hong Kongers were satisfied enough with their local analogue, Huang Feihong, that there wasn't much appeal to a Shanghai-based fighter until political realities had shifted a bit. Sadly, it looks from the capsule summary of Huo's life that it could've made a far more interesting movie than what ended up on the screen. Why take a farmer who moonlights as a caravan guard and make him into just another martial arts schoolmaster?

One thing that did impress me, however, was their devotion to "keepin' it real". For maximum contrast, we ended up watching part of X-Men and all of Spider-Man 2 on Sunday night. As soon as the CGI-overload kicked in, my interest waned. I remember in particular a scene were an obviously computer-generated Spider-Man caroms through the interior of a train car and back out one of the windows. It wasn't one tenth as exciting as that moment in God of Gamblers where Charles Heung (a.k.a. "Dragon Five") whips his body around the inside of a metal post faster than you thought humanly possible in order to fend off a pair of thugs.

I'm not saying that Spider-Man 2 was an inferior film; at another time in my life, I probably would've identified powerfully with the players in the unrequited love affair. (Certainly more than I could ever have with the hokey village-wisdom subplot crammed into the middle of Fearless.) But whereas Fearless came alive during the fight scenes, the superhero films became so dead it made me ready to swear of CGI films for good--or at least until the technology improves to the point where it becomes seamless.

Comments

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I like CGI best when it does things like the sparkly forest air in Princess Mononoke, or the pellucid water in Finding Nemo. But for bodies I like real actors with real bodies. Hence live theatre. Did you ever see '500 Clown Macbeth", or any of 500 Clown's work? *That's* what I'm talkin' about!

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

Spiderman 2 just tries too damn hard. There's that whole bit with Doc Ock throwing the car through the cafe window, for example. It's all "Look how spectacular I am" CGI rather than using it as a tool to serve the storytelling.

X-Men does it a lot better in my opinion because it has a more compelling explanation for the effects and there are a fair few that you don't necessarily even notice (like Magneto's helmet having to morph to don/doff).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Reading the IMDb entry for Spider-Man 2 afterwards, I was struck by the immense number of continuity errors. Not having made a comparison for similar films, I'm not sure if this is more an indicator of sloppiness on the part of the filmmakers or an especially rabid viewer population, but I think at least four or five of them concerned only that cafe scene.

I'll admit, I haven't given X-Men a fair shot. I boycotted it at the outset because of the unforgivable lack of Nightcrawler and haven't yet relented to the point of watching it all the way through.

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

Nightcrawler is in the sequel. I actually like both films a lot because they felt like dramas first and action films second to me. I should note that I knew basically nothing of the X-Men canon before them.