![]() ![]() So this is how I approached WU DANG, knowing nothing of it: with an open mind, but some apprehension. There was a point at which I feared the “honorable-Chinese-fighter-faces-foreign-devil” trope would become the Chinese equivalent of the zombie movie glut. Propaganda took over, and though there are examples that still manage to thrill and excite, like Hero, Red Cliff, the first Ip Man and Jet Li’s Fearless, you can’t make a steady diet of it. With the handover in 1999, as Hong Kong once more became a part of Mainland China, the tenor of the movies changed, for a while. The marvelous resurgence in the early 90s with movies like ZU WARRIORS OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN and CHINESE GHOST STORY provided fantasy realms that Hollywood seemed to be fumbling about, shallow but pretty movies like Legend or Tolkien pastiches like Willow. If the corrupt life-or-death world of the Spaghetti Western is familiar to me yet exotic, how much more so is the jianghu, where in its most extreme forms, people can fly and magic is real? I first started watching kung fu films in the 70s, when I realized they were the best celluloid realization of a comic book world, superheroes battling super-villains. A mythic landscape for mythic figures to glide and fight through. There’s something about Asian action movies that call to me the wuxia tales of righteous men and women in jianghu, the world of martial arts – these are my westerns. Stars: Wenzhuo Zhao, Mini Yang and Siu-Wong Fan ![]()
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