Author: Jack Ford

Yuen Woo-Ping: NYAFF Lifetime Honouree

Asian action cinema owes a huge debt to one of its biggest unsung heroes: Yuen Woo-Ping, renowned action choreographer and director whose career in martial arts films spans forty years.

With his latest, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy, about to hit the screens, the New York Asian Film Festival have decided now is the time to honour his staggering contribution, by screening a selection of his best work and presenting the guest of honour with theLifetime Achievement Award.

You may not have heard his name or be up or world cinema or action flicks, but his body of work is so vast and has ventured into places outside of Asia, you will have likely come across it at some point.

Born in Guangzhou in 1945 and educated at the Peking Opera School, Yuen would eventually follow in the family business – his father, Yuen Siu-tien, was a renowned martial arts actor who appeared in seminal films of the genre, including The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Come Drink With Me and The Mystery of Chessboxing.

However, the younger Yuen felt his place was behind the camera rather than in front, and put his martial arts skills to good use as he set about becoming an action director and choreographer in the booming martial arts film scene of Hong Kong.

What has always made Yuen’s work stand out is his eye for composition and detail, the intricacies of his choreography and the collaboration with performers that makes each fight unique to the fighter. Most of all, though, is his commitment to authenticity – his fights rarely, if ever, use wire work or CGI, which make them so much more exciting and engaging to watch.

After a lot of early collaborations with the Shaw Brothers among other big-name Hong Kong filmmakers, Yuen made his directorial debut in 1978 – and what a debut it was: Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. The film remains a prime example of the genre and was one of the films that helped to make Jackie Chan into an international action star.

Over the next twenty years, Yuen served prolifically as director or action choreographer and directed some of Hong Kong and China’s biggest action stars in some of their best works.

These included Jackie Chan in Drunken Master, Sammo Hung in Magnificent Butcher, Donnie Yen in Drunken Tai Chi, Michelle Yeoh in Wing Chun as well as The Miracle Fighters for legendary Hong Kong producer Raymond Chow, a film which is being screened at NYAFF this year in his honour.

In addition to directing, he also choreographed the action scenes of Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), the best instalment of the long-running action series fronted by action superstar Jet Li. It would be the first of many collaborations between Yuen and Li, the next being 1994’s Fist of Legend.

In 1993 he directed a film that ranks among his very best and the best of its time: Iron Monkey. Starring Donnie Yen, Ringo Yu and Jean Wang, it is a Robin Hood-type story that follows the eponymous masked fighter who fights the injustice of the ruthless and corrupt Ching government.

Beautifully shot with precision action and every martial arts archetype on show, Iron Monkey is quintessential viewing for anyone with an interest in the genre and a perfect choice for the festival’s career retrospective of Yuen.

At this point, his work started to gain attention outside of Asia, and the inevitable call of Hollywood came and in a big way – the Wachowskis hired Yuen to stage the fight scenes for The Matrix trilogy. His work here was so well received, Ang Lee called on his services for the Academy Award-winning Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, as did Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill.

Returning closer to home, he served as action director for two of films of leading Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow – Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and House of Fury (2005) – as well as another collaboration with Jet Li, this time for the lavish historical epic Fearless (2006), directed by Ronny Yu.

In 2013, he was part of the dream team behind The Grandmaster – directed by Wong Kar Wai, produced by Martin Scorsese, starring Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi – who gave the much-filmed martial arts icon Ip Man mainstream treatment. The acclaimed film picked up many accolades and proved that, even in his later years, he was still far from having hit his stride.

He then made his contribution to the popular Donnie Yen-fronted Ip Man series, designing the fight scenes of the third instalment, released in 2015. Around the same time he also returned to the director’s chair, taking the helm of a number of high-profile Hong Kong films including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.

His new film, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy, sees him take the helm of the Ip Man series for the first time, in what looks to be an exciting instalment as one martial arts master gets given the top treatment by another.

Looking back at his career, it is truly staggering how many kung-fu classics he has been responsible for and how prolific he has been throughout. It would be hard to think of Asian action cinema of the last forty years without him, and while he is thoroughly deserving of NYAFF’s honour this year, the bigger question really is: why has he not been honoured sooner?

30th June 2019
NYAFF 2019: Films To See

It’s a big time of the year for fans of innovative and unique cult cinema, when a selection of the best films that fall under this are shown at the New York Asian Film Festival (or NYAFF).

For those who can’t get a NYAFF ticket, though, it’s the time of the year when we have to look longingly at the lineup, in the unfortunate knowledge that most of the festival’s fare won’t ever make it to the multiplex screens.

Every film is really worth a look, but with western distributors deciding there’s not enough room for all, here is a rundown of NYAFF 2019’s films that we would most like to see reach our shores, in descending order of likeliness that they will:

Zombiepura (Jacen Tan, 2018)

Singapore gets in on the zombie game (this is the first film with this subject matter to come out of the country), but put a unique spin on the genre – having a mis-matched serious army officer and his lazy subordinate team up to fight off a sudden zombie outbreak.

Of course, it’s a horror sub-genre that’s hard to miss all the right beats, but its set-up, reminiscent of 2018’s cult hit One Cut of the Dead, and humour lifts this film above the pile to become an intriguing must-see.

The Pool (Ping Lumpraploeng, 2019)

This film looks to be in the same vein as The Shallows and Adrift, with a minimal cast in a single location – in this case a young couple who find themselves afloat in a swimming pool with no one around and the water level receding – but with the seriousness tone of those American films substituted for increasing tension and a lot of surprise twists.

Samurai Marathon (Bernard Rose, 2019)

This has one of the highest pedigrees of all the films in the 2019 selection, directed by Bernard Rose, who previously helmed Candyman, with an original scored by Philip Glass (Koyanisqaatsi) and featuring a cameo from Danny Huston.

Beyond its personnel, Samurai Marathon brings together a lot of interesting elements – a training exercise mistaken for an uprising and the rebellious daughter of an imperial lord caught up in it – in what promises to be an exciting addition to the staple of Japanese cinema.

212 Warrior (Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2018)

Martial Arts fans will be right at home with this Indonesian entry that follows student Wiro (Vino G Bastian) on a quest to stop the villainous Mashesa Birawa (Yayan Ruhian) – the killer of his parents – from usurping the throne.

It looks great and promises plenty of high-energy action, in short it ticks all the right boxes for devotees and the uninitiated alike. Fun fact: Bastian’s father, Tito, is the author of original novel the film is based on.

Fly Me To Saitama (Hideki Takeuchi, 2019)

Billing itself as “the biggest farce in the history of Japanese cinema” gives an idea of the eccentric, self-deprecating tone and presentation of this adaptation of the manga from Mineo Maya.

It’s flamboyant look is one reason it’s worth a look. Its surreal, high-concept plot – a boy who resembles a girl and a girl who looks like a boy fall in love despite being from different warring Tokyo prefectures – is another, among many.

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels (Kim Tae-yong, 2018)

Kim’s film, which got a warm reception at the Berlin Film Festival, looks to have elements of Studio Ghibli, as the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred for a sister and brother who find themselves brought into another world by kokdu funerary idols come to life.

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels

Making special use of the gugak musical style, Kodku would appear to have a lot of whimsy and fantasy, but with a serious tone underlying beneath the exterior.

5 Million Dollar Life (Sungho Moon, 2019)

5 Million Dollar Life

We’ve seen plenty of films of people with terminal illnesses finding a new lease on life in the time they have left. This isn’t one of them. Mirai has his life saved after generous donations from the community get him the care he needs, but he then feels the pressure from those around him to make saving his life worthwhile.

Moon has taken a story told so often it that has become cliched into all-new territory, making it an exciting prospect and one of the marquee films of this year’s NYAFF.

A Resistance (Cho Min Ho, 2019)

This film follows Korean school girl Yu Gwan-sun from her time in prison to emerging as a prominent leader in the March 1st Movement which called for an end to the rule of imperial Japan. Cho’s impressive production recreates an fascinating piece of Asian and brings it to wider audiences, with Go Ah-sung (Snowpiercer) putting in what could be a start turn in the central role.

Jam (Sabu, 2018)

At first glance, Jam appears to be part Oldboy, part Magnolia, part 48 Hours, with its plot that sees the lives of a vengeance-seeking ex-con, a good samaritan with a girlfriend in a coma and a struggling enka singer intertwine more and more. It’s an interesting concept that mixes tried-and-tested elements with some all of its own.

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Show (Hsieh Nien Tsu, 2019)

Taiwan’s answer to the cult American comedy UHF sees the owner of a TV station promotes inept interns to head programmers, in the hope of lowering the channel’s ratings and value so he can find someone to buy it for cheap. However, their new shows become unexpected hits and the channel becomes a big success.

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World sets itself apart a field of high drama and gritty action by just looking like a lot of fun.

The full NYAFF festival lineup can be found on the official NYAFF website.

27th June 2019
The Mule: The BRWC Review

“So help me god, this is the last one.” These lines, spoken by Clint Eastwood in the trailer for The Mule, feel very ominous. At age 88, when the film was released, the film’s director and star may have been feeling that the time had finally come to bring his sixty-year career to a close.

Indeed, The Mule is the kind of late-career film we’ve seen from plenty of directors before. It’s gentle, full of life lessons and follows a flawed central character on a journey of awakening and redemption. While it does fall into stereotype and is self-indulgent at times (there are two threesome scenes), it’s agreeable and earnest throughout, as well as compelling in key moments.

Though Eastwood’s less-than progressive politics have put him out of favour in the current climate, it’s undeniable that few people still active the industry have a greater living legacy than him.

He is a synonymous icon of the western genre and his filmography is packed with quality titles, from Dirty Harry to Letters from Iwo Jima. Even in his later years, instead of resting back on mythology, he continues to experiment and explore new ideas and genres (admittedly with varying results).

Crucially, his films almost always have no agenda. Behind the camera he puts the real world to one side and focuses on what’s on screen – and his impact and longevity have really earned him the right for audiences to do the same.

The Mule sees Eastwood back in front of the camera a decade after supposedly bid farewell to his screen persona in Gran Torino (At the time he said it would be his last film as an actor.) We can only guess what it was that made him want to come out of retirement to take on the role of Earl Stone, who is based on former White House gardener Leo Sharp, but it’s a role he seems to inhabit with ease.

The film opens with the workaholic Stone passing on his daughter’s wedding in favour of a trade show – an act that later sees him estranged from both his daughter and wife. Many years later rift in the family is still wide, even with his granddaughter (American Horror Story’s Taissa Farmiga) wanting to cool the bad blood, with little success.

Now out of business, broke and with nowhere to go, a chance encounter connects the octogenarian with a group who pay him big money to transport packages from Illinois across the Mexican border. While at first he is unsure of the reality of what’s actually happening, he soon realises he is transporting drugs for a cartel, who find his unassuming nature makes him the perfect mule.

His opposition to what is short lived, as he enjoys the journeys he makes and the people he meets, while the money he gets in return gives him the means to make things better for his friends and family – the thing he had never been able to do and made him most feel like a failure.

However, word of this new, unknown mule reaches the DEA, and given the task of tracking him down is agent Colin Bates, played by Bradley Cooper in his second collaboration with Eastwood after American Sniper. It’s not long before the heat start closing in on him.

Whether or not The Mule actually is a swan song, there’s a lot in the film that feels personal to Eastwood. He casts his real-life daughter Alison as his daughter in the film, whom Stone reconciles with after having missed out on so much with her. This is something we’re used to seeing in films of this type, but exchanges between this real life father and daughter adds another level to these moments.

Also of note is a scene set in a waffle house, where he gives life advice to Bradley Cooper – like Clint in real life, a leading man turned successful American director. This exchange, which is recalled later on in the film, feels almost like he is anointing his successor.

As with all Eastwood films, though, self-reference takes a back seat to story. While The Mule does not innovate or break any new ground, it is a solid drama, affecting and absorbing with well-written characters. Also in its favour is that it is free of tricks to try and manipulate, instead relying on the acting and the script to get us to warm to the action.

It has its rough patches, but it gets past those thanks to its genial tone and good nature, which Eastwood equals in his performance. While this isn’t his best work either as actor or director – as a drama it doesn’t have the emotional resonance of something like Unforgiven or Gran Torino – but it’s an easygoing film that everyone can take something away from.

2nd June 2019
X-Men Origins Wolverine – 8 Things

Those who haven’t died the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (SPOILER ALERT) end up with no memory of all the events that have just happened – the latter not just exclusive to those in the film. A decade on, those who saw the first spin-off of the X-Men franchise would be hard-pressed to remember much about it.

Hugh Jackman was back playing the part that made him a star, that of the mutant Logan, who here earns the moniker of Wolverine, but in a film that was not at all necessary nor anyone had any real expectations of. Despite which, it went on to make more than $350 million at the box office.

To mark the tenth anniversary of Origins, here is a refresher of the biggest curio of the Marvel film world, with some interesting things about it (or rather the only interesting things about it) that may have slipped minds, as well as a look behind the scenes and its place in the cultural landscape now.

It was directed by an Academy Award winner

X-Men Origins: Wolverine helmer Gavin Hood had previously directed the 2005 drama Tsotsi, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

During production the studio wanted to replace Hood after disagreeing on which direction to take the film, but he retained the job and later earned praise for crafting Origins‘ action set pieces, which are the best thing about it.

Ryan Reynolds made his first foray into the Marvel universe

Though Reynolds’ character in the film is called Wade Wilson, and his eventual alter ego is referred to as Deadpool, the character was “not Deadpool” in the actor’s own words.

This was a role Reynolds had wanted ever since hearing that a film of Deadpool was in development, but he was not happy with the character’s treatment in Origins. He begrudgingly accepted the part, though, after being told that it was a one-time offer – if he didn’t play it here, he wouldn’t at all.

He later made the part his own in 2016’s Deadpool, and got to “erase” the version he was unhappy with in the sequel:

Dominic Monaghan is in it…

Yes, Merry Brandybuck himself moved from hobbit to mutant in Origins, where he makes a bland and superfluous appearance as electricity manipulator Chris Bradley, the least interesting character in the film (and that’s saying something.)

…So is will.i.am

Judge on The Voice and front man of the Black Eyed Peas made his acting debut in Origins as teleporter John Wraith. While many may have forgotten this fact, the man himself has a permanent reminder of his time on the film – the scars on his knuckles he received while filming a fight scene.

Gambit and Kayla were later reunited in John Carter

Taylor Kitsch, who plays the supporting character Gambit, and Lynn Collins, aka Wolverine’s love Kayla Silverfox, would soon after be re-united in 2012 when they fronted John Carter for Disney.

There Kitsch played the eponymous hero and Collins starred as the female lead Dejah Thoris. Whether or not it was a happy reunion, it was not a happy aftermath, as John Carter‘s mis-managed budget and poor marketing saw it go on to become one of the biggest flops in cinema history.

It was to be the first of many

X-Men Origins: Magneto was to follow this film. David S Goyer had written a script and Ian McKellen was supposedly in discussions to reprise the part from the original films. However, with Wolverine only a modest success and progress lagging early on, the Magneto origin project was shelved. Probably for the best. McKellen did later play the character again for X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014.

Wolverine himself was not happy with the final product (and was not alone in thinking that)

“I had something to prove, and we could have done better … Somehow the first Wolverine movie ended up looking like the fourth X-Men — just with different characters,” Jackman said in hindsight of Origins.

Critics were not convinced, either. The Daily Telegraph called it “an artificial stimulus package of the most unsatisfying kind,” while Rolling Stone called it “a transparent attempt to squeeze a faltering franchise for its last drop of box-office juice.”

There’s a scene where Wolverine boxes an obese man

This, most of all, deserves to be forgotten.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a 2009 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics fictional character Wolverine.

1st May 2019
Escape From Tomorrow: Review

Writer/Director Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow was shot on location at Disney World in Florida without permission – a decision that gives the film an air of tension and makes it so direct and unflinching that it can, at times, be uncomfortable to watch.

This is not the first film that has been made in this such guerilla style – another notable example is Jafar Panahi’s Offside. Protesting laws forbidding women in Iran from entering sports arenas, Panahi and his all-female cast shot that film outside the Azadi Stadium in Tehran while a World Cup qualifier was being played inside.

There, Panahi could have faced repercussions from the Iranian government, but here Moore puts himself in the firing line of a much more unforgiving and brutal authority – the Disney Corporation.

Given the clandestine nature of the production, it would be reasonable to expect nerves to be showing in the film and for a Blair Witch-type aesthetic. Looking at the final product, though, you wouldn’t have thought it was all shot in secret.

It looks as well made as any film shot by or in a studio, with beautiful photography by Lucas Lee Graham. The knowledge of the extra efforts that have gone into the location shoots (Moore supposedly made the cast ride “It’s a Small World” twelve times for the filming of one scene), straight away creates a deeper appreciation and affection for the filmmakers. Thankfully, that

While on holiday at Disney World with his family, middle-age Jim’s (Roy Abramsohn) life seems to be falling apart – he has lost his job, his children give him no respect and his wife (Elena Schuber) is giving him grief about ruining the holiday, and his wondering eye.

Jim’s feelings of hopelessness eventually seem to take a toll on his psyche, as he seemingly constructs a scenario where he learns of the supposed true nature of the park – one involving a secret underground lab, alluring Princesses and fairies and a disease spread by cats. It’s part of a new narrative where he is the hero and has to save his family.

Anyone who’s had a bad holiday will recognise something from Escape from Tomorrow, such as the tensions from being in constant close quarters and the pressure to have a good time. It’s savagely observed, but what it does best is perfectly capture and dismantle the idea that, in these anxious times, Disney theme parks are seen as a sort of nirvana which can make all of life’s problems go away.

“People come here because they want to feel safe. They’re afraid,” says one of the characters Jim meets on his journey, a fired former Disney princess. A line she delivers at a moment when nothing feels particularly safe. It’s true, though, visiting a theme park will not make all your problems disappear – which is particularly true in Jim and his family’s case.

The film ramps up the surrealism as it goes on, before maybe going a bit too far with a final scene that doesn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion (if it had ended a few minutes sooner it would have been better). It does not deviate from its voice, though, and remains uncompromising to the end.

Escape from Tomorrow might be a bit too sardonic and extreme for some, but it is nonetheless a brave, unique and unforgettable experience. This is a real undiscovered gem, ripe for re-discovery.

5th April 2019