09-02-2014, 11:30 AM
I'm going to open with a SPOILER: Q: When you are a defrosted medieval warrior with superhuman powers, and you are trapped in a bathroom, surrounded by several dozen SWAT cops with machine guns and tear gas launchers, how do you escape? A: Crao in the toilet and somehow make it to explode so big that it covers the SWAT cops with crap, sends the toilet flying into the air and covers your escape. END SPOILER
OK, it's poor form to even drop spoilers but I figure most of you don't see all the Asia flicks I do (maybe CF, but then again, maybe he just looks at the poster), so what's the harm? That spoiler was the centerpiece of the film, a bloated travesty of HK filmmaking which, in a nutshell, explains why Chinese cinema can't cross over to the U.S. quite yet. Iceman is a remake of an '89 flick awkwardly titled in English Iceman Cometh with Yuen Biao, Maggie Cheung, Yuen Wah and Yuen Tak (the Yuen bros are Jackie's Kung Fu opera brothers). That was a decent B Kung Fu flick. It was, of course, a Kung Fu spin on the '84 Timothy Hutton flick Iceman about defrosting a neanderthal. The Kung Fu spin is that it's a medieval Chinese Kung Fu master. It's a great concept really - lots of reason to have crazy fight scenes and comic pratfalls. And in this new version, a over-budgeted 3D spectacular that was shown at Cannes, Donnie Yen stars as the defrostee. It was so big, it pulled a 3-4 Musketeers and had to be split into 2 parts (part 1 was 2013, part 2 is forthcoming). It stars some other big names beyond Donnie: Wang Baoqiang, who was in Lost in Thailand and is starting to really grow on me as a great funnyman, Eva Huang from Kung Fu Hustle and Sorcerer and the White Snake, and one of my all-time fav HK actors, the truly awesome Simon Yam. There's some good fights - major wirework and CGI but decent. There's sword fights. There's a lot of random story arcs. There's some peeing scenes where we discover that medieval warriors pee like firehoses. It's much in the wake of Stephen Chow with it's mo lei tau humor, but that humor is inserted obliquely, jarringly. Such is the nature of HK film nowadays. They laugh at silly crap. Crap that blows up toilets. I confess I saw it without English subs, so it got a little hard to follow, and there's a part of me that thinks I should see it with subs just to get some explanation, but then again, I suspect it won't help.
This gets a limited U.S. theatrical release in a few weeks. Of all the ones to get this... :roll:
OK, it's poor form to even drop spoilers but I figure most of you don't see all the Asia flicks I do (maybe CF, but then again, maybe he just looks at the poster), so what's the harm? That spoiler was the centerpiece of the film, a bloated travesty of HK filmmaking which, in a nutshell, explains why Chinese cinema can't cross over to the U.S. quite yet. Iceman is a remake of an '89 flick awkwardly titled in English Iceman Cometh with Yuen Biao, Maggie Cheung, Yuen Wah and Yuen Tak (the Yuen bros are Jackie's Kung Fu opera brothers). That was a decent B Kung Fu flick. It was, of course, a Kung Fu spin on the '84 Timothy Hutton flick Iceman about defrosting a neanderthal. The Kung Fu spin is that it's a medieval Chinese Kung Fu master. It's a great concept really - lots of reason to have crazy fight scenes and comic pratfalls. And in this new version, a over-budgeted 3D spectacular that was shown at Cannes, Donnie Yen stars as the defrostee. It was so big, it pulled a 3-4 Musketeers and had to be split into 2 parts (part 1 was 2013, part 2 is forthcoming). It stars some other big names beyond Donnie: Wang Baoqiang, who was in Lost in Thailand and is starting to really grow on me as a great funnyman, Eva Huang from Kung Fu Hustle and Sorcerer and the White Snake, and one of my all-time fav HK actors, the truly awesome Simon Yam. There's some good fights - major wirework and CGI but decent. There's sword fights. There's a lot of random story arcs. There's some peeing scenes where we discover that medieval warriors pee like firehoses. It's much in the wake of Stephen Chow with it's mo lei tau humor, but that humor is inserted obliquely, jarringly. Such is the nature of HK film nowadays. They laugh at silly crap. Crap that blows up toilets. I confess I saw it without English subs, so it got a little hard to follow, and there's a part of me that thinks I should see it with subs just to get some explanation, but then again, I suspect it won't help.
This gets a limited U.S. theatrical release in a few weeks. Of all the ones to get this... :roll:
Shadow boxing the apocalypse