Four Dragons (2008)

[Drunk Monk]

How did this little gem get by me for so long? It's allegedly Malaysia's first KF film, actually it's Wushu as all the four are decorated Wushu champs. It's done in a comic book style, which I know I say I'm over with here a lot, but it worked for me for this. Maybe it's just American comic books that I'm over. 4D has sort of a Tarantinoesque feel. It has a lot of very scenic locations and frequently cuts away to amazing sunset footage between scenes. The dialog is done in the homage to *classic* Shaw Brothers dubbing and is painfully bad, but that sort of works for this, lines like "Why have you come? So, tell me then." Way to much internal dialog voicing and narration. It's oddly non-linear, going from a massacre to the back stories with the heroes are hallucinating and recovering (btw, there's a great villains smoking opium and muh-ha-ha-ing scene). The pacing is really weird - it repeats a large portion of a major fight scene twice (very irritating) and stalls in the middle for a sappy romance scene (that goes to a weird dead end) and then comes back to shocking sanguinuity (not a word, I know, but it should be). But the scenes are very well framed, often with saturated colors to set a more comic book tone. Nice sets, very detailed. And the soundtrack is bubbling combining modern and traditional elements.

What got me are the fights. They are mostly shot in B&W (more specifically Blue and White) and when someone gets hurt, digital blood is added. But this digital blood doesn't attempt to look real - it's saturated red comic book style splatter against the Blue&W shots, usually in slo mo. Very amusing. The fights start out slow and unimpressive, but pick up for some nice complex single shot sequences, and the wushu champs really shine when they get weapons in their hands.

The film could have been edited in half for a very tight little film. It drags at many points in an amateurish way, but has an overall vision to which it stays consistent. Surprisingly fresh for something now almost a decade old. DOOM Worthy.

I think ED would enjoy it a lot. We had a conversation about the comic book virtue of Man With the Iron Fists at the Residents which I have been mulling over as I just did an interview for MwtIF2.

[El Dingo]

This popped up on one of our cable movie channels.

I liked it but it was a little slow. There really weren't a lot of fight scenes, but because I like pro-Union working-man stories I stuck with it. I normally don't mind CG elements but the blood was 1989-era sloppy. Overall it was just a standard poor-guy beats rich-guy movie.

What I found interesting was the intense hate on IMDB: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1356802/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1356802/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1</a><!-- m -->

I've seen some bad martial arts flicks and this was not one of them. Maybe I liked seeing the Wushu forms being used in practical application, maybe I liked the emotional connections made between characters, maybe I liked the costumes and sets.

In any case, this was not a P.O.S. 3.6 movie on IMDB. I give it a solid 7.5. I smell internet smearing for one reason or another.

[Drunk Monk]

H8rs gonna h8. The repeated scenes bogged down the pacing for sure. Not great but not bad either. I kinda liked the sloppy cgi blood. I don't remember why now. Maybe it was that color contrast