The Bare-Footed Kid (1993)

[Drunk Monk]

There are two or three flicks with Maggie Cheung in them on Netflix, as well as the many martial arts additions.  I need to check some of them out.

I remember enjoying this when it first came out.  Not only does it star Maggie at the peak of her porcelain grace, but also my longtime fav Ti Lung, and a young Aaron Kwok, plus it's directed by Johnny To and choreographed by the one&only Lau Kar Leung.  Now it feels a bit dated, locked in that period of excessively romantic Kung Fu flicks where the cinematography had improved a notch but the stories couldn't escape a thematic love song.  Kwok is a bare-footed illiterate country bumpkin with a shoe fetish.  He gets employed by Maggie's fabric dye shop, which is being oppressed by the Qing.  It's a remake of Disciples of Shaolin (75), and the Qing-oppressed dye shop theme is echoed in Return to the 36th Chamber (80).  Perhaps it's based on something I don't recall. Kwok sells the bumpkin role well and Ti Lung is ever so classy, as always.  And Maggie, she's luminous.  The finale fights are the sort of sanguineous excess that To likes to indulge.  It's a bit of plot to get there, some distracting side stories, but it comes together in the end. 

BAM.  cf, enjoy this one. It is one chamber closer to escaping my tesseract.  



One constantly recursive chamber.

[cranefly]

BAM.  cf, enjoy this one. It is one chamber closer to escaping my tesseract.  



One constantly recursive chamber.

Finished this one, ready to move on...
...into what?  Another chamber?  Cell?  Dimension?

In all my kung fu viewing, I seem to have been blind to Aaron Kwok.  He's very quite good in this.  And I didn't realize he's the same guy who played the Monkey King in the latest iteration.  And he started as a pop singer and dancer?  He does some very sharp fight sequences.

Then there's the ever noble Ti Lung once more sacrificing all.

A wonderfully sanguineous layer cake iced to perfection with porcelain.  I ate it lit candles and all.