Kelly WandSeven Swords
November 11th 2006 00:54
For those of us sorry souls who cant speak Cantonese, a hunt for Asian movies can be a difficult thing. You can wander into Chinatown and be hit by a barrage of titles but even a title written in English doesn’t guarantee appropriate sub titles. When sub titles are present, they are often poorly translated and very confusing. Still, the hunt is worthwhile for genre addicts like myself; particularly when you find something as wonderful as “Seven Swords”.
Tsui Hark is one of my favourite directors and seeing his name above the titles didn’t hurt my decision to buy. Happily, the (double) disc was a great transfer and the titling was good. Better yet, the film itself is the absolute dog’s bollocks.
Good? Whilst you may know I’m capable of making some extraordinary claims with movies, I do so at my excitement at finding something I want others to see. This movie is so cool and some things are just so good you have to share them with others. Also, in my support of multiculturalism, I like to encourage people to enter those shops which have no subtitles.
It’s fun. No. Really, it is. It is good just to do something a little out of the comfort zone. Life is too fucking short to just dig a little trench and hide in it.
But what of this film? The Emperor passes an edict that any one caught practicing martial arts should be decapitated. Bands of sanctioned thugs roam the countryside killing all and sundry because they get paid per person. Looking like they have put the visi back into goth, these baddies spare no-one from the youngest to the oldest.
Caught in the sights of these marauders, the daughter of a Village Chief sends a party out to bring back seven legendary swordsman from the mountains. Okay, the plot bears a lot of similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”, “The Magnificent Seven” and “A Bug’s Life” but is apparently sourced from a novel by Liang Yusheng.
The action sequences have everything you expect from Hong Kong cinema in general and Hark’s work in particular. This is, after all, the man who bought us the “Once Upon a Time in China” trilogy. With those films, he merely borrowed a title from Serge Leone and a sense of the epic. Here he goes one step further with the story telling and pacing being not just western (as opposed to eastern) but also like a western.
I cannot stress to you how good this film is; a genuine cinematic classic. Hark’s best work ever; a film that should finally place his name on the list of directors whose name is immediately recognisable. It is better than “Hero” or “House of Flying Daggers”. It is better than “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. I’d rank it beside “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Yeah. We’re talking that good.
Tsui Hark is one of my favourite directors and seeing his name above the titles didn’t hurt my decision to buy. Happily, the (double) disc was a great transfer and the titling was good. Better yet, the film itself is the absolute dog’s bollocks.
Good? Whilst you may know I’m capable of making some extraordinary claims with movies, I do so at my excitement at finding something I want others to see. This movie is so cool and some things are just so good you have to share them with others. Also, in my support of multiculturalism, I like to encourage people to enter those shops which have no subtitles.
It’s fun. No. Really, it is. It is good just to do something a little out of the comfort zone. Life is too fucking short to just dig a little trench and hide in it.
But what of this film? The Emperor passes an edict that any one caught practicing martial arts should be decapitated. Bands of sanctioned thugs roam the countryside killing all and sundry because they get paid per person. Looking like they have put the visi back into goth, these baddies spare no-one from the youngest to the oldest.
Caught in the sights of these marauders, the daughter of a Village Chief sends a party out to bring back seven legendary swordsman from the mountains. Okay, the plot bears a lot of similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”, “The Magnificent Seven” and “A Bug’s Life” but is apparently sourced from a novel by Liang Yusheng.
The action sequences have everything you expect from Hong Kong cinema in general and Hark’s work in particular. This is, after all, the man who bought us the “Once Upon a Time in China” trilogy. With those films, he merely borrowed a title from Serge Leone and a sense of the epic. Here he goes one step further with the story telling and pacing being not just western (as opposed to eastern) but also like a western.
I cannot stress to you how good this film is; a genuine cinematic classic. Hark’s best work ever; a film that should finally place his name on the list of directors whose name is immediately recognisable. It is better than “Hero” or “House of Flying Daggers”. It is better than “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. I’d rank it beside “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Yeah. We’re talking that good.
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