电影下放

One evening not too long ago, my eyes welled up with tears.

I had turned on my television set to an emotive scene of the 1982 movie The Shaolin Temple, good old Jet Li's premier movie appearance. It was a scene that I remember from my childhood--a young shepherd girl, unable to defeat the evil, corrupt men surrounding her, must watch as her beloved little lamb is slaughtered at knifepoint before she is taken hostage. It was the most striking scene to watch in my early childhood years, and seeing it again more than a decade later drew me right back into the martial arts movie watching mode.

For the next one and a half hours, I was entranced by a movie-watching experience that has been lacking in my life for many years. There were no special effects, no CGI, no science-fiction elements. Instead, there were glorious scenes like this one:




Painted sets, smoke machines, clever shooting-on-location and badass fight-scene choreography. How else can you do justice to martial arts? Guessing conservatively, probably around two-thirds of this film was made up of actual action--that is, fight scenes and other martial arts displays. The story is simple, the ending predictable, it doesn't challenge one's morals, but the movie is good, because it's real.

I couldn't help but feel a little disappointment in the current state of martial arts films, and especially and the mediocre offerings that the West is able to experience. In order to name one example, I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree with an overwhelming majority of film critics. The House of Flying Daggers, a 2004 Zhang Yimou production, would never have been able to even have flying daggers if it were made with 1980s technology. Not only was the love story contrived and made audiences feel like an idiot, but the mythical ninja-like elements of people flying through trees seriously deserves to be frowned upon by Chinese martial arts enthusiasts.

There's something particularly refreshing about watching a movie that has as few add-ons as possible. It's like participating in a rural re-education program for cosmopolitan, urban movie elites. We should think about what it's taken the movie industry to evolve this far in the past twentysomething years.

After all--isn't that an important part of the learning process throughout Chinese history? To revisit those who have done the work the hard way, and to acclaim them as they deserve. Being "sent down', almost Cultural Revolution-style, to an earlier time in film history may help relieve us, to some degree, the glitter and decorations of 21st century cinema.

I, for one, would like to see another Shaolin Temple, becuase when we take away the frivolity of computer graphics and flying people, we still can't deny the talent that is true, old-fashioned, Shaolin martial arts.