response 276 of 284:

Sep 7 16:02 UTC 2001

Which one came first?

response 278 of 284:

Sep 7 17:38 UTC 2001

I (didn't actually intend to, but I did) threw out Jackie Chan as an 
example of classic martial arts movie fight scenes.  More or less the 
same can be said about anyone from Bruce Lee to Van Damme to Sho Kosugi 
to...  Martial arts movies have always been about the fights, and the 
plot is largely secondary.  Martial arts movie fights don't usually try 
to depict what would actually happen if the characters depicted got in 
a fight, they depict an idealized fight scene from the fight 
choreographer's imagination.  So instead of "How would Jackie Chan's 
character handle a fight in which he was faced with these particular 
bad guys", the scene that gets choreographed is "What would be the most 
entertaining fight scene to watch", followed closely by "Okay, what 
characters do we have that we can plug into these predefined roles in 
the fight".  The characters' objectives are simple:  incapacitate (or 
kill) your enemies.  What each character does at a given moment in 
time, and whether or not it works, is not determined by the character's 
skill, but by the dramatic formula of the fight.  And so we find that 
it's almost always the case that the hero gets the crap beat out of him 
for most of the fight, not because his enemies actually have the skill 
to do this, but because it's supposedly more dramatic that way. 
  CTHD does all of this quite differently.  Not once in the movie does 
a character, any character, get beat up by someone who shouldn't be 
able to do so.  Instead, in every fight, we can clearly see who is a 
better fighter than who, and in every case I can think of, that 
assessment agrees with what you'd think based on is known of the 
characters in question.  Dramatic tension is provided by giving the 
combatants *different objectives*, other than just beating each other 
up.  Consider the movie's first fight sequence, between Michelle Yeoh's 
character (whose name I can't remember) and the thief, whose identity 
we don't know yet.  Yeoh's character is quickly seen to be the superior 
fighter, yet her task is much more difficult, since the thief would 
clearly rather flee than fight it out.  Also, you notice that Yeoh's 
character seems to be going out of her way not to injure the thief -- 
almost as if she knows something we don't.  :)  Still, even given her 
more difficult objective, she seems to be succeeding (and hence winning 
the fight), until the intervention of a mysterious third party attacks 
from concealment, allowing the thief to flee.  
  The *first fight* has more dramatic complexity and truth to the 
characterization and plot than the last ten martial arts movies I've 
seen put together, and it just gets better from there.  

response 280 of 284:

Sep 7 21:19 UTC 2001

Syl: Sewer et al came first by several years.  But Dave Berry is enough of
his own guy that I'm sure that he wasn't trying to copy it.  They both have
the same sort of odd style of writing...kind of a skewed look at reality.

response 282 of 284:

Sep 8 04:34 UTC 2001

I must have seen a different movie than everyone else. It SAID Crouching Tiger
Hidden Dragon on the box, and when I put the movie in, it had the right
credits and the right actors, but damn if people keep describing a different
movie than what I saw.

I saw, for instance, a thief who couldn't get away by running and so just
started flying. I saw a series of fights that, to me, seemed even more plagued
by the Batman Syndrome than anything in Jackie Chan. And, again, since you
missed the first analogy, compaing CTHD to Jackie Chan is like comparing
Eyes Wide Shut to Ginger Lynn's Night Out... and, in each pair, I know I'd
rather watch the entertaining mindless fluff than the haute couture nonsense
that thinks way too much of itself.

[I just made up "The Batman Syndrome," but I think it's a good term... Batman
and Robin would be trapped by some completely inescapable deathtrap, and
because of some item that for some unexplained reason Batman had decided to
put on his utility belt THAT DAY, they managed to escape AND get the bad guys
who had easily overpowered them just fifteen minutes previous.]

response 284 of 284:

Sep 8 15:05 UTC 2001

I didn't mind the accents at all.....they kind of made the whole thing more
ridiculous and fun. :)