Ip Man (2008)

Yip Man or Ip Man was a real martial artist and considered the Grandmaster of the martial arts style Wing Chun. His legacy includes establishing the Hong Kong Wing Chun Athletic Association. He also had many students, some who became famous in their own right, such as Bruce Lee. 

The story begins in 1935 in the bustling town of Foshan. This is a unique little place, as the majority of its residents are martial artists. Apparently this is where many different schools have accumulated over the years, and the streets are brimming with demonstrations of skill and techniques. In a setting populated by masters of martial arts, one stands above the rest. He’s a master of masters. Ip Man (Donnie Yen) lives peacefully in a large mansion with his wife and son, practicing and developing his signature style, Wing Chun. Our first introduction to the style and Ip Man’s obvious skill is in a friendly sparring match with another master. It’s a teaser of a fight, as Ip Man simulates what would otherwise be killing blows on his opponent. The plot comes around a few years later, when Japan invades China and Foshan is practically wiped out. Ip Man attracts the dangerous attention of General Muira (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), a karate fanatic who likes to hold martial arts tournaments in his spare time (using Chinese civilians as sport). 

The movie is essentially divided into two parts, 1935 and 37. The time period causes a drastic shift in tone and cinematic style that turns the seemingly lighthearted action flick into a period drama. The first part of the movie is a lot of fun to watch. The setting of pre-war Foshan is a lively and unique place. I like the idea of a town inhabited only by martial artists. Just watching the way life seems to happen in a place like that is really entertaining. Ip Man has to deal with a constant stream of challengers and would-be disciples, and the personal conflict comes with him trying to juggle his dedication to his fighting style and spending time with his family. The action scenes come when a group of new and aggressive fighters looking to open a school go around publicly beating all the other masters. Ip Man is forced to step in. These scenes serve as a great introduction to the characters and the city they inhabit. It also shows how important martial arts are to the culture and why it can be seen as a symbol of nationalism, which brings us the second part of the movie, 1937. The Second Sino-Japanese War has entered China and almost completely demolished Foshan. Ip Man and his family are living on the streets. Many people are impoverished, even more are dead. Even the look of the movie is different. Where there was once vibrant colors and sunlight, now there’s grey skies and dirt. The grayscale of the picture makes everything seem grim and gritty, particularly affecting the fight scenes. 

Now that's what I'm talking about.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Donnie Yen’s fight scenes. Donnie Yen is an amazing physical performer and some of the duels in this are jaw dropping. The choreography by Sammo Hung is masterful and serves as a really good display of the Wing Chun style. Of all the fights sequences in the movie, there’s one scene in particular that comes to mind and it’s a battle between Ip Man and ten black belts simultaneously. It’s a frantically fast and shockingly brutal fight scene in which all of the previously graceful and elaborate moves are turned into force and anger. Limbs are snapped and faces are pounded into with more punches than I could count. Donnie Yen’s skill and speed are captivating to see in action, and scenes like this are what solidify him as an action star and rank him up there with the greats. 

The drama of the character also develops from the original light humor to him questioning his purpose and value in the new times. In the scheme of a country at war, developing his fighting techniques just doesn’t seem that important. Over the course of the movie he learns that his ability to fight (particularly against the Japanese martial arts) means something more to everyone. His fight with General Muira becomes symbolic of Chinese unity fighting back against their oppressors. It’s gets a little heavy handed, but that’s usually to be expected in an epic martial arts movie. 

While a martial arts movie set in the backdrop of war isn’t exactly an original concept, Ip Man is still an entertaining and exciting action film. It tells a good story based loosely on a real life martial artist, has some unbelievable action scenes, and plus you get to watch Donnie Yen kick all kinds of ass.

Renaissance (2006)

It’s hard to find an animated movie for adults these days. Of course this isn’t true for other countries like Japan, where animation is so mainstream and common that they can market it to everyone. Here in the US however, and likely due to the domination of companies like Disney since the 1930s, animation is and will likely always be something geared more towards children, but that's not to say there are no alternatives. Take Renaissance for instance. It’s a black-and-white science fiction film noir. It’s got recognizable voice actors to play the characters in its dubbed release. It’s violent, dark, and gritty. All this explains why it was made in France.

Set sometime in the future of Paris (and it’s once again set in that part of France where everyone’s British), the story follows a cop named Barthélémy Karas (Daniel Craig), who’s put on the case of finding Llona Tasuiev (Virginie Mery), a missing woman that had ties to a powerful megacorporation called Avalon and its shady CEO (Jonathan Pryce). The trail gets muddled and Karas soon finds himself lost in the midst of a conspiracy with world altering consequences. The story is well conceived and there are some really good ideas at play, but the first (and most important) thing to notice about Renaissance is the animation. Firstly, it’s entirely in black-and-white, and I mean that quite literally. There’s almost no gray in the entire movie. Everything is colored in stark black-and-white, creating a lot of deep shadow effects and striking visuals. It’s a really cool looking style, making the world appear as a hyper stylized cyberpunk noir, and it looks different from just about anything else I’ve seen in a movie. The use of only solid blacks and whites actually makes it resemble black-and-white indie comic books like the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Sin City (even more so than the movie adaptation). These comics used only the ink from pens to create shadow and details, and they’re known for their dramatic and extremely stylized artwork. Watching Renaissance in action is like seeing one of these comics brought to life. The only other animated medium I’ve seen that comes close to matching the visuals of this movie is the videogame, Mad World.

The animation style for the people uses a mixture of motion capture and computer graphics to create its look, but it’s the black-and-white that really gives the movie something to distinguish it from others of its kind like A Scanner Darkly, Avatar, or The Adventures of Tin Tin. The futuristic setting of Paris is interesting and very sleek and crisp, as opposed to other more famous futuristic metropolises like L.A. in Blade Runner. Everything in Paris is clean and sharp, with lots of glass surfaces, creating a very cold and sterile environment for the characters to live in. It’s well suited to the idea that nearly everything in the city is run by an evil corporation.

Barthélémy Karas (Daniel Craig)

Where the movie’s biggest problem lies is with the protagonist, Karas. He’s a determined and relentless police officer who will stop at nothing to solve the case. All in all, he’s a pretty standard and uninteresting character, despite Daniel Craig's voice acting. You could replace him with most cliché movie cops and not much would be changed. They spend some time developing a back story for him that involved his childhood ties to a criminal kingpin, but it serves no real purpose in the plot. When his entire back story is revealed, it tells us nothing about why he is the way he is. The biggest problem with Karas is his utter lack of motivation. This guy is the best of the best on the police force, and it’s never revealed why he needs to be so good. Nothing about him explains why he should or shouldn’t make some of his decisions. His romance with Bislane Tasuiev (Laura Blanc) also comes across as flat and uninteresting as a result of this. I don’t know what she sees in him. The lack of characterization with Karas especially hurts the film when some of the major themes present themselves to him directly at the end. When the movie goes into some of the moral and philosophical matters for him to react to, the impact is severely lessened because of his lack of personal investment. I wish more time had been spent going over some of the questions raised towards the end of the film, when the mystery is closer to being solved, but instead it just ends.

It’s very nearly a case of style over substance, but I think there’s just enough here to warrant interest. Despite having a bland protagonist, the unique visuals and interesting story make Renaissance worth checking out.

Blade II (2002)

So after the surprising success of Blade, Marvel movies began to develop and appear in the public eye. X-Men and Spider-man were massive successes, so it seemed only natural to return to the first of the modern super hero franchises. Thus Blade II was created, though this time with Guillermo Del Toro at the helm. The story takes place two years after the end of the first film. Blade is still hunting vampires the world over, and in his search he’s found that they have taken his old mentor, Whistler (played once again by Kris Kristofferson), captive. I was a bit surprised to see Whistler return, what with him being dead and all, but given that this is set in a comic book style universe, it’s not much of a stretch to bring people back to life. The plot really unfolds when two ambassadors of the vampire nation arrive to recruit Blade so that he can hunt down a new, deadlier breed of vampire; grotesque creatures referred to as “reapers”. 

I’ll say again that Blade exists in a very comic book world, and it’s much more emphasized this time around. Where the first film wanted to stress a sort of “real world” version of the character, Guillermo Del Toro wants very little to do with that. Blade’s superhuman abilities are more exaggerated (with the aid of computer animation, but we’ll get to that later), the creatures he fights are more disgusting and numerous, and he even gets to fight alongside a bunch of other hunters, with their own super abilities. With Guillermo Del Toro involved, there are some really cool new additions and alterations to the Blade mythos. First, he references and incorporates old movie vampires by establishing that there are two different kinds in the world, the pretty and seductive kind that mostly made up the vampires of the first film, and the others who are more reminiscent of Max Schreck in Nosferatu. Next, we have the reapers, the central villains of the movie led by the vicious Nomak (Luke Goss). These things are gross, but also really thought out. They’re a mutant strand of vampires seemingly superior to Blade, but more freakish and out of control. Instead of having sharp fangs, their jaws pry open to reveal a gigantic tentacle of a tongue that latches onto their prey. One of the best scenes involving these creatures is when Nyssa (Leonor Varela), a vampire noble, performs an autopsy and we get to see the bizarre layout of its insides, disgustingly and wonderfully created using practical effects.

Awesome.

Now, the bulk of the plot centers around Blade’s team-up with the Bloodpack, a bunch of vampires trained specifically to kill him, and what a team this is. Its members include Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, and Danny John-Jules (as in the Cat from Red Dwarf). For the most part, their only real purpose is to look cool before they get brutally killed (leather clad cannon fodder). Nyssa also serves as a potential love interest for Blade which, given that she’s one of the very things he’s dedicated his life to killing, could have been really interesting, but it’s not given much to develop and honestly doesn’t really amount to much. Unfortunately character development isn’t all that important when compared to the action. The only characters you feel like you know are Blade and Whistler, but that’s mainly because you already know them from the first film. Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson are still as entertaining and likeable as they were before, and are obviously comfortable reprising their roles. 

This is a supernatural action movie, so the question is: how’s the action? The action is more over-the-top than it was in the first film and this is mostly due to the reliance on computer animation. Blade can now pull off ridiculous stunts at any given moment instead of the one or two instances from the first movie. The problem with this is that computer generated Blade doesn’t look very real. In fact, it’s downright obvious whenever they switch out the actor for his animated counterpart. I blame this more on the times than anything else. Blade II was released in 2002, and just as with Spider-man, X-men, The Matrix Reloaded, and anything else around the time that wasn’t Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, computer animated people were really terrible looking. I give Guillermo Del Toro credit however, because even though the CG is extremely dated, he transitions from live action to computer animation seamlessly. The actors sometimes go back and forth between being animated and live action multiple times within one fight scene. I can only imagine that had he made this movie today, this complaint might not be relevant. 

In the trustworthy hands of Guillermo Del Toro, Blade II is an action packed and amusing action movie. It builds on certain elements of the first film to make it feel more fun and showcase that it came from a comic book. It’s violent, action packed, and a worthy sequel.