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Shaw Brothers festival?


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I've just finished the flying guillotine.

It's not the most historically accurate movie, nor a particularly realistic one, but the story is quite a piece of work, and there are some really nice sets.

I found the language difficult, there were no subtitles and I was tired, so I basically stopped trying to understand things about a third of the way in. Lots of Qing court talk again.

It was entertaining enough, and probably would have been moreso if I had understood what on Earth is going on. Basically we have a Qing court killer squad armed with portable guillotine devices who go around doing politics the no-nonsense way until one of them faces a moral dilemma and flees. Of course, his past comes to haunt him.

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@renzhe - yes, that's the story. I just rewatched it; it's pretty rare to see a SB film where there's a special weapon lots of people have. Your mention of court Mandarin again makes me think I need to learn more about it; understanding the movies I watch is the main reason I started learning Mandarin.

There are two follow on films, Vengeful Beauty and Flying Guillotine 2. IIRC, Vengeful is the better of the two, though FG2 has Shih Szu. :wink:

I started going through the screencaps and see that learning all the vocab will really help my understanding of the films.

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Well "court Mandarin" is a phrase I made up to explain the old-fashioned and formal way people speak in these kinds of shows. I believe it's just bookish language borrowing a lot from Classical Chinese.

Anyway, I'd like to recommend the following movies I got my hands on:

Crazy Shaolin Disciples (弟子也疯狂) (1985)

Magnificent Ruffians (卖命小子) (1979)

The ruffians feature the venom gang, which should be fun.

I watched the Shaolin Disciples last night and can whole-heartedly recommend it. It is a combination of magnificent kung-fu and the most juvenile, infantile toilet humour that is so dumb that it had me laughing out loud. It doesn't look like the cast or the director were taking themselves seriously here. The pointless story sets up the plot -- there are two groups of young students training in the Shaolin temple, the monks-in-training from the north and a bunch of yahoos learning kung-fu from the south. The rest of the movie is them playing stupid pranks on each other and some of the most memorable kung-fu sequences reminiscent of early Jackie Chan.

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Crazy Shaolin Disciples (弟子也疯狂)

It is a combination of magnificent kung-fu and the most juvenile, infantile toilet humour [....]
That describes a lot of the films of Liú Jiāliáng (Lau Kar-leung). Maybe we should try to work in Martial Club 武館 if y'all can find a Mandarin version. I recall that being one of the better ones to watch for more than just the kung-fu.
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Well, I'll certainly try to find one, sounds like fun. It's not on verycd, but there is on one the bay that looks promising. If it's half as fun as the Crazy Disciples, it will be a riot.

EDIT: Bah, that one's also Cantonese.

Edited by renzhe
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I've finished watching the Five Venoms (五毒) and it's definitely one of the highlights.

It has a surprisingly interesting storyline, kung-fu that borrows heavily from wuxia novels (though there's no magic) and great choreography. It definitely goes beyond the standard "you killed my master" and "your mission is to punish this traitor of our school", though there are elements of both. I enjoyed the intrigue, as you don't know who all the major characters are until the end of the movie.

The story, in short, is that the school of five venoms has produced 5 masters, each specialising in a style of kung fu based on a poisonous animal: centipede, snake, scorpion, gecko and toad. They all learned from the same master, but have never seen each other's face. Some of them have committed grave crimes and brought shame on the school of the five venoms.

The sixth disciple of the dying master is sent to find them and punish them for their crimes. The problem is, he has never seen any of them, and they are keeping their skills secret. Furthermore, none of them has ever seen any other one. And nobody knows which one is good and which one is evil. So it's not exactly an easy assignments, and there are some interesting twists along the way.

This was very enjoyable. I'm the type of guy who can endure any martial arts flick, including the terrible ones, but this one was actually an oldie and goodie.

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IIRC, Martial Club doesn't have so much humor; it is just one of his better films.

If you want more of his humor, try The Lady is the Boss, My Young Auntie, Dirty Ho, and maybe Cat vs. Rat, Heroes of the East, and Spiritual Boxer.

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I've finished watching the Magnificent Ruffians.

It's another Venom Mob movie, so the action sequences are dynamic and acrobatic, even if not completely believable. I liked it less than the 5 Venoms and Crippled Avengers, but it does have its charms.

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Sorry, I feel like I'm not contributing enough. I admit I'm less than inspired to rewatch Chang Cheh movies I saw about a year ago, but I should make the effort. If only there was an easy way to get my region 3 films onto my iPod Touch, then I could watch them on the bus.

I have been trying to go through The Swordmates screencaptures I made, but with ~700 such captures, it will take a while to build up a vocabulary list.

I did watch most of Double Bliss yesterday. It's a modern romantic comedy about two college students who plan to wed but are prevented by their feuding fathers. It stars Ching Li, the favorite actress of Chu Yuan and Chang Cheh.

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五毒 - Glad I made time to rewatch this, as it's a great SB film. A lot of what annoys me about many of Chang Cheh's films is absent, leaving a very taut film which also has some subtlety.

In films like this and Life Gamble he gives his films many of the characteristics I enjoy in Chu Yuan films.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Magnificent Ruffians -- I liked the backstory of martial artists put out of work by modern implements of destruction and how at one point one of those implements appear in the story. Beyond that it was IMO a fairly standard Venoms film. I do wonder about the scene where some of the Venoms are going to take a bath but chicken out because there are (presumably naked) female attendants. On a shallow level I found the late 70's haircuts distracting.

Perhaps all the vocabulary work is helping; I felt I was understanding a bit more while watching the film.

Does someone want to propose other films to watch?

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  • 1 year later...

OK, this is probably the best thread to post Shaw Brothers-related stuff.

I've watched "Clan of the White Lotus" recently and found it enjoyable. Some of the humour was too cheezy, and little of it was funny, but the main villain (the white-brow Taoist) is awesome, and the scenes where Gordon Liu learns a women's style of kung fu with his best friend's widow are great.

It also features one of the best endings in the history of cinema. Quentin Tarantino was obviously a huge fan of this movie, as he not only featured Pai Mei in "Kill Bill 2" (played by non other than Gordon Liu), but he also stole the ending of the movie for "Death Proof".

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Cool; that's a great film. I've been trying to work through some of my non-action SB films, and saw House of 72 Tenants and Hong Kong 73 recently. I'm going to try to watch Songfest tonight.

A good forum for their action films is:

http://kungfucinema.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=6

For the rest, there's:

http://sblingpo.proboards.com/index.cgi

There are many review sites, but I like Brian's writing style:

http://www.brns.com/pages/shawrevs.html

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