ROCH 2006: Last few eps!

So here we are, in the post-16 year separation. Um. Yeah. All that white hair on Yang Guo looks a bit silly. He's what, 38 or so at this point? Everyone else in the story looks pretty much exactly the same, oddly enough. Well, except for the Guo twins, who are teenagers instead of babies now. I never liked this part of the story that much. And the giant bird still looks silly.

Guo Xiang meets Yang Guo (the Condor Hero) and becomes his number one fan. Or something. A few more groups of weirdos introduced at this point, but I can't bring myself to care. Anyway, she invites him for her 16th birthday, and he plots out this huge "party" for her, and "gifts" that take her as a representative of the city of Xiang Yang. More or less. Guo Fu is bitchier than ever. Poor Yelu Qi. GX's twin brother (I forget his name) is pretty much a nonentity.

Anyway, after some more woe and intrigue around GX's birthday party (With fireworks that rival Gandalf's at Bilbo's last birthday party!) Yang Guo wants to meet up with Little Dragon Girl again. Of course it doesn't work out that easily. He catches up with Huang Yaoshi at last, and learns some disturbing info (all while teaching a couple of idiots that the Force is no myth...or something...err...whatever...). YG screams a lot. Super-powered screams. Geez, I hate those. GX rides off after YG, meets up with the Golden Wheel Monk, who kidnaps her.

Yang Guo finally learns the true story of his father's life and death. Much screaming and carrying on ensues. I liked the old blind bat guy, here. Well played. Also the four men seeking him for revenge.

Somehow Huang Rong, the two cousins (Cheng Ying(sp?) and Lu Wushuang), Huang Yaoshi, the old rascal Chou Botong, Yi Deng, and Ying Gu all end up converging with YG, GX, and the Golden Wheel Monk at the cliff at the Passionless Valley. Big cliff-diving party! Woo hoo!

A reunion with lots of slow motion flying around, spinning camera, flowers, bees, singing, and teary gazes into each other's eyes. I think I fast-forwarded through most of this. Especially as my 8-yr old son was watching with me and he hates it when people kiss...

And back to the siege of Gondor, I mean Xiang Yang. No giant elephants here and no elves, but they did have big siege towers with cannons. Massive battle scene ensues. The final big battles you might expect at this point. One last heroic charge by Yang Guo (riding on 4 horses, no less!). And then cue the semi-happy ending.

So many of these stories set in these historical settings are really depressing, because you know that a few years after the "happy ending", China is violently conquered after all (or there's a civil war, etc.), and our heroes can't change that.

Concluding thoughts: This was a decent serial. Not my favorite, but then I never liked the story that much in the first place. Luckily I didn't watch it immediately after reading the books, so I wasn't quibbling too much over details. It seemed a fairly faithful adaptation of the novels. The acting was good, for the most part. EXCEPT for the actor who played Yang Guo. Maybe he's just difficult to play convincingly, but I just didn't like this portrayal. He looked and sounded wrong to me. The scenery and costumes were good. (No cheap styrofoam wilderness here!) The CGI animals were pathetic. The music was all right. Not really to my taste. Overall, I thought the pacing was too slow. Too many slow scenes to try to play up the romantic elements, but it had the opposite effect on me.

ROCH 2006: get over it!

Eps 31-33 or so. Finished up the Passionless Valley plot and the LMC (evil Taoist nun) plot (more or less). A different song! Woot! (LMC's "Ask the world, what is love" etc.) This section ends with the 16 year separation.

Sure, we can sympathize a bit with LMC, but still, being unfortunate in love once is not a license to slaughter tons of innocent people! Get over it! Perhaps that's what annoys me about ROCH, that it's a great virtue to only ever love one person in your life, ever ever forever! And half the girls have to fall in love with Yang Guo. Bleah. I would have hoped for the two cousins (Cheng Yin and Lu Wushuang) to get more of a life outside YG, not stay single forever. And poor GS Lu-er. What a way to die. What horrible parents she had. And Ci En (the former Iron Palm leader who became a monk, the brother of GS's wife/Qiu Qianzi)...interesting character there. His sister demanding vengeance on Huang Rong, his master telling him to let it go. No wonder he's a bit crazy.

Cat fight! Heh. I was amused by the scenes with Lu Wushuang and Guo Fu. LWS has a mouth on her! Ha ha ha.

But it all seemed to drag on forever. Will this series ever end!?

ROCH 2006: More baby tag!

And swarms of spiders! Bees! Episodes 25-30ish. Not bad. Not great, either. Yang Guo finally catches up with Little Dragon Girl again. The two Wu brothers are more clownish than ever. Not that their dad is much better. (Dad: You can't ruin your lives over love of a woman! The boys: But you did! LOL.) The three sudden blossomings of twue wuv are not all that convincing.

And now it's Little Dragon Girl's turn in the "I'm dying!" chair. I suppose she'll stay there for a few more episodes. Of course, YG is still poisoned.

The Taoists don't come off very well in this series, do they? LMC is supposed to be a Taoist nun, and she is just cruel and heartless. Poor Hong Lingbo (her apprentice.) The Quan Zhen sect 3rd generation are either useless or power-hungry goons who sell out to the Mongols. The older generation isn't much better. They get beat up on by just about everyone and growl at Yang Guo a lot. And poor Qiu Chuji either sucks as a teacher or just has really bad luck with his disciples.

ROCH 2006: Oops! She ran off again!

Eps 21-25ish of the 2006 mainland production of "Return of the Condor Heroes". My interest level: fading, fading, fading...urge to fast forward...increasing... Yeah. It's been over a year since I last watched any of this show. Maybe I overdosed on that SONG. Ugh. It came back to me all too quickly.

This is a bad sign, since this is the part of the novels I really liked: Yang Guo decides who he's going to be, whether he's going to try to kill his "uncle" Guo Jing (the big patriotic hero here) or not (and the choice is even harder because now he's poisoned and his own life depends on him killing GJ and trading it for an antidote) and we have the crisis with Guo Fu and the two Wu brothers, and the choppity-chop and the giant eagle.

Things I liked: the siege of Xiang Yang. Some good combat scenes (even if they did have a tendancy to Force-blast in a cheesy way now and then). Nice sets. Decent acting. LMC (the evil Taoist martial sister of Little Dragon Girl) is back. I laughed when she thought the baby was YG and LDG's. The Golden Wheel monk's gleeful tricking of Nimoxing into stepping onto the poison needles too. ("Now we're even! Ha ha!")

Things I disliked: Huang Rong still looks freaky with the eyes. Horrible looking leopard and giant eagle and snakes. Sheesh. That SONG and the ultra slow-mo moments. Gah! Yang Guo's laugh.

Headdesk moments: Look! She's drooling blood again! (Must be emotional if she's drooling blood AND fainting.) She's running away again! More idiotic misunderstandings! Magic finger Force! (Ok, ok, I guess it's either show it this way or else have little captions appear on the screen whenever you use some esoteric stance/style/move.) Glowing caves! (I understand why they have them, but it's still silly to look at.)

I'm going to try to make it through the rest of this...heh... Maybe I just don't like the ROCH story all that much. The only version I've really enjoyed is the anime version (but I still need to track down season 3).

Ashes of Time

I was reading about the new cut of Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time (Ashes of Time Redux) in the newspaper the other day. On the one hand, I'm delighted to have a new, good looking version out there (the current DVD prints look faded and dirty), but on the other, I'm sad that they decided to mess with it (NO! Don't mess with the beautiful score!) and probably won't release the original alongside the new cut. Anyway, it inspired me to watch my old DVD (I have the Mei Ah version, which while it isn't great, is much better than the World Video version) of it once again. This is one of those movies I like to watch over and over.

In fact, that's its main flaw. Ashes of Time is hideously confusing on first watching (most people don't even like it) and you may not realize it's any good at all until you watch it after already knowing the movie. I'm not a Wong Kar Wai fan (haven't watched his other movies yet) but I am a wuxia/martial arts movie fan. This is NOT a wuxia or martial arts movie. It's not an action movie. It has action sequences, but they're blurry and not there to show off the gymnastics skills of the actors. (On the other hand, they're much better than the laughable CGI sequences in certain more recent TV serials that seem to be there to show off the pretty faces of the actors while their enemies drop like flies.) I'm not sure it's even a "movie" at all. I suppose there's a plot, but it's dropped in bits and pieces not necessarily in chronological order. It's more like a painting, or a poem, or an impressionistic piece of music. Love, loss, regret, lost opportunities, ambition, the desert, chivalry, pain, confusion...played out with characters from a famous series of wuxia novels by Jin Yong (Louis Cha).

So ARE they really the characters from the Condor series? The movie's Chinese title is "Dong Xie, Xi Du" ("East Heretic, West Poison"), which refers to the nicknames of two of the characters from the Condor series. This movie purports to show how they became what they are in the actual series. In that sense, it's non-canonical. But the movie loses something if you DON'T assume they are the same characters, just people who happen to have the same names as other fictional characters. I prefer to think of it as variations on a theme. A professional-quality fanfiction that is emotionally true even if it takes liberties with the story.

The acting is excellent throughout. I was surprised at how well Leslie Cheung (whom I was used to seeing as the "kid" character in other movies) played Ouyang Feng, the cynical, rather villainous "West Poison". We have Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) as the blind swordsman, the other Tony Leung (Ka Fai) as Huang Yaoshi ("East Heretic"), Maggie Cheung as the woman (the one who married Ouyang Feng's brother), Carina Lau (the blind swordsman's wife), Charlie Yeung as the girl trying to buy revenge with a basket of eggs, Jacky Cheung as Hong Qi ("North Beggar), and Brigitte Lin as Murong Yin/Yang.

Ah, Brigitte Lin. I love Brigitte Lin. But what is it with Brigitte Lin and the gender-challenged characters? Did they cast her because Murong Yin/Yang was ambiguous that way? Or is the character like that because she was cast? Even when she's not playing someone transgender (Dong Fang Bu Bai, I'm looking at you!), she's in male drag ("Peking Opera Blues", "New Dragon Gate Inn", etc.) Is it some traditional thing? (Women played the Young Scholar roles, in certain older films, as I seem to remember - was that some operatic tradition?) Sometimes the men play women, sometimes the women play men, depending on the type of opera... In any case, that was a very interesting take on Du Gu Qiu Bai (Loner Seeking A Loss), who was a cryptic, legendary character in the novels.

So who are they here?

Ouyang Feng, whose lover married his older brother, now lives in the desert running an inn and a business as a middle-man hiring out penniless swordsmen to kill people for others. Every year, his friend Huang Yaoshi visits him. One year he brings a wine, that he says someone gave him, which has the property of letting people forget: memories are what make them unhappy. Ouyang Feng is skeptical, but Huang Yaoshi really does begin to forget. And then there's the swordsman, slowly going blind, a friend of Huang Yaoshi, but also an enemy. Who loves whom in the end? Who won, who lost? Is it love or the idea of love? Can you buy your self/honor back with an egg? The story goes between Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi's points of view (I got confused about that at first). In the end (which is where we begin) it all makes sense. Sort of.

The cinematography: I don't know. It might be good. The desert landscape is very striking. But it's hard to tell because the video is so degraded on the copy I have.

The score: Wow. One of the best I've ever heard for any movie, period. GREAT GREAT MUSIC. So good they stole it for other movies/TV series. In fact, even if you hate everything else the first time you watch this movie, I hope you can appreciate the quality of the music.

Conclusion: Watch this movie! Watch it again! Enjoy it for what it is, not for what it isn't.