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).

Chu Liu Xiang (Chor Lau Heung) 1995

This is the 1995 Taiwanese production with Adam Cheng as Chu Liuxiang. I recently bought the VCD set from yesasia.com and watched it over the course of a week or two (probably not how it was meant to be viewed!), which is a tribute to its power to hold my attention over 40 episodes (27 discs)!

For me, Adam Cheng is THE Chu Liuxiang. Obviously, he's older in this version than when he played the part in 1979, but I thought he carried it off with charm and verve. I have no idea who the other actors were, but I liked most of them, even if at times CLX's 3 ship maidens got to be a bit much when added to the other random women he collected along the way. (Actually, the one I personally found the cutest was the woman chasing after the old wine fiend, Hu Tie Hua.) The action scenes were fun to watch: not overburdened with crappy CGI like more recent series, not too much intrusive wirework. Sure, there were cheap effects (smoke! exploding "rocks"! sparkly lightning and fireworks!) but people MOVED, they didn't just strike artistic poses and stand there waiting for the special effects to be filled in. And yes, the scenery and sets looked fairly cheap (especially all those secret tunnels), in comparison to the lavish mainland productions that have been made since c. 2000. The music was also repetitive and too loud (I couldn't hear the dialogue at times, really wishing for subtitles!) and the opening theme song was rather crap (in my opinion).

Plot...hrmm...what can I say? I've only read the first of Gu Long's CLX books, so I can't swear to what is or isn't based on them, but my impression was that the writers just made this one up themselves, ripping off ideas from all over the place. I recognized a few major plot tokens from Jin Yong's "Xiao Ao Jiang Hu" (Smiling, Proud Wanderer/State of Divinity). But just the tokens, not the actual plot or characters. But this isn't surprising, considering that they already made a CLX series in 1979, then 1982, then 1984...heh. Anyway, they did a reasonable job, kicking things off with the ever-popular "hero falsely accused and must clear his name" cliche. Not TOO many people pretended to die, and the number of "there would be no plot if people would just TALK to each other" threads was reasonably low. No one fell or jumped off a cliff! Ha ha. And maybe 15 eps out of 40, one of the main characters was taking a turn being poisoned/dying/etc. Quite a lot of people being idiots and falsely blaming one of the protagonists (granted some of them were planted/coached by the villain, but still, you'd think they'd think things through a bit more).

Mainly, the CLX series are just fun to watch. A nice trio of heros we have: one likes women, one likes wine, and one likes money. Personally, I liked the merchant (Ji Bing Ye) best. At least he's one Jiang Hu character where we see how he makes his money (and he doesn't just go and steal it like the other two!) And I loved how he went into business with the woman chasing after Hu Tiehua. Heh heh! As for Shangguan Wuji (CLX's main love interest in this series), she was all right. Had a tendancy to want to run off in a huff, but luckily didn't do it TOO often. Not sure how happy she'd really be in the long term with CLX (or vice versa), but, well, it's a TV show, so it works well enough. Of the lesser supporting characters... my favorites were the restauranteur who was once a cook in the royal palace and the honest imperial cop (Muo Yan?) who was also a friend of CLX.

Villains...the main villain was well-played. He had charisma and carried out his villainy with flair. His main minions were good, too.

Plenty of quirky mechanisms and odd action scenes to keep me amused. (A dance with stools where the woman places the stool in front of her intended. Guess where the princess puts hers? GASP! Fun with umbrellas! Barrel fighters! A weird semi-magical gramaphone! Invisible writing!? That is actually...something even more bizarre? Choosing a leader by waiting for someone to complete a drawing! etc.)

In sum: highly enjoyable, not terribly original wuxia series

Bian Cheng Lang Zi/Bordertown Wanderer

("Bordertown Wanderer", aka "The Black Sabre" and "A Warrior's Tragedy")

I originally saw the movie version of this ("A Warrior's Tragedy"), which
piqued my interest enough to hunt down the books it was based on.
After I read the books, I tracked down the TVB serialization of the story
and watched that.

The books: A three volume set by Gu Long, set as a sequel about a generation
after his "Duo Qing Jian Ke, Wu Qing Jian" ("Romantic Swordsman, passionless
sword") (featuring Flying Dagger Li, Li Xun Huan, and the swordsman
A Fei). As I can barely read Chinese at all, I won't attempt to
critique the writing style, except to say that it's rather choppy and
distinctive to read.

It features the usual convoluted plots and crazy characters. Fu Hongxue
is kicked out of his home with only one purpose: revenge! His mother has
raised him to pursue and kill his father's killers. Apparently, his father
and his entire family (Fu Hongxue's mother was a lover, not the wife, and
Fu Hongxue himself only an infant when his father died) were murdered by
a group of masked assassins. Fu Hongxue, trained in the use of his father's
famous black sabre, now has to figure out who the assassins were and kill
them all. He seems to have one lead, which takes him to the Bordertown
and the local lord there, Ma Kongqun, of Ten Thousand Horse Hall.

Things get violent very quickly. Fu Hongxue is not the only martially
inclined visitor: there is also Yue Kai (who claims not to need a sword),
a famous thief "Flying Spider", an arrogant young lordling, a hunchbacked
assassin, and many others. When people start dying at Ten Thousand Horse
Hall, everyone is a suspect.

As for the women...there's Shen San Niang, Ma Kongqun's mistress. Ma Fang Lin,
his daughter. Cui Nong, a local prostitute. Ding Lin Ling, who's in love
with Ye Kai. Fu Hongxue ends up in a tragic relationship with Cui Nong...

Once they leave the Bordertown, Fu Hongxue starts coming across evidence
that perhaps his quest is not as black-and-white as he once thought. Maybe
there was a good reason so many people ganged up to kill his "heroic"
father? Thick-headed and gullible he may be at times (a contrast to the
quick-witted, smooth-talking Ye Kai), Fu Hongxue doggedly pursues truth
and revenge.

The most annoying thing (for me) was probably the preachiness (especially
towards the end) and the hero-worship of Li Xun Huan. While the parable-like
encounter with the Guo family was amusing in taking the inherited vengeance
obligation to ridiculous extremes (in lining up the whole family, grandparents
and grandchildren alike --- if we're going to feud, let's get it all over
with once and for all!), the lectures got old quickly, and the ending
felt cheap.

Movie: maybe 50-60 % accurate to the books.

Someone wanted more chariot chases, guns, and explosions.
The golden armor vest seems to be taken from the prequel novel series.
The cloak of invisibility...I have no idea. Maybe it really was in one
of Gu Long's other novels. The stories of the women was probably the most
mangled, followed by the Lu Xiaojia storyline (they didn't even give him
his trademark peanuts!)

I'm really very fond of the movie, actually. (Despite a few silly bits,
and the unfortunate moustache on Ye Kai.) Just watched it again. Ti Lung
as Fu Hongxue is awesome. The man has charisma.

And compared to, say, Tsui Hark's adaptation of Jin Yong's "Smiling Proud
Wanderer" (the "Swordsman" trilogy of movies), this is totally faithful
to the original story. (Why quibble about relatively minor changes, heh.)

TVB series: maybe 80-90% accurate.

Looked cheap! Ten Thousand Horse Hall looked like any other TVB "ancient"
rich guy's house. The wilderness sets and cave sets looked ridiculously
fake. Costumes on the drab side, too, and the Spiderman costume for the
"Flying Spider" takes the cake for sheer silliness. Didn't like Fu Hongxue's
hairstyle. And I watched the Mandarin dub, which in TVB serials, usually
lacks somewhat. Ha.

All those interpolated scenes! They take away from the mystery, although it
may make things easier to understand (and avoid too many scenes where
Ye Kai explains what's going on). And they often use the actual dialogue
from the books, but change the context (and the speakers, sometimes!)
which can be irritating.

Both movie and TV series made drastic changes to the ending.
In this case, I felt they made the right decision. I didn't like the book's
ending very much myself. And the story started with Fu Hongxue and his
mother. I'm glad they let him have some sort of "closure" with her.
They treated Ma Fangling a bit more sympathetically in the series, too,
and I liked the way they concluded her storyline.

Bottom line: enjoyable, but rarely brilliant, and sometimes annoying

ROCH 2006: Now they're BOTH drooling blood...ew!

Bad sign. Very bad sign. Ok, that really was written in the book (I just double-checked). Some things need to be cut before they reach the screen, and this (IMNSHO) is one of them!

"Gu-gu!" "Guo-er!"

So, let's see. While searching for his Gu-gu (Little Dragon Girl), Yang Guo runs into more trouble. Surprise, surprise. It's Lu Wushuang and her cousin with the scary-looking human-skin mask. Li Mochou's back. There's the old crippled blacksmith. Some more fights. And we have a scene or two with East Heretic Huang Yaoshi (Huang Rong's father). From HYS's mentally handicapped martial granddaughter "Sha Gu", Yang Guo finds out that it was Huang Rong who caused his father's death.

This is a good time for a potty break, as Yang Guo goes into the throes of horrible acting and emoting on the screen. Good lord.

Right. I'd have quit watching by this point, but I've already paid for the damn series and now I want to see the train wreck. Yang Guo witnesses the cruelty of the Mongol invaders (more histrionics! Yes, it's a terrible thing, but they could have done the scene better), then meets up with the Golden Wheel monk again, and this time allies himself with him to kill Guo Jing (and Huang Rong). (Remember, these are Yang Guo's foster parents, his "Uncle" and "Aunt").

And we have the first appearance of Zhou Botong, the Old Urchin, at the dinner with Khubilai and the various recruited martial artists. The actor is unexceptionable. The strangest casting choice was for one of the "guest" heros: Ma Guangzuo. In the book, he's about 8 feet tall. In this version, he's a little dwarf! Very odd.

And here we have them going to Rivendell. Excuse me, the "Passionless Valley"... except they made it look like a cross between Rivendell and Lothlorien, with the trees, and the green-clad people dancing around with the flowers (what the hell?) and the airy-fairy music... And the vegetarian lifestyle...

We could have done without all the previous scenes of Little Dragon Girl meeting the lord of the valley and so on and so forth. That just kills the surprise of the scene where Yang Guo finds out. Ok, it wasn't that much of a surprise. When I first tried reading the book, that was where I quit in disgust. I hate those stories where the female love interest almost marries some other man, pretending for some reason not to recognize the male love interest. Well, you can pretty much guess what will happen. Up to a point.

This was never my favorite part of the books, and here it felt especially slow and draggy. And we have some cliches going: the daughter of the evil lord falls in love with the hero, etc. etc. But after the hero gets tossed with her into a pit full of crocodiles, the story gets more interesting. Even the crocodiles know martial arts (and lightness kung-fu!).

Magical "passion flower" poison. Heh heh. It sounds like the sort of thing that would be on a Doctor Who episode (the loveless planet where everyone is poisoned by the flowers! *cue spooky music and metaphorical discursions*). But there you go. Useful plot device.

This adaptation actually seems to follow the books pretty closely. If only they didn't drag everything out with such a heavy hand.

ROCH 2006: She left me again! Oh noes!

Still watching the 2006 mainland adaptation of Jin Yong's "Return of the Condor Heroes." Some of it's all right. Then it all collapses into another attempt to convince us that Yang Guo and Little Dragon Girl are really, truly, deeply, forever, seriously, in love love love. I'm sorry, but the chemistry between the two actors is just not there, and these music video scenes do nothing to convince me otherwise. The time would be better spent showing us their character by their words and actions. If I wanted to stare at someone's face, I'd buy a damn poster.

Lu Wushuang: the actress who played her was ok, could have been better. In the book, I always felt that she and Yang Guo could have been a nicely matched couple. Both have sharp wits and sharp tongues, can be playful, but have hair trigger tempers and can hold a grudge. Too bad they cut much of their interaction. And I missed the ox! They had Yang Guo do all his LWS rescuing on foot. And there wasn't as much with the Beggar Clan.

Cheng Ying: wore a freaky "human-skin mask" through most of this. When we finally see her face, she looks all right. I suppose they must cast this show with Little Dragon Girl as the most beautiful, then Guo Fu and Huang Rong. At any rate, Cheng Ying, unlike her cousin, is much more of a traditional demure maiden with some martial arts skills.

Yelu Qi, Wanyan Ping et all: Decently acted. This little subplot has Wanyan Ping seeking revenge for her family's death on Yelu Qi's father, but unable to, and Yelu Qi's father explaining how his actions were in turn vengeance for Wanyan Ping's family's slaughtering of /his/ family back in the day... at the end of it, she can't kill Yelu Qi after all, and maybe that feud can end. It's something for Yang Guo to reflect upon...

Li Mochou: There she is again! The actress needs to work on her evil laugh. It wasn't terribly convincing. It's almost as irritating as Yang Guo's silly laugh. Gah!

Hua Shan (the mountain), Hong Qi Gong, and Ouyang Feng. Damn, they cut out almost all of this section. I was looking forward to seeing HQG's centipede feast. No sign of the bandits known as the Five Tibetan Clowns (though they were mentioned in passing later.) Ok. Now this is going overboard. Hong Qi Gong can TELEPATHICALLY (through some manipulation of his inner energy, I suppose) transmit the Dog-beating Stick methods to Yang Guo? That was just silly. At any rate, here we have the end of another old feud... I found it very touching in the anime version, but here it left me a bit flat.

The horse! They cut all the cool parts from the scenes on Huashan, but elaborated for many minutes of screen time on Yang Guo and the horse? Sheesh. It was the Yang Guo/Little Dragon Girl loooove goop all over again.

Hero's Meet: Aha, here we are with Guo Jing, Huang Rong, Guo Fu, and the rest. Guo Jing finally finds out that Yang Guo hasn't been safely stashed away with the Quanzhen (Taoist) sect all this time. Yang Guo hangs out with the other kids for awhile. Then here's the meeting and the Golden Wheel monk (they all seem to have turned into Mongols in this version) and the big fights. They cut out one of the combats in the contest, too bad. Yang Guo has a magic nose! Apparently, just /seeing/ Little Dragon Girl isn't good enough. Here, he sniff sniff sniffs...while the LDG Enya-esque leitmotif starts playing. Please. Just. Stop.

Guo Jing: I liked the actor, but I felt they should have cast someone bigger, with more of a physical presence. I always pictured him as something of a brute, with his 18 Dragon Subduing Palms. Here he almost looks smaller than Yang Guo.

Huang Rong: What's with the unnaturally wide eyes? It looks distractingly strange. Other than that, I liked her. She is supposed to be clever, seeing what GJ can't, and using words to separate YG and LDG. Which this actress pulls off pretty well.

Guo Fu: GJ and HR's spoiled daughter. Pretty actress. Sympathetic so far.

Wu brothers: Guo Fu's foster brothers (in effect, though technically, they're just Guo Jing's students.) About what they were supposed to be, that is, chasing after Guo Fu, not too clever, with middling skills in martial arts, and generally resentful and contemptuous of Yang Guo.

Huo Dou: the Mongolian prince. I liked the actor they cast here. He plays him as an arrogant princeling, slightly effete (after all, he does use that fan as his main weapon!), quick to take advantage and not terribly honorable.

Golden Wheel Monk: the strongest of the "enemy" here. Powerful inner energy (demonstrated via CGI, but relatively tasteful CGI). Looks good. Telekinetically controlled wheels o' death! Had some decent fight scenes between him and Little Dragon Girl (what happened to the golden bell/sphere thingies on her white sash o'doom?) and Yang Guo. Speaking of telekinesis, I'll try to erase from my mind that earlier parasol fight (Parasol fight!) between Little Dragon Girl and Li Mochou.

Fight scenes...apparently no one ever moves their feet or legs anymore to move around in a fight. That's so passe. Instead, they slide around magically, or simply fly like Superman. (In the old days, when people jumped off roofs and they just ran the film backwards, at least we some idea that they had to use their own muscles.) Oh yes, and in keeping with genre tradition, no one ever bleeds or even gets bruised. They show their injury by spraying blood from their mouths. Originally, this happened when the characters had internal injuries, but now, it's universal. But they didn't do the Jedi mind tricks from the 9 Yin Manual...awww...too bad. It would have been funny to watch the big monk (Da Er Ba) copying Yang Guo and tricked into whacking himself in the face.

Fight scenes...now they're telekinetically tossing huge boulders around! I suppose the mystically confusing rock formation business was never going to be convincing, but this... Ha, it does look cool. Nice effects. Big rocks whizzing around at the enemy. But...still stupid.

Yang Guo and Little Dragon Girl openly declare their love for each other: Shock! Horror! The shame! The crowd is squicked by the master-student couple. It's like incest. Theoretically. But in the story, she's only about 4 years older, and she looks about the same age. Well, every romantic couple needs some obstacles. They walk out and plan to live quietly in the Ancient Tomb forever, avoiding the censure of society. Of course, this is not to be.

"Gu-gu!"

"Guo-er!"

"Gu-gu!"

"Guo-er!"

ROCH 2006: Ballet with Swords and Flowers!

"Gugu!"

"Guo-er!"

"Gugu!"

"Guo-er!"

[cue sappy luuuuv music]

And there's what, thirty-plus more episodes of this to go? Damn.

Still, it's picked up a bit now that the "adult" Yang Guo has been introduced (in the middle of a "training montage" at the end of episode 3.) My impression? The actor is a bit too old to play the "teen" Yang Guo, so he makes it up by acting especially silly and idiotic. Yeah. Guess it won't be much of a difference when he pretends ("pretends"?) to be an idiot later. This is an inherent limitation of live action, though, when the story spans many many years. The actor has to "age" somehow.

Speaking of "training": what's with all the flowers? Sheesh. Next time I'm in a fight, /I'll/ swoosh a bunch of colorful petals in the air into sword shapes. I'm sure that will be very helpful. And aren't they supposed to be buck naked or something? Cheats... and those puny little flowers aren't hiding anything anyway...

So we have more with the two evil Taoists: the obsessed/stalker one seems rather sad and almost sympathetic in this version (I could forgive him!). We have the return of Li Mochou and her Fly-whisk o'Doom. We have the first onscreen appearance of West Poison Ouyang Feng. He doesn't walk around upside down in this version, more's the pity. (I actually thought that was rather cool in the other versions when he did that.) The Hama Gong (toad stance) looks ridiculous. Way too literal with the croaking and the computer-enhanced toad hopping.

At least they're out of the Ancient Tomb now. It bugged me that all the characters had perfect darkvision (as they call it in Dungeons and Dragons): no visible source of light, yet everything is lit and they can see fine. I found all the training (sparrow catching! Wall carvings! Goofing off in the water! Flowers!) scenes a bit dull.

So now we're on the road with Yang Guo the flirt (with Lu Wushuang), on the run from Li Mochou. (Lu Wushuang's stolen LMC's poison manual --- the one that has the formulae for the antidotes!) This part is fun to watch, except when they slow everything down for a little music video of Yang Guo remembering his Gugu. All right, all right, we understand! Some more fight scenes... hmm. I miss the old days, when fight scenes bore a vague (if stylized and unrealistic) resemblance to fighting. Oh well, it could be worse.

All this makes me want to reread the book. Yang Guo isn't nearly so irritating in text as he is on screen (much of the time). I didn't need to see all those urination gags, no I sure didn't...

Return of the Condor Heros 2006: ARRGH!

It's another damn remake. I complain about Hollywood having no imagination, about them recycling old movies and TV shows, etc., but the Chinese are even worse. It's getting to be like a folk art, where the point is not the newness of the story (everyone already knows the story), but how interestingly you tell it. So there's a seemingly endless stream of Jin Yong and Gu Long (probably the two most famous wuxia writers) and to a lesser extent Liang Yusheng (sp?) adaptations, whether chopped up (and nearly incomprehensible) movie versions or TV serials. TVB (Hong Kong) has done lots of them, and now mainland China's getting into the game. I was very impressed with their Xiao Ao Jiang Hu (Smiling Proud Wanderer/State of Divinity/whatever) 2001, not so much with their Legend of the Condor Heroes.

And now here's their version of Return of the Condor Heroes. As usual, the scenery is nice. Beyond that...heh...so far I've watched the first 2-3 episodes.

Music. Bleah. Woman singing Ah ah ah ah ah, something like that. Got on my nerves, so I fast forwarded through it.

So. They decided to start with the bloody handprints: Scarlet Fairy Li Mouchou (excuse my pinyin, can't be bothered looking it up now)'s calling card. One handprint for each person she's planning to kill. Ok, very dramatic, but right away we see the serial is going to have way too much CGI and frozen shots of people hanging in the air and not so much in the way of "grounded" fight scenes. They skip over a whole bunch of backstory, completely omitting the crazy man and his wife and their two sons who are mixed up with the LMC tragedy. Blah blah blah.

When we see Yang Guo, he's already been adopted by Guo Jing. And oh boy. What an irritating little brat he is. I suppose he was a bit of a brat in the book, but this depiction just makes it worse. I like the child Yang Guo from the...1985? TVB version better, actually.

And there's tooo much of him. Geez, this is dragging... They skip over a lot of Yang Guo meeting West Poison, and his time on Peach Island (he explains it later, but they never SHOW it). They take WAAAAY too much time with Uncle Guo taking Yang Guo up the mountain to the Taoists. The Taoists are ridiculous. They can't fight, but they can do cool synchronized sword dancing with a good deal of CGI assistance. (Yeah, yeah, Big Dipper formation yadda yadda yadda...it wasn't that plausible to begin with, but they make it look COMPLETELY USELESS!)

Anyway, that's enough ranting for now. More later, as I watch more of it. I'm hoping it improves once the adult Yang Guo is introduced. I can't take the little kid YG's whine whine whine cry cry cry woe is me....agh. Yeah, he had a hard life, but still...does he have to whine about every little thing?

Huan Zhu Ge Ge (Princess Returning Pearl)

So this Taiwanese TV series came out in 1998, and as usual, it takes me years before I bother to buy myself a copy (just to see what the hoopla was about) and watch it myself. (In Mandarin, with Chinese subtitles. There's probably an English fansub out there somewhere.)

My verdict? Sappy but fun!

Ziwei, can you be any more weepy? Come on, girl, get a grip!

Little Swallow, wipe that stupid cute smile off your face! You know you get away with everything just because if you died, it wouldn't be funny anymore...

Based on a novel by Chiung Yao, this is...hmm...a romantic comedy of sorts, set during the reign of the Manchu emperor Qian Long (for some reason, he's one of the more popular emperors to hang these stories and TV shows off of. I've seen at least 2-3 other ones.) 24 episodes. Stars Zhao Wei as Little Swallow, Ruby Lin as Xia Ziwei, Alec Su as Yong Qi (the fifth prince), Zhou Jie as Fu Erkang, and Chen Ziping as Fu Ertai. Most of the actors did a pretty good job, I thought. At least, no one stood out as particularly annoying. The villains were convincingly sinister, the emperor convincingly paternal yet lecherous (which led to a squicky moment or two before everything was sorted out.)

Plot: Xia Ziwei is an illegitimate daughter of the current emperor (apparently he had an affair with her mother, then got distracted and forgot about her), seeking out her father now that her mother has died. Accompanied only by her loyal maid servant, she has a hard time penetrating the walls around the emperor, and is lost in the capital as her money runs out. Luckily for her, she runs into the Little Swallow, a thief and conwoman with a heart of gold (apparently) who grew up an orphan in the streets of Beijing (more or less...she's not quite on the streets now, having an adoptive family of sorts and a place to call home.) Ziwei and Little Swallow hit it off, swearing sisterhood with each other (a serious oath in that culture). The Little Swallow promises to help Ziwei deliver a painting and fan once given to Ziwei's mother. Then various plot twists ensue, and it's the Little Swallow who gets "recognized" as the emperor's daughter, under the name/title of "Huan Zhu Ge Ge" ("Return Pearl Princess")! Naturally Ziwei is beyond upset when she finds out. What's going on? Oh noes! But to deceive the emperor can mean a death sentence, so everyone is afraid to tell the truth. The rest of the series is all about how an "uneducated street girl (of the wrong ethnicity)" tries to fit in as a princess, how the cute boys fall in love with them, how their love is Impossible, and how they cry and suffer their way to a happy ending, with some humorous interludes along the way.

And a lot of it was fun to watch. I loved the costumes, and for once we had someone wearing them who wasn't trained from birth to it! Look at those princess shoes! (And I thought heels were bad...) And what's with those handkerchiefs the court women constantly carry around!? And the hairdos! Ha ha ha! The scholarly Ji Xiaolan (famous historical figure: in fact, there's another TV series about him, with the same actor playing the emperor, but that's a different story) as her tutor!

And for once the eunuchs weren't all evil schemers (like they would be in a kungfu flick, but then, this is set in the reign of Qian Long, who had a strong grip on his government), but a range of sensible and silly people. And Little Swallow with her pathetic bit of martial arts, wistfully asking the more skilled folks of the palace to teach her.

The main issue I had with the show was how long they dragged it out before getting to the end. For too many episodes, someone would declare "I have to speak now! I can't take it anymore!" and then some other character would insist that no no, you can't do that yet, blah blah blah too dangerous blah blah blah. And then it would happen again next episode with someone else. Gah.

Worth watching once.