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).

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?