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July 08, 2003
Action Movies
Over at Cogito, ergo doleo, Jivha describes his relaxing weekend. He mentions going to see a bunch of movies and then comments that most of the martial arts movies are all gimmicks rather than real action [Ed: my wording, his idea].
In the comments I suggested checking out Jackie Chan but due to limited space, I thought I had better put something up to explain things. The first few Jackie Chan movies that I saw were in Cantonese (with terrible sub-titles). They were good with some semblance of a plot and lots of action which was real -not camera trickery. At the end of the movies, during the closing credits, they play back some of the bad takes and you get to see the sort of things that went wrong. In particular Jackie did all his own stunts event to the extent (in a later movie) of breaking his ankle jumping into a moving boat.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, my wife bought me a collection of Jackie Chan movies in English including a movie that stars an American martial arts dude (of African descent - is that the political correct euphemism?). No problem with the actors but the movie sucked. There was all this pointless dialogue and the action sequences were all short. This did not look like a Jackie Chan movie and we were disgusted (we want our money back!). Then we watched the 'special extra feature - interview with director' who was explaining how he had IMPROVED the normal Jackie Chan style movie to make it work for American audiences. The main thing was that Americans (according to the director) could not cope with long action sequences and needed more dialogue to appreciate the action when it happened - hence the problems we found were inserted to keep American audiences happy.
Ar dunno, but I think this bloke was eating hash cookies. I find it hard to imagine that your average target American audience can watch long action sequences in say James Bond and not watch them in Jackie Chan. I know that Americans can't watch football without ads (;-))but surely an action movie is different?
If you get a chance to see some of the earlier Jackie movies (especially with directors who are obviously Chinese) try them out, you may be extremely surprised about the quality relative to those directed by Americans.
Posted by Ozguru at July 8, 2003 09:07 AM
