Monthly Archives: December 2008

Fist of Legend (1994)

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aka Jing wu ying xiong

2008 #77
Gordon Chan | 99 mins | TV | 18 / R

Fist of LegendI found myself watching Fist of Legend unintentionally following this year’s Children in Need appeal. The significance of this piece of trivia is that I watched it on TV, which means I had to watch it dubbed. Apparently, “it is regarded as one of the best martial arts films of all time, and almost universally viewed as Jet Li’s best” (thank you Wikipedia), but the dub does its utmost to obscure this.

Putting the audio aside (for the moment), the film has a lot to recommend it — primarily, the fights. At 2am, after seven hours of near-solid TV watching, it was these that drew me in. I’m no expert on martial arts, but I do like a good fight (on film) and Fist of Legend serves up plenty of those. In fact, there’s approximately one every five minutes, an impressively high ratio that consciously — and very pleasingly — fulfills what you want from this kind of film. This quantity doesn’t seem to have damaged quality either: all are generally impressive, but there are some particularly good ideas floating about too, such as a long fight where both participants are blindfolded.

There’s a plot too, which includes a few surprisingly surprising twists and an interesting undercurrent of Japanese/Chinese racial tensions thanks to the setting (1937, during a Japanese occupation of Shanghai). This adds an extra level to what could otherwise be a stock revenge plot.

So, that just leaves the soundtrack. The English audio is at least as bad as you’d imagine, and a reminder — if one were needed — about why dubbing foreign language films is so hated. Whatever the qualities of the film itself, the clichéd dub script and flat voiceover performances, awkwardly delivered to fit the actor’s mouth movements, make the film look cheap and poorly done. On the bright side, the main villain has an amusingly gravelly “I am playing a villain!” voice.

If you can look past the rubbish dub (which I should imagine is even easier on DVD, what with turning it off), Fist of Legend is very enjoyable. However, with the action being the primary source of pleasure, those who don’t like martial arts movies may want to imagine a lower score.

4 out of 5

The Cable Guy (1996)

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2008 #79
Ben Stiller | 88 mins | download | 12 / PG-13

The Cable GuyThe best thing I have to say about The Cable Guy is that the opening titles were very well done.

The second-best thing I have to say is that a subplot featuring director Ben Stiller as a faded-child-star twin-killer is very neatly integrated into the film, seeming utterly pointless until it has a near-vital role in the climax. That’s a pleasing piece of writing/editing right there. Unfortunately, the point this seems to be aiming at — that TV rules our life too much, that we’re too addicted to it, etc etc — is not only old hat, but also rendered meaningless in this instance by the lack of impact: TV goes off for the night, and one guy picks up a book. Oh, wow. And to top it off, thanks to an unnecessary final beat, it seems Jim Carrey’s titular character hasn’t actually learnt the lesson we thought he had.

Incidentally, The Cable Guy is a comedy, though at times it seems to wish you’d forget that so it could be a psychological stalker thriller. Perhaps that’s what it had wanted to be — for one thing, there are surprisingly accurate predictions for the future of telecommunications, although their coming true may simply have killed another joke (“play Mortal Kombat with a friend in Vietnam!”) — until someone realised the idea was too silly to be taken completely seriously. How funny you find the end product will depend on whether you like the style of comedy Carrey employed in the early & mid-’90s, and whether you can stomach pointless asides that don’t do anything for the plot (final act freaky nightmare, step forward). There’s little else to engage interest — Matthew Broderick’s pseudo-protagonist is, perhaps, too nice and too eager to please, and the go-nowhere romantic subplot — his main action aside from being Carrey’s straight man — has all the depth and shape of something from a cookie cutter.

More fun than the jokes, actually, is playing Spot The Pre-Fame Comedy Star. Eyes open for young-looking turns from (in ease-of-identification order) Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Janeane Garofalo, and Kyle Gass. And Eric Roberts randomly shows his face too, not that that’s relevant to anything.

The Cable Guy is rated 12, or PG-13 in the US, which may also be the last ages you’d enjoy it at.

2 out of 5

In case anyone’s wondering what’s happened to #77 & #78… Despite spending 23 months carefully posting reviews in order (well, the first two months are actually a bit of a muddle), it’s now December and I’m a few behind, so I’ve decided to throw numerical sequence to the wind and just post reviews as & when I get round to completing them. The main reason for this is to help drive things forward so that I can actually end 2008’s posting by December 31st, rather than having it drag on into 2009 and overlap with Year 3. I’m sure no one will really mind. Or care.

Eternal laziness of the dreamless blogger

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11 months down, 1 to go… 81 films down — it should’ve been at least 92.

It’s fair to say 100 Films hasn’t gone quite as smoothly this year as it did last, where I made it to 100 by the start of September and meandered on to a final total of 129. Rather than being in the luxurious position of just watching as much as I like to see how far I can get, I have 31 days to see 19 more films to even hit my basic target.

“Oops.”

I could reel off a list of excuses — the effort I’ve tried to put into writing much longer reviews, having an undergraduate degree to complete, starting work on a postgraduate degree, actually getting a job over the summer… but there’s also plain old laziness — yeah, isn’t watching a film such a lot of effort?

…no?

Of course, as the old adage favoured by so many teachers goes, “you’ve only let yourself down.” (I may be paraphrasing for effect.)

Still, 31 days! And 19 of them holiday-days! The end is in sight, and I might still make it.

Though, don’t be surprised if the reviews get shorter — it would be nice to complete 2008 within 2008 after all — and, if I do well, I may even get the final lists (see here and here for last year’s) online for December 31st.

Hey, a blogger can dream.