"Fearless" review - Time Asia

[Gaijin84]

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501060206-1154256,00.html

I swear, if I hear Yuen Wo Ping referenced as the "master behind the Matrix films" one more time....

[MrBooth]

Ronny Yu's best-known films are the gorefests Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky, which should tell you all you need to know about his aesthetics.

How does somebody who clearly knows so little about Asian cinema end up writing movie reviews for Time Asia?

The emotional journey of the average kung fu hero is briefer than a quick jab to the nose, whereas Huo suffers and changes... Hard kung fu is replaced by a softer, more flowing style, and aimless anger by peace, even in battle

I guess he's never seen Tai Chi Master, for one.

Fearless lacks the pure martial energy of Li's rawest films, such as Once Upon a Time in China.

OUATIC is "raw"?

[Gaijin84]

OUATIC is "raw"?

lol - seriously, that's one of classic adjectives that is nearly impossible to define but people love to use to describe movies... kinda like "edgy"

[MrBooth]

I'm sure I've used both of those in reviews on numerous times But I wouldn't use either to describe OUATIC (which I suppose I should write a review for some day, being one of my top 10 hk films and all that...)

[Zethzen]

It's kind of depressing when you have reviewers that don't know what they are talking about reviewing HK movies. I honestly think this person got his job because he was in the right place at the right time. He probably graduated college with a BA in journalism and had a mild interest in HK film. So he gets offered a job reviewing HK films, just cause he has good credentials, but regardless that he may not know s**t about HK films. You find that alot in the workplace. People have good references/credentials and they get a job doing something they know nothing about.

[Brian Thibodeau]

It's kind of depressing when you have reviewers that don't know what they are talking about reviewing HK movies. I honestly think this person got his job because he was in the right place at the right time. He probably graduated college with a BA in journalism and had a mild interest in HK film. So he gets offered a job reviewing HK films, just cause he has good credentials, but regardless that he may not know s**t about HK films. You find that alot in the workplace. People have good references/credentials and they get a job doing something they know nothing about.

Good points all! And probably true of most of the mid-level newspaper/magazine movie critics working today. Sure, there's the upper echelon of film critics who provoke legitimate discussion and wear their long-standing passion for filmmaking with pride, but for every Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael, there are two hundred nobodies toiling away at magazines and newspapers the world over, and they get the gigs largely because they have decent writing skills, passable knowledge of film history and production, and can provide material that brings in some easy ad revenue for the publications.

Every once in a while, a magazine like Premiere or Entertainment Weekly used to do silly little features taking many of these mid-level hacks to task for essentially being random "quote" generators for movie posters and TV spots. More often than not, phrases like "This Summer's Thrill Ride" or "The Best Film of the Year!" are accompanied, in teensy tiny print, by the name of some critic employed by a duckberg weekly newspaper or middle-American AM radio network that few actually listen to. But as long as the quote flashes on screen faster than you can read the name attributed to it, the studios will continue to rely on the practise.

Not to say that the FEARLESS reviewer is in that category, but his knowledge of Yuen Wo-ping extending no further back than THE MATRIX - or by extension his galling presumption that no one reading his review would be bright enough to want to know anyting about the man beyond his most pop-culturally accessible work to date - is symptomatic of this level of film criticism.

Then again, these days, I'd put more faith in a batch of fifty reviews at Amazon (or even IMDB) - mistakes, typos and all - that I could scroll through in half an hour for free than I would in the ramblings of most legitimately-published starry-eyed film critics. Not to mention sites like this one to guage other people's opinions on HK films I've just watched.

Granted, a LOT of folks who write on the internet simply wouldn't fit the bland standards required by many of these publications, for as superior in their knowledge as they are, the internet is far more forgiving of poor grammar, sloppy hyperbole, profanity, run-on plot synopses, English-as-a-second-language issues and all the other things that make the best internet film criticism such a real-world joy to read!

[pjshimmer]

I'm sure I've used both of those in reviews on numerous times But I wouldn't use either to describe OUATIC (which I suppose I should write a review for some day, being one of my top 10 hk films and all that...)

Agree. I would define OUATIC as "refined" which is just the opposite of "raw."

[MrBooth]

If anything, OUATIC is over-polished!

Anyway, regarding FEARLESS... only seen the first hour so far, but I think it's probably Jet Li's best film, and the best kung fu film in a __long__ time!