kung fu action swords!

By PJK

HEY!! I'm LOUD!!

Did you read the text in capitals louder in your head? You should've, it was intentional. It represents me shouting at you. LISTEN TO ME!! Are you? Excellent.

Rarely do I frequent the cinema as my major source of amusement. If my brow were any higher, it'd be levetating above my head. But I did see Fearless recently — it's a movie — and of course one of the great things about martial arts films is the insane martial arts they do! People get smashed, grabbed, knee-ed, kicked in the shins and so forth. All that is awesome, and sometimes they even use deadly weapons when fighting. But that's not actually what I love most about martial arts epics. My favourite thing ever is just the whole visual motifs in these films, the aesthetics if you will. The sets, the costumes, the landscapes. This is where asian cinema excels.

Talking about movies critically in this way is not my vain attempt at being avant-garde. I don't even know what that means. For I, dear readers, am a student of Screen Studies, and this is all part of my plot to destroy Hollywood! ... I kid. Except not about the Screen Studies part. I am actually doing it (so is Challi, my co-conspirator for this weblog). It's one of several arts subjects I'm taking this semester, along with History and Philosophy (I'm starting Law next semester). But now I'm straying from the topic and we can't have that. Back to film. So what you find with Screen Studies is, surprise surprise, there are a lot of very pretentious people doing it (including moi of course). Unlike them however, I'm not that much of a movie snob. Mainly because I haven't seen nearly as many movies as most screen students. I hate the same crap they hate, but when it comes to naming directors, I find myself at ClueFactor Zero™.

For this reason, Screen Studies has been my least successful subject, grades-wise, this semester. I'm trying to better that though, because I really do enjoy my weekly dose of screen. The lectures are fun and the screenings are a good chance to see some classic films with an appreciative audience. It's also fun to do some "homework" on your own — I've been renting films from the directors/genres/eras we're studying to try and get a better grasp of the subject and I'm already starting to feel the snobbery begin to bulge like rippling biceps of pretention! It's fascinating, and contrary to what I thought, it's not actually ruining my experience of going to movies (quite the opposite in fact).

So back to Fearless. Though it is a joy of a film to watch (got that one from Margaret and David, yoink), it didn't have the same depth as say, House of the Flying Daggers. I think one thing we can all agree on however: it would totally suck to own a restaurant or teahouse in a martial arts movie. You just know what's going to happen! Why did I buy those vases, oh why?!