la_marquise

New words today: 1061
First new line: From the other side of Tryffin, the elderly monk, Brother Sawyl, spoke up. ‘The young find it hard to recognise sin.’
Fight! Well, verbal conflict, at least. Sawyl is quoting Gildas. Gwgan approves. Abbot Sulien doesn't -- and what is up with Cadog?

The shiny: half an hour spent translating bits of Gildas' On the Ruin of Britain. Because a good rant never dates.

Skirt of the day: rust cotton.

It's still too hot and the builders have gone home for the day. I've been watching Foshan Leung Sinsaang (aka Real Kung Fu) from 2005, which was Yuen Biao's first tv series for Hong Kong station TVB. At twenty episodes, it's short by TVB standards, but its selling point was the reappearance of real action stars and fight scenes. It's loosely based on YB's early star vehicle The Prodigal Son (Ba ga jai, Hong Kong 1982) which I wrote about a while back. In FLS, YB reprises his role as Leung Jan, who is here a hard-working but poor kung fu student who gets caught up in a murder, an opium ring and some nasty politics. Maggie Siu Mei Chi, who co-starred with him in The Ultimate Crime Fighter is his sharp-tongued love interest and his first master is the wonderful Yuen Wah. (Yay. We love Yuen Wah.) Leung Kar Yan takes on the role played in the film by the late Lam Ching Ying and does a very OTT impression of the latter. Lee Hoi Sam is on hand as a faithful servant, and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui is a local magistrate. Some excellent choreography and set pieces so far and no major angst -- but I'm only 6 episodes in, so that's sure to turn up soon.

I've been doing more rewatching: the Yuen Biao dvd upgrades are down to a single drawer, amazingly, though in addition to the six or seven films therein there are three and a half tv shows (the half is Jiang Shan Mei Ren, which I love but have got half to two-thirds of the way through 3 times and then stopped, mainly because I absent-mindedly started translating it and, with my Chinese at the level it is, that is a very slow process). Before the marquis returned on Saturday (I has Marquis! I has Marquis!) I watched Millenium Dragon, which was a bad as I remembered -- it's directed by Philip Kao Fei, who is one of the worst directors in the world -- and has an incoherent plot about art smuggling and a magic pearl. With helicopters and horse barbarians. Don't ask. I also finally watched the full length version of The Setting Sun (Rakuyo). That was rather frustrating, as there were no English subs and it's in a mixture of Japanese and (Mandarin) Chinese. This is the Japanese dvd, which is the full tv miniseries version, as opposed to the cut-down cinema version that I'd seen before (the HK release). I suspect it's better (and more comprehensible) in the full version, but most of it I had to guess at. This is an oddity, with Diane Lane as the Manchurian horse-warrior/cabaret singer heroine and YB as the villain (his first villain since his stunt-man days in the 70s). Plus points: he's very good in it, there's a weird cameo from Donald Sutherland, and a lot of it is sync sound. I do love to listen to YB speaking Mandarin: he has a lovely accent (Taiwanese-influenced). And I finally got round to Hero Youngster (Shao Nian Chen Zhen) which wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but led me to the interesting observation that a film can pass the Bechdel test in spades, but still be pretty poor (HY is about the early years of the Red Army and the resistance to the Japanese occupation, so there are many conversations between the women about politics and none about men, apart from the occasional maternal worry over her son). Sadly, Millenium Dragon also passes. It's still direr than dire.
So I treated myself to Dreadnaught (Young Zhe Wu Ju), YB's second lead role, directed by Yuen Woo-Ping of later Matrix fame. Around the house, this is often known as 'the laundry film'. The hero --- known as Mousy, because he's so very timid -- is a laundry boy. He has excellent laundry fu. Excellent, acrobatic, laundry fu, which turns out to be more useful than he expects. Other good things include the drunken lion dance sequence, the presence of the late Kwan Tak-Hing in his signature role of Wong Fei Hung (he created the part long before Jet Li Lian-jie) and some inventive choreography with far fewer wires and far less undercranking than usual for Yuen Woo-Ping. (This is not a Yuen Woo-Ping household. His wire-work is often unsubtle, his preferred style of humour rather heavy-handed and his plots can be flabby. This is a Yuen Kwai household.)
Meanwhile, Grass King has gone off to Nice Editor, and I am doing background reading for The Drowning Kings (because it feels safer that way. Yes, I know, writing avoidance. But the project makes me want to write footnotes, so I'm trying to settle academic brain before I let writer brain take over).

I stole this from xenaclone. Too appropriate for words.