The best and the worst of martial arts movies

This week resulted in a curious film-viewing adventure when I happened to watch a few martial arts movies, cutting across genres, and downloaded via bit torrents, while there was a state-sponsored film festival in the city. The public's memory is proverbially short, but I still happen to remember the wicked things that happened in some villages during last year's film festival, and I still retain the aversion and the reasons for not going in to the 'festival' again.

Anyway, back to the films I viewed. Here's a brief review of the best and the worst of them.



Kuro Obi (Black Belt), a 2007 Japanese Karate film starring real-life Karate black belts, is one of the relatively good ones.

Demonstrating some fluid Goju-Ryu and traditional Shotokan techniques without stunt rope tricks, the film is about two students competing to inherit their sensei's black belt. It starts off excellently with a practice session in a secluded dojo where the Jap military (this is in 1930s) comes in to take over the school. The protagonist searches for meaning in his Karate, while the other student goes on to challenge karatekas on behalf of the military, in search of a stronger opponent.The climactic fight in B&W is less of karate though, the 4th Dan hero and the 5th Dan challenger, kick, butt and grapple in the mud like we used to do in junior school.





Chocolate (2008), a Thai film by the Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew, is a story of an autistic girl picking up martial arts skills similar to Taekwondo by watching the practitioners of a Muay Thai school (?!). The plot is thin, and a pretext for displaying martial arts skills.



This film has some spectacular stunts performed by the young girl Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda, and obviously, the stuntmen acting as villians' seconds; this also marks the director's only preoccupation to outdo Hollywood special effects by using real-life dangerous stunts that can scarsely be imitated. Towards the end, you actually see a stuntman falling down from the ledge of a three-storied building, and breaking his neck. Adrenalin booster, yes. Martial arts spirit, no. For you're bound to feel sorry for the unnamed stuntman and question the mindlessness of this violence.

I also saw Red Belt (2008), one that I would rate as one of the best martial arts films I've ever seen. It has less to show of martial arts techniques, apart from some good Jiujutsu moves, but it's definitely about martial arts philosophy, a serious film concerning the role of ethics in the life of a martial arts practitioner. You get real things to learn from here, than say, from stoopid MMA films like Never Back Down.




Here in Red Belt is a Brazilian Jiujitsu instructor Mike Terry who nevers goes into tournament fighting for he thinks it weakens the spirit (rightly so). He sees himself framed by big money and comes to know of his best student committing suicide to save his instructor's honour. Then Terry gets caught in the middle of a big MMA prize fight (staged) between a Brazilian jiujitsu champion and a Japanese fighter, as his honour as a practitioner and the question of the survival of his dojo, are both at stake. But he doesn't step into the ring, as you could have expected. The story takes a new turn when he ignores the glare of the cameras and the attention of the know-it-all commentators, and proceeds rather quietly to "end this charade". Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry is simply awesome; this needs watching even if you think Krav Maga and fashionable MMA butt-grabbing is all about martial arts.

And here comes the worst. But I did laugh a lot. The funky sound track could be one of the solid reasons for you to watch this film, provided you've got the right kind of humour.

Ah, I saw Black Belt Jones (1974), a Blaxploitation action film starring Jim Kelly who's best known for his role in Enter the Dragon and it's shaped by the same director, Robert Clouse.




This movie has incredibly flat characters speaking, walking, dressing, howling, grabbing and shrieking Karate all throughout, and their acting is invariably and incredibly bad. And yes, Kelly uses Karate even while courting. You also get to see Karatekas shooting fists in a mournful way as their teacher's ( who happens to be Scatman Crothers) corpse is lowered into the grave- something so hilarious that it gives you serious stomach cramps.



"Oooooooeah!" goes the hero Jim Kelly making strange grimaces whenever anybody comes near him or when he's just watching his reflection on a polished elevator door. And sometimes he's just fascinated with his white telephone. The final scene with the carwash bubbles is a visual treat; completing the delightful mix of karate, James Bond technicolor movies, girls on trampolines, and lots and lots of butt-kicking. There happens to be a certain display of hostility on the part of 'good guys and gals' karatekas to the male genitalia; the sheer number of kicks to the bonkers and the grabs are, er, for the lack of better words, embarrassing.




Apart from the overdoses of very-badly choreographed karate, this is also one of the funniest comedies ever made. I guess, without being intentional.

Longing for Home: The Edge of Heaven

Obsessive dreams of love and hate. Awareness of evil, madness, uprooted memories, human frailty, pain, and the fatality of the equal exchange of coffins across international airports.



The pleasure of waiting, being part of history as radical marchers, the pleasure of being part of non-history as a teacher explaining Goethe’s aversion to the revolution, the contagious languor of pure spectatorship, and the awareness of the world as an undecipherable enigma either for the mind’s glory or for its mockery, a play-in-itself.



The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007), directed by Fatih Akin, is one of the few recent films that I’ve enjoyed watching. And there’s the beautiful Nurgül Yeşilçay (sigh!), who plays the over-confident radical who learns of the terrible suspicion you have about the present— that history of the present consists of everyone being put to use by someone.



The film veers away from the perpetual scrambled of the Hollywood makes, and recognizes the variety of the will to explore two irreconcilable domains— the ‘Western’ and the ‘non-Western’— which is also the proof of the confusion. (Read a typical ‘Western’ take on the film here).



The confusion of times and places appears and reappears, dissolves into the blue...



When the story of a young Turkish musician dying of the Chernobyl radiations recurs as a motif, when a Turkish street kid becomes the indirect assassin to the dreams of a German student trying to help (read condescend) a TKP-ML militant disowned by her comrades in Germany and inside the Turkish prison.

Or when a respectable and elderly German lady (who had in her time been an hippie planning an exotic trek to India) trying to come in terms with her daughter’s mysterious death in Istanbul, and when a Turkish professor of German literature in Germany returns to Istanbul looking for the militant Turkish girl and ends up buying a book store from a German who wants to return home. All those books at the bookstore, almost none to read but the owner!



You get to see the lives of six individuals trying to balance their positions on the edge, and thinking of what it means to have somewhere to go, to lay claim to a home of some sort. After all, home is where you hang yourself, while the vagabonds die not-so-peacefully on the streets.

Who believes in Harvey Dent?

The face of the beautiful psychopathic Joker can make you forget all. But try hard, you’ve got to remember Harvey Dent. For there's a confusing question.

In the silence of the multiplex that grew illegally atop a marsh to the south of this mad city, and in the middle of popcorn-munching SAYTMDHMs (Smart-Ass-Young-Things-Made-Dumber-by-Hollywood-Movies), your mind fidgets uncomfortably as the arch-villain to the Dark Knight whispers across space to Harvey Dent, the injured district attorney sprawling in Gotham Hospital. Your ears prickle as the Joker edges closer and says:
“Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair.”

The words sink in as Dent flips his coin, and he has begun to show two faces. I mean officially. For everyone in the movie has two faces, irreconcilable and mutually incompatible. And you’re alone in the dark with your grimace, your realization of this stereotypical double-facedness that pervades the silver-screen glare and gives you strange stomach aches. Burp! Oops, the last one was a stretched metaphor.

But consider the Joker.

On the one hand, he’s almost the stereotypical embodiment of a bomb-gun-and-scheming Guy Fawkes type anarchist social crusader (“This town deserves a better class of criminals...It's not about money,” says he as he kills a stereotypical Chechen goon of Hollywood stock and burns the heap of bank notes saying, “it's about... sending a message.” “Everything burns”, that’s his message.) On the other, he’s the stereotypical cold-blooded murderer, who plans but refuses to acknowledge his planning, displaying a spontaneous but stereotypical professionalism which masks his stereotypical smile that refuses to do anything without being paid in monetary or symbolic terms (“If you're good at something, never do it for free”).

Or Lucius Fox.
The man has no objections to his using a device to map and record everything of the private spaces of the stereotypical scheming Chinese gangster Lau (and the violation of international airspace in Hong Kong, eh?) but then offers to resign when Bruce Wayne eavesdrops on every telephonic conversation in the American city of 30 million damned souls. Ah, numerical and geographical morality once again, the same good old Patriot!

Or consider James Gordon, the Bat-friendly cop, who believes in the stereotypical principles of law while arresting Joker (he calls him “son of a bitch” though, I distinctly remember) and even consents to hound the Batman at the end (“and so we'll hunt him, because he can take it”).
But always believing in the deux ex machina extra-judicial legal apparatus consisting of a caped millionaire in a spandex costume beating cleaning up the streets with “his bare hands” (the improbability of this, even in movie-time, is testified by Lucius Fox before his junior staff), Gordon lights the lamp to his deity.

And even Bruce Wayne, with or without his spandex suit, has two stereotypical faces. As Wayne, his concern is restricted to the undefined betterment of Gotham, may the world outside Gotham and America rot and burn. Consider his conversation with Alfred Pennyworth:
Bruce: That man in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred: Oh yes.
Bruce: How?
Alfred: We burned the forest down.

Bruce nods and passes on without a comment. Follow the thread of logic here: you support the burning down of an entire forest to catch a fugitive. Now, did you ever hear of bombing down an entire country to catch a person, a tyrannical president maybe? You didn’t?

The answer comes from the man in the suit that could give you muscular cramps if you tried it for real. Much later in the movie, the Batman says: “Sometimes, truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” (Remember you had willingly bought your way into the hall, indeed, you deserve to be stereotypically rewarded, no matter what that is). It's a matter of faith, you've got to believe!

The scene where Batman beats up Joker inside the police lock-up is the best naturalised justification of extra-judicial torture witnessed in movie space in recent times. With the audience cheering, that's where the new Batman beats good old Rambo outside Guantanamo.

And after surviving all that stereotypical double-facedness, I know it will be really hard to remember what sort of values the official Two-Face Harvey Dent stood for in the movie. I am still so confused 'bout it all.

The man was sort of goody-but-stern replacement to the Dark Knight, if you go by his appearances in the movie as the district attorney to bloody Gotham, stars and stripes ablaze. In the comic books, he was twenty-six, a smart and handsome district attorney, the youngest ever to serve, and nicknamed "Apollo" for his good looks. 40-year-old Aaron Eckhart is too old for that, but never mind. Also forget the question of choice between love and commitment to Battick principles in the movie, it’s so stereotypically Hollywood. You had watched that in the Spiderman movie, you watched in The Incredibles, and even in Scooby-Doo.

Harvey Dent plays Ron Paul to Gotham (if you again excuse the confusing metaphor), and lives up to his quote as Two-Face: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” (Mind it, it’s a Dent-ed quote). But at least, he’s an admittedly confused White Knight who gets a hard push from the caped crusader and thrown off the board. And with no moralizing words of closure.

But did you ever, inside or outside the movie, believe in the values embodied in the confused attorney’s character?
(The quotes used above are from IMDB and can be found here)

Black Orpheus

According to the legend, the guitar passes on to a new singer of the morning, in far-off countries, cultures and continents, and the singer calls in the sun to rise from the seas of unrecorded life.

There’s the madness and the melancholy of Rio de Janeiro, the carnival, the beginning and end of sorrow for a people who live high on the mountains but descend on carnival day, to dance away all sorrows. And here lives the smiling tram car conductor Orpheus with his guitar which makes the sun rise every day, and grief rising like vapours or sweat.

The guitar tells the story of the music, weaving the classical Greek story in the bossa nova beat and the triumphal strum, of beautiful Eurydice and unrequited love…. there in the background is the tambourine played by the magic kid of sorrow, love, death or time who observes all and teaches nothing except to celebrate particulate forms of life in the middle of the expanding darkness of drudgery.

After Eurydice is chased by a mysterious death and dies of an electrocution, Orpheus goes searching for her in the hell of the hospital and the missing person’s squad. The sweeper tells him life and people are never found in the papers and documents, and through circular staircases where people and names fall off like strewn paper, they go to a voodoo ceremony where the dead are supposed to descend.

Orpheus returns to the cliff, the slum overlooking the sea and Rio de Janeiro, and falls off the cliff after the Bacchanalian women, those who were part of the carnival, try chasing him.

Here in India, things are perhaps the same, or perhaps different, for though there are the same people, the plains here stretch away for miles, there are no mountains to call in the skies, and most artists and directors too concerned with middle or upper-class sentimentality in the heavenly supermarkets or in computer-generated violence to attempt something like Marcel Camus’s epic creation… and the music, it’s the music that touches you deep inside, the lives and songs of the unrecorded live on in children’s voices… in the dance of life of the three kids who watch the sun rising.

I feel guilty for having watched this, this late…. and i share the guilt with all who prefer to keep their eyes closed.

Ivan's childhood

Narrowing down on 28 years, i get to watch Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo), a 1962 film by Andrei Tarkovksy. As the CD starts whirring, i remember seeing it long before in a darkened room smelling of straw and the smell of sweat from two dozens of viewers... i was acting as a translator of the english sub-titles for men and women who thought of fighting for a better world... what did i translate? Today, i am not that sure...

These are the times when you start hating yourself, and your unstable voice...
a voice that compartmentalises dreams, visions, feelings, emotions and arousals of a childhood and the imaginings of an adolescence in some remote corner of the mind, and seals them away with a creaking rusty lock...

And I start hating myself! I really do!