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This weekends fun was "A Chinese Ghost Story" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093978/)

The general story is that Ning Tsai-Shen is a tax collector whome finds himself in a town witthout money to pay for lodging...so he isdirected toward a nearby haunted temple.  Here he meets up with a swordsman, Yen, and finds a beautiful woman, Nieh Hsiao-Tsing.  It turns out that Hsiao-Tsing is a ghost who is being used by an evil tree spirit to lure men to her to be devoured. Tsai-Shen  and Hsiao-Tsing fall in love, so they and Yen must fght the tree spirit to free her...even though freeing her means that Hsiao-Tsing  will finally die.

I rather enjoyed this one.  The production style reminded me of "The Bride With White Hair", which I saw a few months ago.  It seems to be fairly low budget, but with a good use of lighting and atmospherics to build a good look and feel.  It was a combination medieval action film, with typical wire work and kung-fu craziness from such a production, and mystical love story.  There were a lot of parts that were pretty funny as well.

One unintentional funny part was that the subtitling was...very bad.  There were some interchanges were the verb tenses were all wrong and some words...they seemed to be used because they sounded a little like what you could guess the right word was going to be.  Kinda like the subtitling was done by someone who didn't know Enlgish and had the script and a babel fish web page

Anyway, it was a lot of fun...if you like Chinese movies with dramatic stories and phrenetic action and some romance and humour, this would be worth it.

this is a cool movie.  There are like 10,000 of them just like out of HK now.

"Chinese Ghost Story" is one of my favourite movie trilogies!
The modern martial arts movies are great - especially those of Jet Li.
Feerless Freep, if you too are keen on modern martial arts movies, watch
CHINESE SWORDSMEN
BUTTERFLY AND SWORD
IRON MONKEY
really good entertainment!

A Chinese Ghost Story is a classic of modern HK action cinema.  Love them all.

The subtitling of HK movies is legendary for its badness.  Because Hong Kong was a British colony, all movies had to be subtitled in English if they were not spoken in English.  The translators could whip through an entire movie in a few days or less, and their English skills were ... creative.  Probably some of the funniest stuff you'll read on screen.

There is a HK cinema book with pages of quotes taken from the subtitles of various movies.  One of my favourites is "What?  Balls not broken yet?"  This line is uttered by a villain after he kicks someone in the groin, only to find them still standing.

~Archivist~

This was one of the first HK I ever saw, back in the 90s, before the John Woo craze, and it is still one of my favourites. I remember showing it later to some of my friends and they were als amazed by the blend of drama, humour and kung-fu. It still amazes how easily it changes ton from one scene to another, or how well the cheapo FX work. One of my favourite moments is the off-the-wall scene where we see, all of a sudden, Jackie Cheung's character drinking and singing in the middle of a thunderstorm. I later knew that Cheung was a very popular singer in HK, which I guess explains that.

Yeah,and Yen's rock video in the middle was..interesting :)



Post Edited (07-19-05 08:29)

This movie is really quite good.  The humor works well, even across cultural boundaries.  Also, some of the cinematography was plain gorgeous.  The scene that sticks in my mind was the female ghost spinning out her dress material in long spirals.

Also, the crazed old monk with his explosive martial arts was a fun addition at the end.  I might have to go watch this film again, because thinking about it got me into the mood.

This is an excellent film, and I especially liked the "holy fool" hero, who is complete rubbish at any form of martial arts, but who prevails through his innate goodness.  "Chinese Ghost Story 2" is also entertaining and fun, if not quite as good as it's predecessor.