General Yu is executed after having been accused of treason by the powerful eunuchs, and his children will be deported. Eunuchs plotting to kill even the children, and prepare an ambush on Dragon's shelter in the middle of the desert. There are other guests, who are also interested in the deal.
elementally perfect. enough to make you want to work at a movie theater where it's all they ever show.
I ended up watching this on YouTube, because there's not even a legitimate release on DVD. This is wrong. This should be on Criterion. Still trying to decide which is cooler: When Xiao catches an arrow in a porcelain wine carafe and with a flick of the wrist tosses it right back at the man who shot it at him OR every single camera movement, shot composition, and edit.
So exciting to finally see this on the big screen, finally can get a sense of the sublimity of King Hu's use of space, the 'scope frame arranged so precisely in the various stand-offs, the judicious close-ups lunging out at the audience. Even smaller stuff, like the "take the shortcut" joke, which would be just as at home in a Mel Brooks movie, works so much better on the big screen, similarly the whip pans of Pai Ying's leaps out of danger, the gradual reddening of Shih Chun's eyes, and the gorgeous natural vistas that would go on to become an integral part of Hu's films. Having perfected the action movie in 1967, he was free throughout the 1970s to take it places no one has yet managed to follow.
King Hu... Wow. Just wow.
-Remember the tension in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)?
-Remember how tension escalated from an indoors conversation into a stylish outburts of tragic violence in the opening sequence of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)?
-Remember the basement scene in one of the best referential films of the decade, Inglourious Basterds (2009), where there was a non-stop, upwards sloping trend of tension until it culminated in an explosive aftermath?
This was Leone's legacy. But so it was Hu's.
King Hu, even if I must resort to the most childish pun regarding his name, is unquestionably the Taiwanese king of the wuxia genre. What an awesone name…
PART ONE OF A DOUBLE-DRAGON FEATURE
King Hu's staging and blocking is incredible. Some critics refer to this practice as mise en scène, but as anybody who googled it knows, the term is controversial and fraught with all sorts of baggage, almost 100 years of critics arguing amongst themselves what it means. I'm about to finish Adrian Martin's Mise en Scène and Film Style which is both a series of close readings paying attention to staging and a historiography of mise en scène. For my purposes, without having to belabour a long methodological unpacking of the term, I'm going to stick with David Bordwell's version of the concept, which is to say, the most productive: the act of staging.
The…
You know shit is about to get real when a man removes his blanket to go into battle
Hugely influential sole-location film (this inn has appeared in sooo many films now). Stunning widescreen desert photography reveals a connection with Leone's westerns that were contemporaneous to this. A lack of characterisation and some arbitrary narrative hooks keep Dragon Inn a notch below King Hu's masterpieces Come Drink with Me and A Touch of Zen.
I'm really disappointed with this. I absolutely adored the other films I've seen by King Hu and I'd built this up in my head with plans to watch Goodbye Dragon Inn after, but it's just incredibly boring. The fact it seems to use the same set (or very similar) to Come Drink With Me doesn't help as I can't help but wish I was watching that film instead the whole time.
Main girl is cool tho.
All of the the like grace and style and rhythm of Come Drink With Me but now in a less confined space, the quiet table fight over the poisoned drink, the many many conflicts on a mountain cliff, it's all just so good
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This list is the Letterboxd version of The Oxford History of World Cinema.
The book celebrates and chronicles over one…
