From: upham@cs.ubc.ca (Derek Upham)
Newsgroups: alt.cult-movies
Subject: Chinese Ghost Story 1, 2, 3 _and_ Swordsman 2 (was just Re: Chinese Ghost Story I vs. II)
Date: 15 Dec 1992 17:49:39 -0800
Organization: Raven's Auto Body Repair Shop, Mega-Tokyo.
NNTP-Posting-Host: cascade.cs.ubc.ca

nix@CS.CMU.EDU (Nick Thompson) writes:

>I saw A Chinese Ghost Story II tonight and didn't enjoy it nearly as
>much as the first movie.  The connections to the first movie were
>tenuous at best, the magic in the film went from brilliant to tacky,
>and the romance got sappier.

>How good is part III?  Which of the Ching Siu Tung / Tsui Hark movies
>resemble part I, which resemble part II, and which are just different?

I will not go overboard, I will not go overboard, I will not go...
Oh, the hell with it.


  "A Chinese Ghost Story" is the BEST HONG KONG MOVIE EVER MADE!


Whew.  Good thing I got that out of my system early.  Anyway, on to
explain why this is true, and from there talk about ACGS2 and ACGS3.
No spoilers.

If you can get past the awful subtitling in the Cantonese dub (either
by watching the film 18 times in the theater, or finding a copy of the
Mandarin dub, or both), you'll begin to notice something strange, if
not downright bizzare, about ACGS.  The story holds together.  Even
more, the story is _tight_.  The entire scope of the film occurs over
five days and four nights, and _all_ the important action is driven by
interactions between the four main characters:

              Swordsman Yen <------>   The Matron
                    ^                       ^
                    |                       |
                    v                       v
             Ning Tsui Chen <------> Nieh Siu Hsing

Ning does his best to see Siu Hsing, but to do so, he has to put up
with Yen.  Siu Hsing has the unenviable task of keeping Ning and the
Matron out of each other's sights.  The Matron wants to sell Siu Hsing
to Lord Black, and maintains a belligerent peace with Yen.  Yen isn't
quite feeling up to dealing with the Matron, since most of his spare
energies are devoted to scaring Ning away from the temple.  There are
other people in the film, of course, but their contribution to the
plot it minimal.  (The only real exception to this is Lord Black, but
even if his appearance is abrupt, he _had_ been established sometime
earlier in the film, and had been kept in mind since.)

Now we come to ACGS2.  A while back, I read someone's definition for a
novel, and it stuck in my mind: ``for the characters in a novel, the
events in the novel are the most important things that will ever
happen to them'' (paraphrased).  Following this definition, ACGS is a
novel, and ACGS2 suffers from an insurmountable problem: there's
nothing else the writers can do with the characters.  Try as hard as
they might.

Keep a mental eye on the story the next time you're watching ACGS2.
The writers fill the first half with good humor and fight scenes (the
extended scene with the demon and the paralysis spell is probably the
funniest in all three of the movies); but by the time the second half
of the film has rolled around, they've run out of steam.  They stop
trying to explain Windy, and switch abruptly to a trite corrupt-
government plot in order to provide some sort of dramatic climax.  All
in all, it's rather a disappointment.

For ACGS3, the writers took a different approach: they set the film
one hundred years in the future.  Skipping forward that long gave them
much more freedom to play with the story.  The characters of the
previous films have long since passed away, so there's no need to
explain how they've gotten involved in another adventure; Wang Tsu
Hsien can be a Siu Hsing lookalike, for example, and the writers don't
need to find an excuse for her.  The one exception to this is the
Matron, but we've known she could return since the first film(!).  On
the whole, the ACGS3 writers took the main characters and plot
elements of ACGS and tweaked them to provide variety and humor.  We
lose most of the emotional intensity of the original, of course, but
the new elements make the film enjoyable to watch.

Me, I prefer ACGS3 to ACGS2, mainly because the second half of ACGS2
is so horrible.

The only other Ching Siu Tung/Tsui Hark films I can think of offhand
are "Terracotta Warrior" and "Swordsman 2".  "Terracotta Warrior" has
an okay first-half, showing the life of an Imperial soldier serving a
rather mad Emperor, but in the second half the soldier ends up in
1920s China and the whole thing fizzles.  The movie's only strong
points are two hauntingly gorgeous scenes in the first half---so
strong that I'm planning on renting it just to watch them again...

"Swordsman 2" is considerably better.  In fact, I'll include a real
review for it:

---------------------------- cut here -----------------------------

Subject: VIFF '92 review:  Swordsman II

Sometimes it's just impossible to retire.  Ling is finding this out
the hard way.  All he wants to do is go to Ox Mountain with the
remnants of the Wah sect fighters.  There he can live out the rest of
his days in boozy seclusion.  His only stop on the way is a reunion
with Ying, the Highlander woman who aided him a year before.  But Ying
has terrible news for him.  A warlord named Master Asia has taken over
Ying's Highlander clan, the Sun Moon Sect; he has plans to mold the
clansmen and a group of Japanese renegades into a force that will
conquer China.  Despite his misgivings, Ling finds himself rapidly
drawn into the fray. . .because Master Asia was once Ling's sect
brother, Fong.


This is damn good.  The fights, the scenery, and the special effects
are all excellent.  The acting is good, and the story is rock solid.
Screenwriters Tsui Hark, Hanson Chan and Tang Pik-Yin avoid the trap
of adding gratuitous characters and plot complications (a far cry from
some of Hark's more recent productions).  Director Ching Siu-Tung ("A
Chinese Ghost Story", "A Chinese Ghost Story 2"), meanwhile, keeps the
action flowing smoothly from beginning to end.  The film has just two
flaws.  First, it's slightly confusing unless you've seen the original
"Swordsman" recently, and this is exacerbated by not using any of the
original actors (Hark seems to have gone to his stable of regulars for
this one).  Second, in the original film, they kept on singing this
damn song called ``Hero of Heroes'' (the Chinese name for the film,
I'm pretty sure); in this film, they probably spend even more time
singing it.  The only consolation is that the singers are rarely
accompanied by the soundtrack.  But neither of these should be
considered an excuse not to see the film.


Uncounted dead bodies.  No breasts.  Two cheeks (male).  Aardvarking.
Sword Fu.  Shuriken Fu.  Snake Fu.  Scorpion Fu.  Embroidery Fu.
Meathook Fu.  Essence-absorbing stances.  Beheadings.  Renderings.
Horse-splitting.  Ninjas.  Drive-in academy award nomination to Lin
Qingxia as Master Asia, who demonstrates her complete sex change by
putting on makeup.  Four stars.  Joe-Bob says check it out.

---------------------------- cut here -----------------------------

One point that Daniel Read mentioned, and that is worth repeating:
"Swordsman 2" has a considerably darker feel than most of Tsui Hark's
films, and this is almost certainly due to Ching Siu Tung as the
director.  Just as "ACGS" combined an untenable romance with a
heartwrenching ending, the characters in "Swordsman 2" are kept
carefully greyed, rather than black-and-white, and the ending is very
nasty, even more so because it is completely believable.

"Swordsman 2" is on the festival circuit, so with luck it'll show up
in a theater near you sometime soon.

Derek

-- 
Derek Lynn Upham                               University of British Columbia
upham@cs.ubc.ca                                   Computer Science Department
=============================================================================
"Ha!  Your Leaping Tiger Kung Fu is no match for my Frightened Piglet Style!"
Newsgroups: alt.cult-movies