Beyond Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

If your only experience of Chinese martial arts films involve:

-Dubbing
-Quentin Tarantino
-Afternoons in the 70s following Mel Jass' matinees
-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Then you need to head to the Walker Art Center to see the Heroic Grace, a series of 70s and 80s films from the Shaw Brothers' studio in Hong Kong.

I always thought that if I saw a cleaned up, non-edited-for-tv version of these films with decent subtitles that I would understand what the heck was going on. I watched the movies for the great fight scenes and kind of let the intricacies of the plot fall to the wayside. If you can mostly tell who is good and who is bad, that's all you need.

Well, the restored prints don't clear up the plots much. I still cannot tell for the most part why the good guys hate the bad guys and how the bad guys can suddenly fly to the ceiling and disappear into a wisp of smoke. One thing I do know; Bruce Lee is always the good guy. But once again, the fight scenes, the creativity and the passion of the films are all that matter. You don't need a traditional Hollywood studio plot to have a good time.

The series opens tonight with The Five Venoms. See what warriors armed with the power of the scorpion, snake, centipede, gecko, and toad can do!

If you can't make it tonight...don't sweat it. The series runs until October 19th.

Thanks for the link. But Bruce wasn't ever in a Shaw Bros film, although they did try to sign him. Sadly the super-stingy studio didn't offer up the big bucks, or the creative freedom, that Bruce wanted.

The best films in this series are this weekend and the weekend of October 14th. Dirty Ho may be one of Shaw's best films. Enjoy!