Wing Chun

I forgot I had taped most of this off TNT a while back. I watched it again and am really beginning to enjoy how good Donnie Yen is. Easily as good as Jet Li and seems to have a greater acting range ( Jet seems always so serious and intense). But I need to see more of each. Anyway the fight scenes are good, good and varied techniques, though not looking like really wing chun. Unnecessarily speeded up (these guys are fast enough) and too much wire fu - typical Yuen Woo Ping it seems. It would be good to see Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen together in a modern film.

Wing Chun is an entertaining combination of slapstick humour and amazing martial arts fights. It's a romantic comedy at heart, one with a feminist bent. The story, while simple, features several memorable characters. There are setpiece battles that move the story along. Most of these feature Michelle Yeoh as the charismatic and beautiful Yim Wing Chun. Yuen Woo-ping's fight choreography is as usual inventive. He included moves that are quick and fresh, many of these aren't featured in other films. Donnie Yen's unusual turn as Leung Pok To, a man who has come to town to wed Yim Wing Chun is also of note. All in all, there's enough character development, humour, fights, and good scenery here to make Wing Chun one of the best martial arts films ever. It's not quite as good as the director's other famous film Iron Monkey (1993), but it's still a delight. Where else can you find actresses this good-looking and fights this exciting? Come to think of it, Peking Opera Blues (1986) probably influenced Yuen Woo-ping's filmmaking. I easily recommend seeing Wing Chun.

Yong Chun/Whing Chun(1994) contains action scenes which are brilliantly Staged and amazingly depicted. Many of the scenes with Michelle Yeoh are examples of why she is the Queen of Hong Kong action films. She is an action star to which many aspiring action heroines looks up to her. Michelle Yeoh combines earthiness beauty with physical endurance as Yim Wing Chun. I show Wing Chun(1994) at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge and became a big fan of the film and the career of Michelle Yeoh.

Michelle Yeoh stars as the titular Yim Wing Chun, the spiritual mother of Wing Chun kung fu (the kind they teach in Prodigal Son, amongst others). As you would expect from Yeoh, she is vibrant on screen, kicking a lot of arse and showing us the sensitive side to a martial arts hero.

Wing Chun's village is constantly under threat by bandits led by the…erm… flying simian family (well two brothers, Flying Monkey and Flying Chimp). After she cracks some skulls, while rescuing the widow ‘Charmy', she makes enemies of the local martial artists, who lose face after Wing Chun shows them up, and the bandits, who want her dead and for Flying Monkey to marry Charmy. The scene where Wing Chun shows the local martial arts heros the ‘Art of fighting without fighting' in the soya shop is amazing. Anyway, after castrating flying monkey, flying chimp decides to challenge Wing Chun, for the honour of the bandit clan. With inevitable consequences.

When Wing Chun isn't giving us great fight sequences, it plays it like quite a lot of HK cinema. For laughs. And, like a lot of HK cinema, it can get pretty irritating. A lot of mugging and juvenile humour are the order of the day here. Concentrating on that old Kung Fu film staple, getting laid.

Wing Chun was one of the first great high flying new style kung fu films and stands the test of time, nine years on. I really liked it, and forgiving its faults is easy. Although Donnie Yen was criminally under used, but that's not such a big deal.

Wing Chun is a memorable film because Michelle Yoeh epitomizes the female heroine at a time when it was not allowed for women to be as strong or in this case, stronger and smarter and more skilled than men. But Michelle Yeoh creates a memorable and competent impression while maintaining a masterful grace and precision that will blow your mind.

Michelle Yeoh has the posture and grace of Bruce Lee, now if only they had done a movie together... now that would be something, like Salvador Dali's short animation collaboration with Walt Disney, what a treat that would be.* I saw this movie years ago and finally discovered it again after long searching and am I glad I did rediscover this little gem.

This movie truly takes me back in time to a simpler time, like finding a diamond in between the millions of grains of sand on the endlessness of beach.

Much of the acting is really silly, but that's just the way these movies were back then. The martial arts are terrific, the sex appeal is palpable, Tofu is gorgeous, drop dead, and the story is very enjoyable.

*Dali and Disney started a project in 1946 but it was never finished in their lifetimes, recently completed in 2003, many of us are long awaiting a DVD release slated for 2004, and still waiting in 2007.