Starting a collection of favorite kung fu moments from the past two+ years' worth of our weekly Kung Fu Fridays, as nostalgia or discovery, according to each person's background.
And let's start at the very beginning. For me, that was June 26th 2009. I had watched Lau Kar-Leung's Heroes of the East (AKA Shaolin vs. Ninja) early in the evening, and when the roommates walked in, I just had to watch it with them all over again. It wasn't the first time I'd done exactly that (it was John Woo's Hard-Boiled a few months earlier), but that summer's first Friday, a tradition was cemented. And every Friday since (give or take a holiday here and there), I and a variable number of friends have been watching a (usually action) film from Asia. You've seen the posters, now experience the moving images themselves. Now, I had a hard time picking just one moment from Heroes of the East because its bloodless feud between my man Gordon Liu and a cadre of Japanese masters over which country is better (the only way to save a Chinese-Japanese marriage, incidentally), is wall-to-wall awesome, biased though it is. You-tube has most of the fights, so I'll let you discover them, but I've picked the drunken kung fu vs. karate fight that best illustrates the angled vs. direct approaches of each nation's martial arts. And as a preface, the training sequence featuring the director himself as Liu's drunken teacher:
You WILL believe it's that easy to learn. In fact, I still use some of those moves in playfighting, earning me my KFF nickname, Drunken Master. And now the fight:
Gordon also kicks the ass of katana, sai, spear, nunchucks, judo and ninja masters. Check it out wherever you can get browsable video (under "Heroes of the East"). It's damn near the most perfect pure martial arts movie and it's available from Dragon Dynasty.
And let's start at the very beginning. For me, that was June 26th 2009. I had watched Lau Kar-Leung's Heroes of the East (AKA Shaolin vs. Ninja) early in the evening, and when the roommates walked in, I just had to watch it with them all over again. It wasn't the first time I'd done exactly that (it was John Woo's Hard-Boiled a few months earlier), but that summer's first Friday, a tradition was cemented. And every Friday since (give or take a holiday here and there), I and a variable number of friends have been watching a (usually action) film from Asia. You've seen the posters, now experience the moving images themselves. Now, I had a hard time picking just one moment from Heroes of the East because its bloodless feud between my man Gordon Liu and a cadre of Japanese masters over which country is better (the only way to save a Chinese-Japanese marriage, incidentally), is wall-to-wall awesome, biased though it is. You-tube has most of the fights, so I'll let you discover them, but I've picked the drunken kung fu vs. karate fight that best illustrates the angled vs. direct approaches of each nation's martial arts. And as a preface, the training sequence featuring the director himself as Liu's drunken teacher:
You WILL believe it's that easy to learn. In fact, I still use some of those moves in playfighting, earning me my KFF nickname, Drunken Master. And now the fight:
Gordon also kicks the ass of katana, sai, spear, nunchucks, judo and ninja masters. Check it out wherever you can get browsable video (under "Heroes of the East"). It's damn near the most perfect pure martial arts movie and it's available from Dragon Dynasty.
Comments