Danny ChaiWatched Jackie Chan: My Stunts tonight. It was pretty interesting, I thought. It’s really hard filming a good fight scene. So much to it. Anyway, it briefly talked about the history of fighting movies and it said how for a long time, it was divided into two genres – weaponless and swordfighting. In the swordfighting movies, they’re often supernaturally good at swordplay and have other powers as well. And they showed this super old clip of a movie, and these sword fighters were flying all over the place, and going into trees and stuff. It was a lot like Crouching Tiger, and I thought that was really interesting.
As you may or may not know, CTHD didn’t do too well in China, and Western stories have said that it’s because it just ignores reality. Like, there were quotes about how the fighting is just totally unreal, and they supposedly didn’t like that there.
But when I see how these really old movies were the same way, and when I see how Jet Li and even Jackie Chan sometimes use unreal wire work, I dunno, I don’t buy that. I think it was something else. My guess is that they didn’t speak Mandarin well. I think in Asia they’re used to the sound and video not matching, but they are used to dubbing by native speakers. So the fact that the actors didn’t speak Mandarin that well, maybe that was why.
But, this is something I just heard also, dunno if it’s true, so who knows.