Roll one gives us Netflix, which leads into my uncle's Netflix, which takes us to international movies, which gives us our pick for the day...
My exposure to Asian entertainment is limited largely to the anime my dad and brother watch on adult swim. S'good stuff, pretty well put together most of the time, but it's only one form of entertainment, and one oftentimes defined by cheapness and poor dubbing at that. I've only watched a small handful of really, properly foreign films (when I say that, I mean films not made over in the UK, which for all the differences you could mention still subscribes to enough of the same conventions as US films that I can keep up without much effort), most of which are either martial arts or Godzilla flicks. I say all this because going into today's film, The Taking Of Tiger Mountain (courtesy of my uncle watching Iron Sky and rating it high enough for international movies to pop up on his dash), I expected to be completely alienated. A historical action film set in the aftermath of World War II focusing on a bunch of Chinese soldiers in the middle of nowhere? The cultural differences alone would be enough to put me off, not to mention my complete lack of knowledge of Chinese history. It was a film I went into with a certain degree of wariness.
After having seen it, I have only one thing to say.
Holy shit, why didn't anyone tell me about The Taking of Tiger Mountain sooner?
OK, OK, maybe I should back up just a touch. I really liked the movie, but I should probably provide some backstory before getting into gushing over it, because I feel it's important to the review making sense, and also showing that for as great as the movie is, there's reasons to have reservations about liking it.
The original story Tiger Mountain takes its inspiration from comes out of Chinese novelist Qu Bo's first book, 1957's Tracks in the Snowy Forest, a series of tales about members of the People's Liberation Army tracking down bandits and marauders in the snowy mountains of China's northeastern mountains, largely drawn from his own experiences as a member of the PLA. During the reign of Mao Zedong, a portion of the book was adapted into the opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, which became one of the eight model operas in China - the plays used by the government to emphasize China's strength and power while limiting the citizenry's exposure to outside or contrarian ideas. Director Xie Tielli created a film adaptation in 1970, and the opera remained a popular mainstay of the Peking Opera.
All of this is to say the story of Yang Ziorang and the 203rd unit is, to my understanding, a very familiar, well-worn story to the Chinese people. It's so inherently Chinese that, upon reading all this information after finishing the film, I was all the more impressed with how accessible it is. Director Tsui Hark is apparently a very popular, highly regarded director in his home country, and even directed Double Team stateside (a film which, for those like me whose first experience with internet film criticism was the Nostalgia Critic, is notable for helping to reveal that Doug Walker does not have the slightest clue how internet memes work), but if I had read any of this BEFORE watching the film, I might not have had any inclination to check out the rest of his work. Now, having seen how he managed to communicate the story in such a timeless yet effortlessly cool and relatable manner, I'm all for seeing what Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story first, then. In the aftermath of the second World War, bandits run rampant across China, and only the People's Liberation Army stands between them and the helpless, famished villages in the mountains. While moving through northeastern China, Commander 203 and his unit come across a group of bandits working for Lord Hawk, a ruthless warlord who has holed himself up in the fortress at Tiger Mountain. They soon discover his plot to assemble the three Advance Maps, which will allow him to assemble hoards of Japanese resources and dominate the region - and soon after, all of China - from his isolated mountain fortress. Only with the aid of a new arrival, the spy and counterintelligence expert Yang Ziorang, can they infiltrate the fortress and find a way to take down Lord Hawk's gang once and for all.
Right away, I want to note the story is very well paced. Despite being a 140 minute movie, the runtime only occassionally makes itself known during some of the slower scenes with the villages. Everywhere else, from the opening battle, to the slow yet steady reveal of Lord Hawk's plot, from Yang's adventures while infiltrating to the tense protracted wait for Hawk's men, moves so smoothly that I don't even care time is passing. And this is without getting into the numerous subplots with characters on both sides. I will note that I don't exactly remember any of their NAMES (especially not the various brothers in Hawk's gang), but they all give such good performances and have such interesting designs that I could probably pick them out of a lineup and rattle off their role in the film easily.
Speaking of performances, we get some great stuff from the leads. Commander 203, Tank and Gao all get pretty solid ones out of their actors, but it's our hero and lead villain who give the best shows. Zhang Hanyu plays Yang Ziorang, who seriously reminds me of a somewhat more comedic Chinese take on James Bond. Once he starts going, he doesn't stop, either chewing the scenery or speaking in soft, serious tones as the scene demands it, and generally giving off an air of a man who untangles every situation inside of ten seconds without letting you onto the fact that he did so in the first place until after he's done it. He's definitely playing a proto-spy character in a nontraditional setting, which gives him a really good villain to work off.
Tony Leung Ka-fei's Lord Hawk is, in theory, just a good villain. For the first hour of the movie they only let you hear him, which gives Ka-fei ample chance to do his best Doctor Claw (I don't know enough about China to come up with a suitable substitute), and when he's finally revealed, he takes on a fair deal of large ham, slightly comedic traits. In another movie, he might be a nonthreatening bad guy. But in this movie, his sudden outbursts through slow, self-contradicting speeches and displays of both ruthlessness and gentleness with his men give him just enough unpredictability to add tension to every scene he's in. Overall, Ka-fei just plays him wonderfully, and acts as a great foil to Yang.
But a movie like this isn't going to win just off its characters. The action has to play well too. And, admittedly, there aren't all that many action scenes in this movie. Going off my memories, the big set-pieces are the skirmish at the start, Yang fighting a tiger at fifty minutes (silly and out of nowhere, but effective), the battle at the village at around an hour and a half, and the final assault on Tiger Mountain at the end (plus one more, but I'll get to that in a moment). Fortunately the plotting in the first half and character of the bandits in the second half more than make up for the lack of action, and when they aren't available, there's a good tense argument going to fill the gaps. Yet even for the lack of action, it's all really good. There's a slow-mo, slightly 3D effect going on in certain shots, and they add a certain flair to the scenes that I'm a big fan of - although I could see why others might call it hokey.
I want to pay special attention to the bits in the last two action scenes where the characters employ skis; first as a means of getting around the battlefield faster and making themselves harder targets, and then to jump the crevice towards the back of Tiger Mountain and create a zip line across for the rest. It might be a silly thing to like, but I've never seen an action or war movie using skiing as a prominent aspect, and it's a refreshing addition that makes perfect sense for the snowy mountain setting. Plus, it just looks cool. Can't really fault anything in a movie like this for looking cool.
It all just works and blends together in a manner I can't help but love. Like I said, I was expecting a movie I couldn't penetrate for the cultural differences, but Tiger Mountain is very accessible to an American whose palette is more used to the Avengers than anything else. Beyond the setting and scenario (which they explain within the first ten minutes), there's not much need to understand the Chinese culture at the time, and the direction plays everything off as more a timeless tail with modern trappings, something anyone can get into. It's less like reading a different language and more like listening to a different accent of action films - unfamiliar, but still understandable. I'm definitely interested in seeing more of Hark's work, and more Chinese action films in general.
For all my praise, though, I do have my fair share of issues with the movie. I've already noted some of the village scenes have a tendency to drag, but my main problem is with the framing device. For some reason that I can't begin to understand, the film starts with a modern day Chinese-American man hearing a song from the original opera during a karaoke party and deciding to return home for New Years. He then vanishes until the end, when he arrives at home in the same village the soldiers defended, and his grandfather was a child they'd rescued during their adventure. Then he imagines how Lord Hawk's defeat MIGHT have gone in a manner that reminds me of James Bond played completely unironically. Then he and all the soldiers (still played by the same actors) eat New Years dinner, and the movie ends.
I can't, for the life of me, work out why the film is contextualized this way. It doesn't add anything to our understanding of the plot or characters, or even the man at the center of the framing device. I glanced around at some other reviews, and found a few hypotheses as to why it's here. Two that stick out to me particularly are Hark resenting the restrictions the government placed on his creativity and added the final sequence as a means of showing what he REALLY wanted to do, and Hark making fun of younger Chinese people for twisting a classic tale into something over the top. Me, after watching the film but before doing my supplementary reading, I thought it was an attempt to let off steam after finishing the movie and have a bit of fun poking at American styles of filmmaking (as the character in the framing device is Chinese-American). None of it really seems right though, and the film's final sequence just confuses me.
And... well, as I alluded to in the last paragraph, the Chinese government apparently had a pretty big hand in funding the film. The Chinese military in particular. Given the history of the Tiger Mountain story being used as a means of promoting compliance amongst the populace (although the characters are heroic, they're also communist revolutionaries trying to claim China for the party that would eventually lead to an oppressive regime in the late 20th century), this raises some questions as to the intentions behind this remake. Is it just the director's desire to give a fresh take on an old story, or the government funding a retelling in an effort to forward its interests? And if it is the latter, am I in the wrong for recommending the movie as heartily as I have?
I really don't have the answer to that question. As I've stated multiple times here, my knowledge of China and its culture and politics is especially limited, so even passing negative judgement on what may be a propaganda piece in disguise would be foolhardy without proper cultural context. I will say, however, that for whatever it is, The Taking of Tiger Mountain impressed me greatly while I was watching it, and turned out as a great find from Netflix. I'd say look into the matter and decide for yourselves how you feel, but still do recommend the film, if only on the basis of being a great action film.
(Assorted thoughts
- While the film's description purposes a degree of historical accuracy, I highly doubt anyone quite so lavishly costumed and flamboyant as Lord Hawk and his gang were running around northern China after World War II.
- Seriously, I don't think I can emphasize how much combat-ready skiing makes me feel all giddy inside.
- A 1970 recording of the original opera is up on YouTube as of this writing. I might give it a look over the weekend, and I recommend you do the same.)
I wound up with a few things coming up during the writing of this article that prevented a second pass at polishing and editing from being done, so I hope the raw text I have here is good enough. Also, I'm not sure what happened with Elena, but she never got around to writing her review of Black Christmas. Here's to hoping she's able to start up tomorrow.
(There IS a reason why the sidebar says the schedule is only hypothetical, though...)
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