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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
an Excellent General Survey of the Martial Arts Movie genre,
By Tauna "blktauna" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas: Martial Arts Movies (Paperback)
Decent overviews but... A lot of pages devoted Bruce Lee and Japanese Samuri stuff. Goodly amount of pictures and info but I found lots of mistakes and the literary emphasis is on cinematic development rather than who is in what and when. This book is more for the person interested in the Martial Arts movie as an art form rather than someone who wants to know what is good to rent.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Intro For New Fans To The Genre,
By
This review is from: From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas: Martial Arts Movies (Paperback)
This book is an excellent primer for those who grew up with old school HK kung fu and wuxia movies, as well as those interested in the much rarer to see on tv, but now, relatively easy to find on dvd, Japanese chambara movies.
The book pretty much gives you info on just who did what. So if you always wanted to know the names of your favorite Asian stars, "From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas" is of tremendous help. (Knowing the names of the actors is always a plus when video hunting in Chinatown or Japantown.) The history of these films is also detailed, which is of tremendous help to the average American reader who wishes to understand the cultural significance of these movies. For specifically kung fu fans, who are looking for Saturday afternoon fair, the last chapter on kung fu videotapes is an excellent list. (Incidentally, it also contains many of John Liu's works available on video, a personal favorite of mine.) The Japanese chapter entitled "Samurai Swordsmen and Karate Killers" introduces U.S. readers to the much earlier 1960's chambara versions of the ninja, in the late Ichikawa Raizo's depictions in the "Band of Assassins" series. These movies became available on video shortly after this book was published and I suspect their availability was a direct result of this book's outlining of them, since to the best of my knowledge, "The Band of Assassins" series wasn't regularly shown on U.S. tv. Of course, no human endeavor is perfect, no matter how much care goes into it (and a lot of care went into this book.) One "flaw" is the omission of Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) and Hua Shan's works in the wuxia peng genre, which were more or less, contemporaneous with Lau Kar Leung's (here given the Mandarin pronunciation Liu Chia Liang) and Chang Cheh's works at Shaw Brothers. Both director Chang and Lau Sifu's works in the kung fu genre are of course, outlined in detail, and rightly so. But without at least mentioning the Shaw Brother's wuxia films that were based on the Ku Lung novels, the chapter on Chinese movies is, in my opinion, still incomplete, especially since some of those movies, such as "The Magic Blade" did reach U.S. shores in dubbed form. Some other admittedly nit picky "flaws" are the crediting of "King Boxer" ("Five Fingers of Death") to Chang Cheh (the director of that film was the Korean director with a similar surname Chang-Hwa Jeong), a slightly inaccurate plot description of the Nemuri Kyoshiro film "Nemuri Kyoshiro At Bay" (he doesn't kill Christians who he had saved moments earlier), and finally, there's the opening of the American chapter. The chapter on American martial arts films ("Noble Norris and Nasty Ninjas") would have the reader believe that there was no "before Bruce Lee" and that action films here were devoid of acrobatics and complex choreography and that guns were the main focus of American action. The authors even go on to say that there was no sword fighting(!) in American action films prior to the importation of HK and Japanese cinema. Discounting James Cagney's use of judo in his action movies or Frank Sinatra's and Spencer Tracy's use of karate in both "Bad Day At Black Rock" and "The Manchurian Candidate" respectively, or the Lee Marvin vehicle "Lord Jim", which shows Muay Thai (none of which are even mentioned in the American chapter), one could argue that swashbuckling films from the '40's and '50's (like "The Flame And The Arrow" and "Scaramouche"), with their acrobatics and choreographed sword fights, were the precursor to what Americans would later see from imported Asian films. (Marilyn Mintz does make that comparison in the much earlier book, "The Martial Arts Films.") Still, despite the admittedly nit picky "flaws" mentioned above, "From Bruce Lee To The Ninjas" is an excellent overview of Asian action cinema and Asian-influenced adventure films.
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