Now that we’ve got the good and bad of 2017 out of the way we have to resume normal service … for a given value of normal that is! This week we cast our eyes (which are admittedly in various states of working order), over the Winter 2018 season of […]
Martial Arts
Keyframe 94 – Farmer Goku’s Fight Club
Keyframe 80 – Groundhog Day Fanfiction
Things get a little ranty this week as we try to work out if long-running shounen are still relevant, or if the desire to produce the next One Piece/Dragon Ball/Bleach/Naruto is nothing more than a false hope. Our featured anime are Little Busters! Refrain, Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Dark Side of Dimensions […]
Keyframe 75 – Postman Smurf and Gargamel’s Cat
Drunken Master (1978) Jackie Chan at his physical peak (Review)
Brotherhood of Blades (2014) An all-too-rare outing for that classic Shaw Brothers-style yarn (Review)
It’s not the language barrier, nor the theatrics and flamboyance, no, the biggest cross for martial arts cinema to bear is context. As a Westerner, many of the nuances of Eastern history allude me, unfortunately, its those very nuances that the historical martial arts film (Wuxia) concerns itself with. Even […]
Classic Film Kid: The Matrix
Keyframe Episode 62 – Maximum Ding
The Assassin (2016) The martial arts film as a beautiful arts saga (Review)
The Assassin (Hsiao-Hsien Hou) is loosely based on a seventh-century folk tale about a female assassin assigned with re-establishing equilibrium to the corrupt Tang Dynasty court. Shu Qi plays Nie Yinniang, the formidable female protagonist, who has been trained since the age of Ten to be a silent slayer for […]
The Ninja Trilogy (1981-1984) High Camp of the 80s Ninja Craze (Review)
Cannon films where rarely more iconic than when they produced the Ninja Trilogy. In 2016, films that pay homage to the richness of the Eighties, or the type of genre silliness that ensued, seek to exploit that which came before through the lens of irony. While blaxploitation, producers like Corman […]