Look, Ma, No Hands
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Look, Ma, No Hands Why must every Hollywood movie have wire-fighting scenes? BY JONATHAN V. LAST Hollywood has always run on the principle that what worked before must work again—and again and...
...In fact, there may be some connec- tion between wire work and the vapidi- ty of Hong Kong movies...
...Wire work has long been a trope in Hong Kong kung-fu and sword-fighting epics, and now, like the Asian flu, it has infected American entertainment...
...And the time has come to clip its wings...
...It's an updated telling of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, and in the trailer D'Artagnan jumps and flies just like Keanu...
...and then finally, with this summer's mini-hit Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, it became a story idea unto itself...
...This new Hong Kong style was mostly missed in America, where Bruce Lee and kung-fu theater went the way of the pet rock...
...In his excellent book Planet Hong Kong, Bordwell notes that during the last twenty years, while American movies have dominated the global marketplace, they have accounted for as little as 30 percent of Hong Kong's audiences...
...Wire work," as it is called in the film world, involves harnessing actors and suspending them from thin cables high in the air...
...Director Ringo Lam told Hong Kong Film Magazine, "I like visuals and simple stories...
...Recently, however, they've been gaining ground...
...Which is why so many Chinese movies have the same rice-paper plots: a young upstart seeking revenge or a middle-aged warrior seeking revenge or an old master seeking revenge...
...The year after The Matrix, Wo Ping choreographed Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon...
...For one thing, wire work takes forever to shoot...
...The cinematography and choreogra- phy of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are so lovely that they obscure the pure ludicrousness of the movie...
...in his Keanu way, "I know kung fu...
...Like sheep, everyone in Hollywood seemed to decide that the film's success was due to this alien spe- cial effect...
...Modern wire work first came to America in the surprise hit of 1999, The Matrix, a science-fiction film directed by Andy and Larry Wachow- ski...
...But then in 1987 a video-game maker released a modest little game called Street Fighter...
...Specializing in balletic wire work, Wo Ping brought a sensibility to The Matrix which had never been seen in the West by mass audiences...
...With teams of people tugging on the lines, the actors are able to soar across the screen, delivering a dozen kicks in a single jump or leaping gracefully from the ground to the rooftops...
...The Matrix even became a verb in script notes—as in "Why don't we Matrix this up some...
...If there's anything development executives understand, it's a profit of $311 million...
...I would prefer my movies to have very little dialogue...
...He became, naturally, a Hollywood darling...
...Made with a budget of $63 million, it grossed $374 million worldwide...
...Which brings us back to The Matrix...
...On a hundred-day shooting sched- ule," says Ang Lee, "maybe eighty days would be spent on the martial arts scenes, twenty days to do the rest, so they don't have time to get into the script...
...That leaves open, of course, the question of who is infiltrating whom...
...In the 1980s, swords and wire work reappeared in Chinese movies, most notably in the high-flying Duel to the Death (1982...
...BY JONATHAN V. LAST Hollywood has always run on the principle that what worked before must work again—and again and again and again, in movie after movie, until theatergoers reach the point of throwing things at the screen...
...Street Fighter succeeded where Chi- nese filmmakers had failed in planting the seed of the Hong Kong aesthetic in America...
...The Street Fighter games featured one-on- one combat as kids took control of cheesy martial-arts warriors and tried to beat the tar out of each other by flip- ping joysticks and pounding buttons— while the characters performed outra- geous martial-arts moves, throwing lightning strikes and gliding to and fro as though they themselves were on wires...
...And so wire work began popping up everywhere, from the schlock movie version of Charlie's Angels to the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, from Pamela Anderson's VIP to the Goth police series Witchblade...
...The Matrix featured a buffed-up Keanu Reeves soaring on wires like a latter day Sandy Duncan, delivering spine-shuddering kicks and claiming, Jonathan V. Last is online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...During pre-production in 1997, the Wachowski brothers hired Yuen Wo Ping, a veteran fight chor- eographer, to, well, Matrix up The Matrix...
...Meanwhile Lara Croft still dances up walls and across ceilings, Wo Ping is working on two sequels to The Matrix, and this fall The Musketeer will open in a theater near you...
...These films even made some inroads in the United States, as chop-socky became hip in the disco age...
...The most recent example of mindless repe- tition is gravity-defying martial arts...
...Wire work has its roots in the earli- est Chinese cinema, dating as far back as the 1928 Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery, which film historian David Bordwell notes involved over three hundred martial artists and extensive use of wires...
...In this, the high- water mark of wire work, Lee and Wo Ping paid homage to nearly every cliché in Chinese cinema: the bamboo grove combat of A Touch of Zen (1971), the roof-top chase of The Jade Bow (1966), the temple battle of Legendary Weapons of China (1982), and the inn melee from Dragon Gate Inn (1967...
...Wire work went into decline, however, and by the 1970s Chinese film-making—centered most- ly in non-Communist Hong Kong and Taiwan—was dominated by wireless kung-fu movies...
...It was a runaway success, and its 1991 sequel, Street Fighter II, became a cul- tural event, invading 7-Elevens and mall arcades across the nation...
...In 1997, for the first time, Hollywood productions took more than half of that Chinese till...
...Above all, however, wire work seems to be indicative of a Chinese sensibility that values the visual, the visceral, the emotional above the intel- lectual...
Vol. 6 • September 2001 • No. 48
