With a beautifully constructed allegory mirroring William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem Invictus that asserts, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” the record breaking Chinese 3-D animated feature Ne Zha, which is loosely based on a Chinese mythological martial arts legend drawn from the Ming Dynasty novel The […]
Fantasy
EL CAPITAN MARVEL: A Mountainous Movie with Cliffhanger Acclaim and Waterfall Fights
By Drs. Craig and Silvia Reid. Of all the superhero movies I’ve seen as a film critic/fan, through a martial artist and fight choreographer’s eye, what started off as a poorly shot, jumbled, non-linear perfunctory directorial method approach to the first 40-minutes, with fight scenes akin to a local martial arts school putting them together […]
THE ODYSSEY OF CHRIS YONG: Lion and Tiger and Beast…Oh My!
By Dr. Craig D. Reid If you happened to be trying to connect with the dance scene in the early 2010s at the renowned Trocadero Underground near London’s Piccadilly Circus, you might have bumped into the young dance major graduate from Westminster Kingsway, Chris Yong, who at that time would be freelancing and jammin’ using […]
Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings: One of Tsui Hark’s Best iDee-as
By Dr. Craig D. Reid It seems as the years go by for director Tsui Hark, his film’s are subliminally and slowly creeping backwards to incorporate what made his early fant-Asia films of the 1980s and ’90s the best made Hong Kong wuxia movies in town. His three romantic A Chinese Ghost Story thrillers were […]
MONKEY KING 3: Hey Hey, It’s the Monkey and He’s Maybe Coming To Your Town
By Dr. Craig D. Reid Chinese film fans have heard of wuxia novels and films, stories soaked in traditional tales and legends of superhuman swordsmen and magical feats. Yet there’s another genre of martial arts prose called gung-fu xiao shuo (kung fu novels), books in which the characters use martial arts even though the heroes […]
THE THOUSAND FACES OF DUNJIA: Well Dun and Dun Well
By Dr. Craig D. Reid The Tsui Hark produced/written and Yuen Wo Ping directed/action choreographed The Thousand Faces of Dunjia is a VFX saturated far out, fast and furious, female driven fant-Asia film that is derived from a foundation of wuxia (martial chivalrous hero stories) Chinese literature spanning back to the Warring States period (475 […]