[Tai-Chi Master Download Di Film Mp4
Tilo Chopin
One of my very favourite movies is Tai Chi Master, directed by Yuen Wu Ping and starring Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and Chin Siu Ho. Chin is a fabulous performer and on my DVD copy of this film he gives an interview. I have transcribed excerpts from this interview that I found interesting and you can read them in the following blog:
Although he always made martial arts movies, I felt he was a scholar, because he embraced Chinese culture and a kind of romance in martial arts movies, and expressed them. So they were not just martial arts movies. There would be a lot of brotherly bonds. They were movies about relationships.
I prefer applied martial arts. Before I did movies, when I learned martial arts, I practiced for the contests in Hong Kong. So I rarely did standard maneuvers. I prefer applying martial arts, as I like Bruce Lee. I am also really inspired by my master, Sin Lam Yuk. He was a champion who applied his fighting in the arena. So I like practical kung fu more.
Falsely accused for cheating in a martial arts competition, two boyhood friends are banished from their Shaolin Temple and go their separate ways. As adults, they join opposing sides in a civil war. When one betrays the other, they settle their differences mano-a-mano.
Michelle Yeoh's exploits in the millennial world continue, now joined by another martial arts legend, Jet Li, as a man seeking to make use of his skills to exact revenge on a comrade who betrayed him.
i feel like every movie that yuen woo-ping was involved with ended up being a stone cold masterpiece, the guy was a martial arts genius. everything in this is 110% effused with beautiful motion and grace, not to mention the constant moments of hilarity that are the bedrock of so many hong kong films. the guy just knew how to make all of this wirework style look completely natural and poised. jet li gets beaten up so badly by his evil best friend that he ends up going insane and learning to control the elements of the fucking universe, this is what you watch movies for, it fucking rules.
Zhang Sanfeng (given name Tong, courtesy name Junbao), the folk hero that this film is about, declined to serve either of the two dynasties under which it is claimed he lived, dying at the ripe old age of 307 in the Wudang Mountains.
Not quite full slapstick, but close, this film is an action-heavy extravaganza of flying fights, martial arts philosophy, and creative use of every piece of scenery, every prop, and every actual body on hand. It drags a bit in the third act, but its main fight sequences are wondrous, especially the epic final conflict and the crucifixion scene. It has some weird issues with suggesting the main villain is sexless for some reason, which I can't even begin to parse, and there's a disturbing murder of a woman late in the film that I can't decide if it's a little too dismissive or if it's treated as the moral event horizon it is. But as far as action choreography goes, it's more than amazing.
Another Yuen Woo-ping masterpiece. Some of the very best that Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh have ever been on the screen, both in terms of what they're able to accomplish on the screen in terms of the stuntwork they're pulling off on the screen. But I think that when you're looking into what Yuen Woo-ping allows for the two of them, as one of the greatest martial arts fight choreographers of all time, it only makes for some of the most beautifully filmed action scenes that the screen has ever seen.
Most Hong Kong movies you watch and they make you wait for the goods, Yuen Woo-ping is such a vat of creativity that he can't help but give you the goods pretty much non-stop throughout his career. You haven't really seen an action movie if you haven't seen one of his movies.
Against the beautiful backdrop of Yuxu Palace at Wudang Mountain, Grandmaster and Taoist Priest Zhong Yun Long is teaching Wudang Mountain Tai Chi to his students, the Sanfeng Academy which he founded. Known as the Chief Priest of Wudang Mountain, Zhong Yun Long has transformed this remote mountain into a Martial Arts Mecca that rivals Shaolin Temple. This transformation included changing the old Tai Chi forms into modern practice that has been adopted by Tai Chi Chuan schools across Wudang Mountain.
Master Zhong Yunlong is a 14th generation legitimate inheritor of Wudang Sanfeng Pai (pai equates to sect), an orthodox Wudang Internal Kung Fu successor of two great Wudang Taoist masters and senior priests: Guo Gaoyi and Zhu Chengde.
When Wudang Taoism first opened to the outside world, Master Zhong Yunlong was sent by the Wudang Taoist Association, to unearth Wudang martial arts which were then only being practiced outside the temple.
Leading documentary filmmaker and author with thirty feature length movies on Martial Arts, Buddhism, Chinese medicine and Zen meditation. Jon has spent his life in the practice of martial arts and is a Karate 6th dan. He has been featured in Black Belt Magazine, Kendo World and many other leading publications.
Keanu Reeves has a mixture of stilted awkwardness and gangly grace that is uniquely his own, and that makes him an often strange, disaffected presence. This can either work or not work. His line readings are sometimes baffling. But his simple sense of truth and touching trust in the material (whatever it may be) is one of the reasons his career has lasted so long. There isn't a ton of ego in his work. It's refreshing.
"Man of Tai Chi", Reeves' feature film directorial debut, has the same sometimes-awkward blend that Reeves brings to the table as an actor. The film is super serious (as befitting the martial arts genre, where everything is a matter of life or death), with moments of strange stilted dialogue (also par for the course) and scene after scene of thrilling physical combat, filmed with grace and certainty and no small amount of awe for the athletes involved.
Tiger Chen, a stuntman in the two "Matrix" sequels, plays the eponymous character, also named "Tiger Chen". He is a devoted practitioner of the ancient art of tai chi, working with a master named Yang (Yu Hai) in a beautiful temple. For his day job, Tiger works as a delivery boy, driving packages around the city, and flirting with a receptionist at one of his regular stop-offs. He lives with his parents. He does not have ambition to "do anything" with tai chi, because the rules underlying his apprenticeship with Master Yang say that those who practice tai chi do not do so for money, glory, or even to win. But during a public competition, his undeniable skill brings him to the attention of a mysterious individual named Donaka Mark (Reeves). Donaka lives in a cold man-cave of a penthouse, furnished in black leather and chrome. He strolls around barefoot on shiny black marble floors, he speaks only in terse commands. He has a security detail working for him that would rival the NSA's. He reaches out to Tiger, offering him a security job, when in reality it is a recruitment for a deadly underground fighting ring.
Tiger is flown to an undisclosed location, put into an empty grey room with a mirror on one wall, as he waits to see what will happen. A female voice commands: "Fight", and from out of nowhere an opponent grabs Tiger from behind. Tiger is then engaged in a fight for his life in that grey room with the big mirror, and it is an Alice-through-the-looking-glass moment which will bear fruit through the rest of the film: Like Alice, Tiger is catapulted from one strange experience to the next. The normal rules of regular life no longer apply.
Donaka, of course, is watching through that mirror. That first fight is a test. Tiger passes, but it is only the first of many. Donaka's fight club is run like a cult, where essential information about the nature of the organization is withheld from the participants until they are too deeply embroiled to get out. Tiger finds himself back in that grey room again and again, fighting increasingly vicious and skilled opponents. To what purpose? What is it all for?
The money Donaka offers is substantial. When Master Yang's temple is slated for demolition unless money can be raised for necessary repairs, Tiger caves. And so the sacred temple is now being financed by someone who has betrayed the underlying principles taught there, a terrible irony. Tiger Chen, a superb athlete (to watch him is to go slack-jawed in wonder and appreciation), is also a terrific actor, going believably from sweet open kid to cold lean killer with a haunted aspect. "Man of Tai Chi" takes place in a deeply moral universe where our choices have spiritual implications.
The fighting ring is illegal. The cops (one in particular) close in on Donaka, who remains elusive and omniscient. Donaka understands that tai chi is not the usual fare in the martial arts underground, and he gets off on the fact that Tiger has sold out. That's the turn-on, the power trip. Reeves isn't in the film all that much, and there are a couple of extremely stiff scenes of dialogue, but he does get a very impressive fight scene with Tiger near the end. This is Tiger Chen's picture all the way. You watch him transform, and you watch his soul go dark.
Cinematographer Elliot Davis films the fight scenes with thrilling immediacy: lots of long takes, so you realize you are actually seeing these guys actually do this, as opposed to watching something pieced together later in the editing room. The camera circles and rises and pulls back, moving horizontally and vertically with the movements of each fight. The filming is intuitive and visceral. There's one masterpiece of a scene that takes place in a hidden night club floating in the bowels of a cargo ship in Hong Kong harbor. The setting is surreal: the circular stage painted with psychedelic dizzying swirls and the circular tables surrounding said stage, not to mention the bored elegant silent crowd, is reminiscent of the midnight theatre scene in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" or the freaky tiered nightclub in Josef von Sternberg's "Shanghai Gesture". Each fight gets more dangerous. The stakes rise. Death is the only possible outcome. Reeves approaches the genre with respect and passion. "Man of Tai Chi" is hugely entertaining.