The Bodyguard From Beijing Subtitles

[Idara Viengxay]

Acorrupt businessman commits a murder and the only witness is the girlfriend of another businessman with close connections to the Chinese government, so a bodyguard from Beijing is dispatched to help two Hong Kong cops protect th...

I just watched the fight clip from FIST OF LEGEND. Wow, that looks stunning! It looks very natural, like when I first saw it in the theater and on VHS, as opposed to the too-bright, ultra-vibrant colors of the Miramaxe DVDs.

Can we safely assume this version of Fist of Legend will be uncut, with the long-absent epilogue text? How decent are China Star's subtitles these days?

And - what's a good place to order these from once available, for USA delivery?

Thanks, folks. I'll probably wait on impressions on this forum before making the purchase - I've had my hopes dashed too many times to go in blind on this one. But if true, that's the third of my five holy grails this year alone.

Directed by Corey Yuen Kwai, the film revolves around a Beijing bodyguard who travels to Hong Kong at the request of a wealthy businessman to protect his girlfriend. The cast includes Jet Li, Christy Chung, Kent Cheng, Collin Chou, and Joey Leung.

Synopsis: A corrupt businessman commits a murder and the only witness is the girlfriend of another businessman with close connections to the Chinese government, so a bodyguard from Beijing is dispatched to help two Hong Kong cops protect the witness. Complications arise when the bodyguard and the witness must confront their deep feelings for one another.

Nothing could be farther from the meditative languors of the Fifth Generation. The images are not lingered over: they tumble one into the next with careless abandon, surrounded not by silence but by noise. Hong Kong at present makes the most raucous and least contemplative movies on the planet, movies which by turns recall the spirit of Abbott and Costello, George Raft, Bela Lugosi, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. Hopping ghouls, cartwheeling comedians, heroines who sing and fire machine guns with equal flair, vampires kept at bay by chicken blood and sticky rice, passionate gangsters caught up in ruthless dynastic struggles, martial arts masters who set off cascades of special effects at the least flourish of their fingers: the hyperactive characters who inhabit Hong Kong cinema make the energy level of Hollywood types like Kevin Costner and Bruce Willis seem torpid by comparison.

The result is a constantly evolving game of concealment, evasion, and disguise, in which trysts, cabals, masquerades, and police raids become inextricably entangled with theatrical illusion, culminating in a finale in which the disguised heroes make their escape through the roof of the theater. The cutting throughout is so rapid that one actually needs to see the film twice, once to watch the images and once to read the subtitles. Hark cultivates giddiness as a deliberate style, and even the occasionally lethal violence is not permitted to dampen the festive atmosphere: indeed, one of the best gags involves a resourceful heroine extricating herself from a difficult situation by pretending to make love with the general she has just murdered.

Themes of separation and homeless-ness impinge even on the most commercial projects. In A Better Tomorrow II, a couple of displaced Chinese racketeers stand in a Long Island field staring across at the Manhattan skyline and have a melancholy exchange:

3a8082e126