THE GRANDMASTER

While watching The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-Wai's decade in the making martial arts biopic, I couldn't help but think of the films of Bruce Lee, particularly Enter The Dragon. This is partially because Grandmaster's subject, Ip Man (Tony Leung), went on to train Lee, but mostly because of the contrast in how these films handle action.

The photography in Lee's films were joyously overwhelmed by his physicality. The camera often staying far away, emphasizing his whole body moving as one blurry, unstoppable force. But Grandmaster isn't like that. It's approach to Kung Fu is much more intimate. Wong's camera is interested less in the whole and more in the individual pieces of the body and how they relate to each other. He uses many short close-ups of hands and feet moving into position, an impressionistic technique that, in other action pictures, frequently confuses, but here it provides insight because Wong is showing us strategy. It also helps that Wong is one of the most tactile and painterly filmmakers in the world to the point that he frequently uses step printing and other techniques to make it seem like we can actually see paint smearing on the lens of the camera and the film becomes a beautifully choreographed ballet of singing razor blades, rain drops splashing off hats, falling icicles, crumbling cakes and ritualistically lit cigarettes.

While Wong usually eschews traditional narrative to create his thematic mood pieces, a sort of story does emerge: the film follows Ip Man and Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), two expertly talented Kung Fu masters who find their destinies greatly altered because of the times they live in. The film begins in the early 1930's when it seems that Ip, a rising star, might be able to unite the Northern and Southern schools of Kung Fu. But his refusal to collaborate with the invading Japanese results in him being exiled to Hong Kong where he suffers terrible poverty and hardship. By the time Wong get's to the 1950's, the old guard is mostly gone and no one even knows Ip's name.

Gong Er's battle is even harder, she is the daughter of a northern grandmaster and an expert of her 47 Hand's style, she even beats Ip Man in a wonderfully conceived bout, but because of her gender she will always be denied her place as the shepherd of her fathers legacy. Her father, clearly bitter about the limits society puts on her, is forced to pass off his legacy to someone the community would accept and suggests she try her hand at becoming a doctor.

Though history has vindicated Ip Man (films about him are almost a genre unto themselves at this point), Wong views both these people as being defined by lost destinies. Indeed all the characters in the film seem to struggle living in the shadow of the lives they almost had. Like many Wong films, Grandmaster is ultimately about people in limbo, making the best of who they are and using love as a way to cope with crushing loneliness.

There are two cuts of Grandmaster out there. The original Hong Kong cut is not especially long at 130 minutes, none the less it has been cut down to 108 minutes for the American market. The cuts are noticeable but not fatal. The American cut, which Wong oversaw personally, adds a great deal of intertitles to help explain/rush past the complex plot, and it often feels like there are holes in the narrative. The Hong Kong version handles the exposition much more smoothly and there are more scenes involving the Gong family and more stuff with secondary characters such as Razor (Chen Chang), another exiled master. Strangely though, the American cut also contains a great deal of footage not found in the Hong Kong cut, some of which seemed essential when I saw it last week. Both versions are fantastic and worth your time.

Grade: A-

HAYWIRE

Haywire, one of 2 films outrageously, prolific director Steven Soderbergh released in 2012, is something of a minimalist thriller. Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs (Dark City) know that their plot, about a burned spy trying to clear her name, is completely out of the manual and use it as window dressing, getting it out of the way as a efficiently and unobtrusively as possible to make way for the main event.

The main event is Gina Carano who plays Malory Kane, the burned spy. There really isn't much to her other than "spy."  The film doesn't make her into much of a person and instead features lengthy scenes of her running, jumping and beating the ever loving shit out of her enemies.

The choice to dehumanize Kane must have been at least partly practical. Carano was not hired for her minimal acting experience, but her incredible MMA fighting skills. Which explains the incredible all-star cast Soderbergh has including to support her including: Ewan McGreggor as her boss, Channig Tatum as a co-worker, Micheal Fassbender as a mystery contact, Micheal Douglas as a government official and Bill Paxton as her dad. But the dehumanization also says something interesting about female action heroes in general. There are plenty of exceptions but it seems that Hollywoods general idea of what to do with women in action movies is to write them as boys, but with more revealing costumes and less interesting personalities.

In Haywire, Kane's lack of personality is strangely the thing that makes her interesting. She reminded me of Val Kilmer in Spartan, who was also defined almost solely by his commitment to work. Late in the film, one character says that it would be a mistake to think of Kane as a woman. Indeed, it might be a little much to think of her as human. Her idea of relaxing is that she allows herself a glass of wine while she cleans her gun. If she ever had any humanity, she scarified it long ago in order to join the boys club of private sector espionage. Maybe all spies are like this to a degree, it would seem to come with the territory.

I like that the film doesn't cheat. It's as utterly dedicated to its vision of this dehumanized lifestyle as Kane is, and doesn't do anything to artificially soften her or sexualize her in any way. In fact, when the plot calls on for her to wear a dress, Kane looks unfathomably uncomfortable in it, as if it were some sort of alien concept to her. All she cares about is the fighting.

The fighting she does extremely well. Carano's skills are amazing to behold. I foresee that Carano may very well become a great action star, she certainly couldn't have a better showcase. She has a number of brutal, bone crunching fights. Each one is expertly and inventively choreographed, all achieving that tough balance of looking realistic wile remaining aesthetically beautiful. Soderbergh's laid back style lends itself well to capturing action. He doesn't try and sensationalize it with wild camera movements or overly choppy editing. Instead he respects the work that Carano and many of her co-stars put into performing all those great feats of athleticism.

Haywire is a fun, engaging 93 minutes, it delivers on the promise of seeing its star hit people very hard wile also serving up an interesting nugget about the masculation of women in action movies turning into complete dehumanization. But the idea feels vastly underexplored here. It's a rough sketch of a film begging to be filled in.

Grade: B+

Note: Haywire is currently streaming on Netflix Instant