A movie discussion

Last night I watched Donnie Yen in Ip Man. I have avoided the Ip Man movies for many years now because I didn't really understand what they were all about but on the advice of Nikko (he works in the Leasing Office) I found this particular version and sat down with it.

This is no mere martial arts flick. It uses complex story arcs, incorporates history lessons, had flawed and very believable characters -- even the fight scenes develop a particular personality and language to communicate their message.

There is, however, an expectation of a familiarity or even a fluency with the vocabulary incorporating all the culturalisms which are so engrained that they become subtly asynonymous with each other. The same word, movement or emotion can, by virtue of the complicated shifts in culture mean very different things from another seemingly identical iteration of that word or action. But one needs to understand the entirety of the societal norms and behaviors to appreciate it.

The movie fascinated me. The aesthetic is old school but the depth of character and emotional backstories are so much more modern in their conception and telling. Ip Man is of the model of the stoic master but that impacts his home life and what makes him so successful as a fighter marks his failings as a husband and father. He is dressed up as the invulnerable super fighter, but has to learn to be a man as well. Superman is always off saving the world that he never plays ball with his kid. What the world sees, it admires, but that's just the public face of a man whose family resents him.

The cultural issues, which I'm assuming are represented accurately, amazed me. In earlier martial arts movies, I began to appreciate the use of animal names for various moves because of how the move simulates both the appearance of the animal, but copies its strengths in fighting, and the choice of style is driven by the choice of what animal would best succeed in a given confrontation against any other particular animal. But in this film, things are taken a stem further.

Conflicting schools of Kung Fu are representing different dynasties, styles, locations and philosophies. One sees the Kung Fu as extension of body while the other sees it as an expression of the mind. They are fighting, refining and redefining themselves through the battles. The schools/styles reveal an approach to living and the conception of self, and represent nations and policies so to defeat someone is to show error in his entire way of life. It is almost as if there is a constant quest for a certain shade of hegemony -- all the Kung Fu movies with local battles and duels or larger wars between school and styles are real in an alternate universe, one in which dominance over all  will be awarded to the school that has the "best kung fu" as proven through that series of bracketed face offs and seeded contests. Impress, win, move up or disappear. So every Hollywood presentation is really a documentary about the Darwinian selection system which creates a fight-or-die, force-fed evolution of Kung Fu.

About an hour in, the movie shifts from being a series of character-based studies to being a more traditional plot-driven work. The Hollywood tropes start showing up (and retroactively make one wonder if the first part was only pretending to be outside the traditional box of martial arts films). When you get to the standard redemption, revenge and growth parts, you are rewarded with a training montage set to music. It all leads up to a big, final duel between the representatives of two distinct cultures who are competing on both the macro and micro levels. But it doesn't end there. Just saying.

Anyway, I liked it a lot.