For my very first real post here, I think it’s only fair that I write about my history with martial art films.
Just like every single kid out there, I have grown up watching Jackie Chan leaping off buildings and kicking ass. His athleticism and the physicality of his movies was unlike everything I have seen before, and on top of that, he just knows how to make his movies fun. All of those elements made me a fan of Jackie Chan, and I remembered thinking he is like the closest thing to a real life superhero we will ever get.
Since then, I become a fan of the genre and watched quite a lot of Jackie Chan movies, a lot of them I don’t even remember what the names are now. After awhile, I found out about Jet Li and also watched quite a few of his movies too.
However my passion for movies slowly faded out. Those who followed my anime blog will obviously know this, but aside from martial art movies, I’m also a big anime fan. This was just around the time when we started to have some form of internet at our home which wasn’t called dial-up. Especially with the accessibility of anime in the internet, I started to delve deeper into it more while movies, much less martial arts movies; took a backseat.
Daniel Bryan and The Shield were red hot by the time I got back to wrestling.
After a long time spent deep within the anime rabbit hole, I decided I need to broaden my horizons outside of just anime. This was also around the time when my anime blog has really gained some traction so that may or may not played a factor in my decision; after all, getting exposed to more media means you have a smarter and more experienced views on things. And I didn’t know why I started with this (I blame this shitty anime) but the first thing I did was to get back to wrestling — again another one of the things I dropped a long time ago in favor of something else.
The interesting thing about wrestling is that it’s scripted, I think that comes as no surprise now. But despite wrestling being scripted, the stunts are real. Whereas when I was a kid, and didn’t want to believe kayfabe was dead, now I’m a smarter viewer and know how to appreciate it despite being scripted — allowing me to see it more as an action movie than a wrestling match. Yes, action movie. This was also around the time I started to keep up with movies again, and after watching wrestling for awhile, I thought it’s about time to get back to martial arts films.
And boy did I missed out.
While I knew about Jackie Chan and Jet Li, I have no idea how I missed out on gems from guys like Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa. While I remembered Jackie Chan for his daredevil stunts and physical comedy in otherwise, cheesy-as-all-hell movies, and Jet Li for his questionable American movies despite the man’s incredible talent (as of this writing, I haven’t watch a single Chinese Jet Li movie yet, which is a problem I plan to rectify soon) Donnie Yen’s movie instantly got me back into the genre, as it is truly the first martial arts movie that I believe is just all-around excellent, no asterisks attached — yes, I’m talking about Ip Man. After that, watching SPL and Flashpoint also makes me realize Donnie Yen has a really open-mind to martial arts, of which Flashpoint, was the movie that finally got me on the MMA bandwagon.
Now I’m trying to get up to speed. I’m rewatching some of Jackie Chan’s old movies, while trying to watch martial arts films, new or old, that I missed out on. I just recently watched Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak, and that one is also appearing to be one of my favorite martial arts films ever too, alongside Ip Man.
In any case, if you guys have any recommendations feel free to hit me up in the comment.
The Art of Kaijutsu 