Tai Chi Master

Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in a wuxia film directed by Yuen Woo-Ping.

If you’re me, those words were all it took to get Tai Chi Master (1993) in your queue.  If you aren’t me and those names don’t ring a bell, let me explain.  Jet Li is a former Chinese national wushu champion and a no-kidding master of two styles of northern Chinese kung fu.  He made his first film in 1982, at the age of 19, and has been working steadily ever since.  His best film, Fearless (2006), combines first-rate action with a retelling of the Buddha’s journey in a manner both ambitious and profoundly successful.  Michelle Yeoh’s background is in ballet and choreography, and she's applied her training to a string of successful martial arts and action films dating from 1984.  While best known in the West for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she’s best known to me for jumping a motorcycle onto the roof of a moving train in Police Story III (alternately titled Supercop), thus making her the only stuntperson in history to upstage Jackie Chan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTv7HXqqqXA

Yuen Woo-ping, the film’s director, has directed and/or choreographed some of the most memorable martial arts films ever made, including Drunkenmaster, the Kill Bill movies, and Kung Fu Hustle.  Folks, this is the A Team.

And the A Team delivers.  With Tai Chi Master, they create not just an action film, but a testament to the remarkable athletic feats we humans are capable of achieving.  Yes, the film relies on wires and hidden trampolines and creative editing to make its characters appear superhuman, but those wires are attached to real people bouncing off real trampolines and making it all look, if not exactly natural, then credible.  I marveled at these performers’ flexibility, speed, endurance, and grace.  I loved how Yuen shot them, I enjoyed the complexity of their choreographed fights, and I lost track of time for the hour and a half it took for Tai Chi Master to tell its story of medieval China.

Jet Li.  Michelle Yeoh.  Yuen Woo-ping.  They’re as good as human beings can be at what they do, and Tai Chi Master showcases them beautifully.  Enjoy.

Jet Li's Fearless

Fearless is a towering masterpiece and a brilliantly fitting end to Jet Li's wuxia-film career. It's thoughtful, beautiful, exciting, and heartbreaking. It makes me want to be a better man.

By now, most of us are familiar with the Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey and they way that journey informs the Western storytelling tradition. Jet Li's Fearless takes on a different kind of journey, the Buddha's Journey, and it breaks and re-forms our hearts along the way.

In the Buddha's Journey, the privileged young man comes to see the emptiness of that privilege. He either wills himself or is shocked out of his mental and emotional space, and he embarks on a spiritual quest for enlightenment. For most men, that enlightenment never comes and the quest becomes its own spiritual vehicle. The Buddha, however, gets it in the most profound way imaginable. If he returns, he may try to share part of what he's seen with his fellows. He may even succeed.

Fearless begins with Huo Yan Jia (Li) at a tournament in the waning days of the Qing Empire. Li, the embodiment of Buddhist self-possession and peace, easily bests three Champions of the Western World. As the last challenger, a Japanese fighter, enters the ring, we flash back to Huo as an impetuous and Wu Shu - obsessed child. From there, the film takes on the journey that leads to this ring and beyond. It's beautiful work, beautifully done, and it does more to illustrate my limited knowledge of Buddhist thought than any other film I've ever seen.

The film itself looks beautiful. Fearless chooses a heightened aesthetic. Its world looks like our world, only cleaner and fresher and somehow more wonderful. In other words, it's the world of story. It's a world in which wire-fu lives alongside the drudgery of planting rice in paddy day after day after day. It's a world that's infused with beauty, and one in which unspeakable things happen to people who deserve only wonder and joy. Even if the whole "Buddha's Journey" thing doesn't appeal to you, even if you could care less about wuxia films, this picture is worth seeing for the joy of looking at it alone.

The action, well, it's wonderful. Choreographer Yuen Wo Ping pulls out all the stops here, letting us see and feel the variations in the fighting styles onscreen and seamlessly blending wire work with practical stunts. The film's fights (or later, competitions) breathe with an organic life of their own, and they're filled with surprises both delightful and heartbreaking. Some of the action beats in Fearless made me laugh - others brought tears to my eyes. From a choreography and dance perspective alone, this thing is phenomenal.

Finally, Fearless is a heartbreaking movie. Having grown up in rural America, I'm not much for bucolic reawakenings. Nevertheless, Fearless made me cry just by showing me a bunch of farmers pausing to stretch their backs in the middle of a hard day of planting. This is a movie that explores a life badly lived, then turns and gives us one lived well. We see this life lived well, and we see the effect it has on the people it touches. It makes me want to live my life better, to touch those around me in a more positive way.

What a wonderful, brilliant movie. In a year filled with outstanding films, Fearless is one of the very best.