Oh get your minds out of the gutter. 😀
Yeah, so anyway, I had an interesting if short chat with my son yesterday just as I was getting ready to watch a TiVo recording of The Legend of the Red Dragon, a 1994Â Jet Li martial arts movie. Mark quipped that he didn’t think I liked martial arts/kung fu movies. My response was to wonder why he would think that when he knew good and well one of my top favorite movies is The Forbidden Kingdom, an extremely fun story about the legend of the Monkey King featuring both Jackie Chan and Jet Li in mentoring roles to a young martial artist.
Then I got to thinking about it some more and realized that in a way he was right. I don’t particularly like martial arts movies. I just don’t particularly hate them either. I do enjoy watching them, though, in a pick and choose kind of way. I’m partial to some of Jackie Chan’s and a couple of Jet Li’s but I’ve watched others over the years. Hey, I even caught one of Bruce Lee’s really, really old classics (I mean like the first or second but don’t ask me the title) about two weeks ago and was surprised at how much I, how shall I say this, appreciated the style in it. So what I ended up telling Mark was the honest truth.
It’s all in the plots and sometimes the characters with me. Just like storytelling in any other genre.
Once one does develop a taste for a genre of anything, unless someone is a diehard fan who will consume everything put before one regardless, the storytelling has to be able to draw an individual in or it’s just not going to.
Take The Legend of the Red Dragon. Over the last month or so, I kept catching the last half of it and getting drawn into the quirky characters and what I saw of the plot seemed intriguing but it was driving my crazy that I didn’t know what happened in the beginning. So I finally caught the whole thing.
I liked it all.
I mean it’s not The Forbidden Kingdom for me, but it’s an enjoyable, quirky, if R-rated martial arts movie that I giggled my way through on a lazy Saturday afternoon and could do so again. It doesn’t get much better than that if you ask me. 😉