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HEROIC CINEMA @ MERCURY CINEMA
Week Four (a): Time & Tide plus Gundam Wing (25 October 2002)
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This is your intrepid Adelaide correspondent, dear reader, sitting here a-typing in my dressing gown (complete with cat on lap), because I'm so keen to get you the news on the Heroic Cinema at the Mercury season. If you hurry, you can make it to the final, all-singing, all-dancing show tonight. Okay, I may be exaggerating a tad there. Perhaps "all-kicking" would be better. And isn't that what you want?
First up, a quick report on Friday night: a good crowd of stalwarts turned out for the very esoteric Tsui Hark film
Time and Tide. This time, Mark P., aka the Merc Magician who is responsible for organising this season, gave away a bunch of free passes to the Brisbane animation festival films, while I rambled on about what a genius Tsui Hark is.
The mood was cheerful as we swung into the anime episode: Gundam Wing
Operation, an example of the mecha style of shonen, or boy's anime (you can tell I've been brushing up on my anime definitions. Thanks, Deni, for the anime expertise). In the style of the series, where giant robots turn into other sorts of giant robots, we all turned into teenage boys for the duration of the episode, internally yelling "Yeah! Pow! Blam!" every time the good robots shot up the bad robots.
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Gundam Wing
Operation
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Then it was time: time for Time & Tide. Right from the opening credits, punctuated by the rock beat of a lead actor
Nic Tse doing his thing, we were entranced. Tsui's visuals in this film were astonishingly engrossing, drawing us into the centre of the film to ride along with the characters. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who closed eyes to defy the occasional queasy moment as the camera followed the action in a frenetic sort of Brownian motion.
I'd mentioned in my opening speech one of my reasons why Hong Kong films are better than Hollywood: five minutes into a Hollywood film, you know what's going to happen, but fifteen minutes after a Hong Kong film, you still can't believe what happened. And with respect to
Time & Tide, I'd first seen it in Hong Kong eighteen months ago, and I still couldn't work it out.
Man, it was incredibly cool, though...
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Time & Tide
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And a quick plug for tonight: the final session in the Heroic Cinema season at the Mercury is nigh, and we've been promised all manner of good things. There's to be another display of martial arts, and I've heard a rumour that there'll be weapons about. I'm hoping that that means traditional Chinese weapons, and not ground-to-air missiles and the like.
Oh, yes, there'll be more giveaways, there'll be free wine, there'll be a lion dance, and of course the afore-mentioned kicking of things and waving of weapons. And that's all happening before, before I tell you, one of the finest martial arts films ever to grace celluloid: Fist of Legend, with the incomparable Jet Li. Bring your friends. Bring your enemies and have them kick each other. Bring strangers off the street, because anyone who misses out tonight will be kicking themselves for months.
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Fist of Legend
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Alison Jobling reporting
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H E R O I C * C I N E M A
http://www.heroic-cinema.com
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