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Filmstill: Taiji Yingxiong Jueqi (Stephen Fung)

Asian Delights: A special to show your colors!

22 Oct 2013

Asian Delights: A special to show your colors!

October 22, 2013

Chromophobia is quite a strange malady. In view of a loud blaze of color bursting outside the screen, envy grows pale from pondering, paints everything black and white and attests: Meta-level is missing! Pathos gets pathologised (as if suffering from missing substance), cosmos reduced to cosmetics.

ASIAN DELIGHTS are a confession to color and worship color. The special celebrates a genre cinema of fine distinction. Gorgeously gaudy these films are, five in number. Four times martial-arts and once horror at its purest. The subject matter is dashy in 3D.

The first two posturers wait to be seen this week in the halls of Gartenbaukino. On Friday, October 25, 11:00 p.m., Andrew Lau's XUE DI ZI (THE GUILLOTINES), on Saturday, October 26, 12:00 p.m. Stephen Fung's TAIJI YINGXIONG JUEQI (TAI CHI HERO) will be screened.

XUE DI ZI (THE GUILLOTINES)
Shaw-Brothers revisited. Rich in action the period melodrama engulfs the audience in the abyss of passion and shows: The wrong way into the alleged direction of freedom may cost somebody's neck. Especially when assassins are set at flying heads. The French guillotine leastwise was stationary, here is death in the wind. A visually powerful Honkong-spectacle, with the earthy smack of fight scene dust in the afterglow. That's dope in slices! (bk)

Trailer:

 

TAIJI YINGXIONG JUEQI (TAI CHI HERO)
Here, the genre masterly spoofs itself. The bizarrely fractured story line reveals the innards of the paintbox until the toothed wheels come out of the mesh. Getting everything out of the traditional forms of production, this piece of pawn comedy amuses in a flamboyant way. (bk)

Trailer: