比武 Beimo

The long awaited Schwartz production has finally been released:
比武 Beimo

Well, long awaited for me since I’ve been seeing clips every now and then whenever sschwartz puts it up online. I’ve got to say, this piece was beautifully done. All of the conversation is in Cantonese, though I’m not sure if that makes it more authentic or not.

Spoilers:

This film starts off with the scene where Japan invades China during WW2. However, the context seems to show that the Japanese were attacking Beijing and northern China, which I don’t believe speak Cantonese. However, the survivors later moved to Hong Kong, or so the story goes as they held fights on rooftops.

The story follows the life of a boy whose parents got murdered in front of his eyes. As he grows up, he can’t control the rage he has against the Japanese and always gets into trouble for getting into fights. However, he knows the anger inside of him is not good and asks for help trying to get rid of it.

The choreography was done really nicely and the story flowed well. The video editing was superb! The one thing I do miss is that many of johno’s scenes were removed, including my favorite falling to the knee scene. But I guess since you’ve never seen that one, there’s no point in trying to describe it for you. Another thing that would’ve been nice is a higher quality release. It was a bit hard to see everything at a 320×240 resolution. I was surprised of the adults that took part in it since this is the first time I’ve seen adults in it. By adults, I mean people who look like they’re fathers, but I’m guessing one of them is their Wing Chun master and the other could be a father of one of the actors.

Check out a more indepth review at Kung Fu Cinema. They’re actually on the front page as I type.

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