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NEWS AND VIEWS - NOVEMBER 2020
WRITING NEWS Added another 14,000 words to The Brassfire Fleet this month, bringing the current word count up to 79,000. I no longer expect to finish the book by the end of the year, partly because December's going to be pretty busy for me but mainly because the book just seems to be running longer than I expected. My plan was to start work on a new Sam Fortune adventure after I wrapped this one up, but I'm kind of waffling on that now; I'm thinking I might jump into a new Signalverse novel instead, or maybe start in on an entirely new series. One of the books I'm considering writing is The Butterfly Trapper Keeper, the first in a series of "playground noir" stories -- short novels written in a hard-boiled Chandler-esque style, but starring elementary school kids, and set in the 1980's. This seems like it might be kind of an amusing idea. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING After completing The Outer Worlds a few weeks ago, I started in on The Alliance Alive, a 3DS RPG (now also available on the Switch, I believe). I've been having fun with it. It uses many of the same mechanics as Cattle Call's earlier RPG Legend of Legacy, but unlike Legend of Legacy -- which was difficult, grindy, and frustrating -- it marries those mechanics to a much easier and much more traditional, story-driven RPG. It's quite charming. 
I'm also working on Arc the Lad II, the oldest game in my backlog. Unfortunately at this point I'm basically only playing it for the battle sequences, which are fun and occasionally challenging. Frankly there's not much else to like about the game. The graphics are drab, primitive, and often quite ugly, the story isn't particularly engaging, and the localization is actually quite bad -- it's professional, and competent, but there's no energy in it all; it's very rote and matter-of-fact, without any of the liveliness one usually finds in a Working Designs-translated game. Even their usual lame jokes and American cultural references feel forced. But I'll probably stick with it anyway. To be honest I'm basically just killing time with both of these games while I wait for the Ao no Kiseki fan translation -- that's the RPG I'm really looking forward to. * * * * * * * * REVIEW: MONKEY FIST FLOATING SNAKE Here, for the heck of it, is a review of an old kung fu movie I wrote a few years ago for another site. This movie got on my nerves. I don't usually have a problem with movies of this sort (bottom-of-the-barrel 70's-era kung fu flicks of negligible coherence) -- in fact, I tend to find them pretty entertaining, if only for their funny dubs and weirdo plots. Monkey Fist Floating Snake, directed in 1979 by Law Chi, is, alas, not entertaining at all: the film is full of annoying characters and lame jokes, and has a boringly simplistic and redundant plot. The fight scenes, meanwhile, are nothing special -- every fight in the film looks exactly like every other fight, and anyways the participants are usually so annoying or so perfunctorily introduced that it's hard to summon up any interest in the outcomes. The whole thing irritated me. 
The film begins at a kung fu school headed up by a big fat dude. This corpulent bully, we learn, teaches "Tiger Style" kung fu to his students, although his grasp of it seems dubious. Ah Tung, a lowly waiter/delivery boy, begs to be taught some of this kung fu, but the fat guy (I think they called him Mr. Chang) refuses, preferring to use Ah Tung as his own personal punching bag. Later, Ah Tung gets himself into a fight with some local toughs, and is rescued by an old barber with rotten teeth called Tu Hai (the actor who plays this guy is only middle-aged, so they put a white wig on him to make him look older). Tu Hai, as it happens, is a master of "Monkey Style" kung fu, and handily puts down the local yokels. Ah Tung begs this practioner of the monkey arts to teach him his brand of kung fu, but the "old" man laughs at him and wanders off. The film's villain is introduced over the next few scenes: this guy is Hai Yun, a master of "Snake Style" kung fu. He challenges Mr. Chang to a fight, explaining that he's planning on taking over all the kung fu training places in town, and, well, he has to start somewhere. He also plans on extorting the townspeople by running a protection racket. His blunt but effective motto: "Pay the fee. Anyone who refuses to pay gets beaten up." He takes out both Mr. Chang and Mr. Chang's boss. Meanwhile, Ah Tung -- this whiny, scrawny loser is our hero -- spends a huge amount of the movie trying to get Tu Hai to teach him monkey kung fu. At one point Ah Tung runs off with Tu Hai's barbering tools, instigating an unfunny chase scene. Eventually Tu Hai takes him on as his apprentice, but his training regimen turns out to be nothing like Ah Tung had in mind: he puts him to work, ala Mr. Miyagi, hauling baskets of pumpkins around and doing other dumb pointless exercises. He doesn't get around to actually teaching him monkey-fu until practically the end of the film. Meanwhile, Hai Yun is kicking the crap out of all the fighters at the other training places. He has a long, drawn-out battle with one of the town's other kung fu instructors and recruits the local toughs from the beginning of the movie to harass the townsfolk and collect money from them. Eventually, he learns about Tu Hai and his "Monkey Style" after the barber beats up a couple of goons who were sent round to extort him. The two soon meet and fight it out. They're pretty evenly matched, but Tu Hai wins the day, forcing Hai Yun to retreat and ruining his protection racket. But, Hai Yun isn't done yet: he goes off into the wilderness somewhere to train, and returns for a rematch at the end of the film. (He also goes on to molest the proprietress of the restaurant where Ah Tung works, while looking for Ah Tung and Tu Hai. "Tell me where he is," he demands of her. "If you don't tell me, I'll rip your dress off bit by bit until you're naked.") 
Hai Yun and Tu Hai go on to fight the final battle, with Ah Tung joining in along the way and landing the final blows. That's the end. There's also a sort of subplot in there about a character who keeps bragging about how great his kung fu is, but who is ultimately proven to be a cowardly blowhard; it's not funny. The film's plot is, as I said, redundant. Ah Tung spends all but the last few minutes of the movie begging Tu Hai to teach him kung fu, in scene after pointless scene. The villain Hai Yun, meanwhile, spends a large part of the movie fighting various anonymous characters and consolidating his control over the town. It's pretty thin gruel, and the repetitiveness of it begins to grate after a while. Monkey Fist Floating Snake's chief flaw, however, is its lead: Ah Tung, played by Chan Muk Chuen, is a clumsy, dimwitted, pratfalling clown, and his performance is annoying beyond belief. The dub only makes things worse; the dub actor who plays him has a wimpy, nasal voice that made me wince every time I heard it. A better lead might have made the film significantly more watchable. But then again, maybe not. There are other problems. As a big fan of bizarre, hilarious dubs, I'm sorry to report that the film's dub is distressingly unfunny: there are only one or two really outlandish lines. Dumb "comedy" scenes abound. And the fights...well, they're frenetic, and plentiful, but they're not all that creative or fun to watch, either. The actors seemed much more focused on completing their complex choreographed motions than on making their fights look truly intense. All told: Monkey Fist Floating Snake is boring, brainless dreck, not even good for a few laughs at the expense of the dub. Don't bother with this one. |