Hacker Cinema
Ip Man 4: The Finale
葉問4
2019 · Film · 105 min
Part of Ip Man Collection
Directed by Wilson Yip
Following the death of his wife, Ip Man travels to San Francisco to ease tensions between the local kung fu masters and his star student, Bruce Lee, while searching for a better future for his son.
2 negative1 mixedfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China, and it’s not just their ‘only popular in China’ movies like Wolf Warrior (1 and 2).
Some scenes:
https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo
IP Man 4, which is more well known to western audiences:
https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4
https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ
You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans.
Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people:
https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE
^ That is a fucking video game ad as far as I’m concerned. No mature person should be turned on by that.
This happened to me after awhile, so I literally shifted to watching movies from a different culture. It’s all the same tropes, but delivered differently from a different cultural lens.
Ip-Man 4 is just a hilarious version of Chinese exceptionalism (as opposed to American exceptionalism ((hilarious as in woah this how ridiculous our version of exceptionalism must look like to everyone else))), if you’re looking for an English movie to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
90s Bollywood is great if you want to see how equally ridiculous Indian version of romance/marriage is idealized (as opposed how Americans idealize/romanticize their conception of guy-gets-girl).
The things they do really well are often pretty unique if you’re not familiar with their tropes. It’s very snobby and meta, but I can’t watch American movies anymore without getting bored.
> In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversation across the languages.
So the mixed Mandarin / Cantonese conversations actually do happen. My wife's family are all native Cantonese speakers, but her uncle married into the family from another part of China. He understands Cantonese perfectly but is more comfortable speaking Mandarin; and everyone else understands Mandarin to various degrees but prefer to speak in Cantonese. So he just speaks Mandarin while everyone else sticks to Cantonese; and it's quite a fluid back-and-forth.
That said, for that to happen so naturally the way it does in the Ip Man movies is really unrealistic. First of all, Mandarin wasn't as well-known in Guangdong in the 1930's as it is now; and there's no way someone from another part of China could just show up and magically understand Cantonese: It would take at least a few months of immersion to be able to "listen" fluidly enough to have that sort of a mixed conversation.
Even more unrealistic is Ip Man 4, where he shows up in San Fransisco, and starts talking in Cantonese to people who have immigrated from Beijing -- including one of the character's 12-year-old daughter who grew up in San Fransisco. Yeah, that's not going to happen.
[Minor grammar edits.]