Hacker Cinema
The Grandmaster
一代宗師
2013 · Film · 130 min
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
The fall of China's last dynasty, a time of chaos, division and war, is the golden age of Chinese martial arts. Legendary kung fu master Ip Man, who will eventually train Bruce Lee, finds his peaceful life interrupted by vengeance.
2 neutralfrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
2 comments on Hacker News
See, this is why I can't quit my HN addiction. Occasionally someone will post something like this, and I end up going to Wikipedia, and pretty soon I'm adding a bunch of films to my to-watch list.
But I have zero familiarity with his work (maybe I saw The Grandmaster? I saw some movie about Ip Man... actually it was probably just Ip Man...) so I would need some help to actually understand your reference. Given that his parents fled to Hong Kong in advance of the Cultural Revolution (says Wikipedia), I have to assume that they had some resources, would have been more on the Revolution's receiving end, and might have been more sympathetic to meritocratic order -- and maybe their son absorbed some similar opinions? Am I on the right track? (Probably not, simply given my ignorance.)
So, I'd be grateful if you could explain what the heck you meant :-) ... but I'd also just take a film suggestion!
Movie adaptations of novels are generally very, very questionable in terms of true-to-the-original accuracy. And novels at least have the advantage of having been written for the kind of entertainment-driven everything-fits-together narrative that movies are compelled to conform to. Real life, with its terribly inconvenient nature for pacing and self-contradicting, does even less well when compacted into 2 hours for a primarily visual medium.
If you see a movie adaptation, you can be pretty sure it's inaccurate. The question of accuracy shouldn't be in the detail; it should be in the message that the movie was trying to tell.
"Ip Man - A Legend is Born", for instance, conveyed Yip Man's desire to spread Wing Chun better than any other movie biography, whereas "Ip Man" best discussed his philosophy of life and "The Grandmaster" put him into a historical context completely ignored by the other movies. They're all factually wrong, but they're wrong with different emphases and strengths because they're expressing different perspectives on the same life.