![]() ![]() Director Herman Yau is a director who makes lower budget genre movies with social agendas, ranging from gangster movies to hitman flicks to wuxia flicks with sociological detail. The fights are filmed in real time with very little slow motion or wire-fu to show them as realistically as possible. Released this year after The Grandmaster and unlike Wong Kar Wai's memory play, it's steeped in wide shots of meticulously-recreated post-War Hong Kong and details of social behaviour and mores of the time. Where The Grandmaster is dream-like and impressionistic, Ip Man: The Final Fight is a naturalistic social drama, much more ambitious than the same director's earlier The Legend is Born – Ip Man. Herman Yau, however, is not a director to easily dismiss, as you will read later. It was considered a schlocky cash-in to those movies, but had interesting moments before the genre demands of an all-out fight in the final act. It was an empowerment fantasy as all martial arts movies are, but in this case it was also tailored to appeal to Mainland Chinese audiences just as the Chinese box office market was opening up to movies made by people not from China, a few years before Hollywood began to make their deals to get their movies into the Chinese market.Ģ010's The Legend is Born – Ip Man was a lower budget affair made by different producers, preferring a more straight, naturalistic biopic approach to the early life of Ip Man in China, serving chronologically as an unofficial prequel to the Donnie Yen movies. These fights never happened in real life, but they went down a treat as visceral experiences for the audience, with a subtext of China reclaiming masculine power from past humiliations at the hands of foreigners. ![]() ![]() Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen's Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010) are fairly straightforward patriotic Kung Fu blockbusters with Yen's portrayal of the grandmaster as a paragon of virtue and Chinese masculinity against foreign – specifically the Japanese, British and Americans – comers out to humiliate China. ![]()
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