The film is absolutely beautiful to look at and the fight sequences themselves feel more like very tightly choreographed dance sequences. Just the way everything is shot, even the choreography of the fights itself, feels like a product of one person's vision and ideas, without any creative interference from anyone else. It doesnвЂ™t get much better than this вЂ“В and frankly it leaves Ip ManвЂ™s story in the dust вЂ“ but in this cut, at least, itвЂ™s but a blip in an otherwise staid, even unsure film.This is definitely a kung fu film done by an art house filmmaker. And a seeming aside, prefaced by an ungainly вЂњdid I ever the tell you the story вЂ¦,вЂќ marks the filmвЂ™s high point, in an extended montage that chronicles Gong ErвЂ™s efforts to reclaim her fatherвЂ™s 64 Hands martial-arts legacy from a usurper.ДЄ whole movie in miniature, this snow-swept stretch is a perfect synthesis of action choreography (set alongside a whizzing train), personal stakes, and WongвЂ™s signature, so-seductive high-emotions aesthetic. Characters are introduced, only to drop off the radar abruptly. The Second Sino-Japanese War goes by in a blur, though its betrayals and gutting losses will steer the course of the film. After Ip Man and the retiring Northern grandmaster dally, the latterвЂ™s daughter, Gong Er (the tiny, potent Zhang Ziyi), challenges Ip to an honor match, and the two parry and thrust in a magnetic pas de deux that will spark a chaste bond that carries them through a decade marked by war, vendetta, ruin, and redemption. ItвЂ™s a helluva story, to be sure, opening with Ip Man (played by Wong regular Tony Leung Chiu Wai, seemingly ageless, endlessly placid-smiled) at his ascension in the 1930s as a leading light of the Wing Chun fighting style in the Southern provinces, who is tapped to challenge the North for martial-arts supremacy. HeвЂ™s typically more show than tell, but The Grandmaster вЂ“ charting a largely chronological course and plodgy with pedantic title cards that rehash what the attentive viewer has already gleaned вЂ“ is heavy with the telling. But The Grandmaster is his first go at real-life biography, and it doesnвЂ™t feel like a natural fit вЂ“ the traditional biopicвЂ™s streamlined, A-to-Z arc and WongвЂ™s more impressionist ethos. Wong has tackled period films before, sensuously evoking the Sixties in Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love, and 2046, and this isnвЂ™t his first martial arts picture, either ( Ashes of Time was a wuxia epic, both the original 1994 cut and 2008вЂ™s Redux). (Worth noting: No one walked out of 2007вЂ™s featherweight My Blueberry Nights, WongвЂ™s last feature film and his first English-language one, feeling the cine-master was working on solid ground.) So what of the movie now showing stateside? For this diehard Wong fan, it plays like an ambitious and anomalous entry in the canon вЂ“ occasionally breath-catching, but never body-and-soul engrossing like so many of his other works. Those are the facts, more or less what follows is the helpless frustration of the American viewer, who may absorb a version that circles both torpor and transcendence, but not know вЂ“В not now, at least вЂ“В if that filmвЂ™s deficiencies are preexisting or the fault of a deleterious scissoring. cut, which Wong endorses, runs a slim 108 minutes, and has by all accounts been reshaped for American audiences, who, by and large, donвЂ™t have the same foreknowledge of Ip Man, or martial arts, as Asian audiences do. The film now arrives in American theatres, courtesy of distributor The Weinstein Company, which is helmed by Harvey Weinstein, famously nicknamed вЂњHarvey ScissorhandsвЂќ for his perceived overappetite for hacking down running times. Wong released a 130-minute domestic cut in China, where it was a huge hit, then sheared 10 minutes or so off that version for the filmвЂ™s world premiere as the opening night film at the Berlinale in February.

The facts: The internationally acclaimed filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai made a movie about the legendary martial-arts practitioner and teacher Ip Man (or Yip Man). ItвЂ™s a tale of two masters that canвЂ™t be told without footnotes or what-might-have-been frustration, and the book hasnвЂ™t closed on it, not by a long shot.

The grandmaster full movie english