The Grandmasters 2012 (一代宗師)

[spcnet]

The imagery looks beautiful and it will be interesting to compare Tony Leung's version of Ip Man to Donnie Yen's. So excited!

http://www.spcnet.tv/Movies/The-Grandmasters-p1943.html

[Mido-Ban]

yea, tonys not hardcore martial artist like donnie, but he trained 2 or 3 years in wing chun from one of ipmans son.

[C-luv-H]

I think i'm going to like all the versions.... lol but donnie versions was really good, the action, fight was awesome....

[Surferket]

Just watched this and the imagery and cinematography is top notch. Sad to say the fighting is pretty crappy due to the 3 main leads not being from a true martial arts background. Hence, gimmicky camera tricks are used to hide the deficiencies. Perhaps only Zhang Ziyi looks pretty ok as she has basic training in her academy days. The rest of the fight scenes are too disconnected most of the time to see what happened, like when and how did Mo San killed his master since it's impossible to tell from that fight scene. The second half of Ip Man in HK was pretty empty and slow and filled with flashbacks. Julian's assassin/killer Razor's role was pretty much unnecessary as it has no significant connection to any of the 3 leads and only passingly with Zhang Ziyi's.

No, it's not Donnie's version of bone crunching short punches at all. Only the opening fight scene in a rain-filled courtyard looked like an Ip Man movie. As for the few Tony fight scenes, well, they don't look much like Wing Chun or Ip Man at all. The movie closed with the mentioned that Ip Man moved to HK leaving his wife behind in Fosan and he never saw her again as she died there of illness. It also mentioned that he lost his 2 daughters during the Japanese occupation. Nothing was mentioned of him besting any Japanese officer in a competition. Very, very different from Donnie's version. He was pretty much a nothing during that time with a mention that he refused to be a collaborator, yet took home leftover food from collaborators' fine dining. Perhaps the only good thing I can say of Tony's Ip Man was his angst filled face as he lives in his flashbacks. The whole movie is composed of flashbacks and is more of an arthouse movie than an action movie.

The 2 Donnie movies and even the young Ip Man version were superior for better story flow and fight scenes.

See the Grandmaster as an arthouse movie and you won't be disappointed. But for a movie that took 10 years to produce well I think the producer had wasted his and his actors' time.