The Art of Storytelling and The Legend of Chun Li

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Does he at least note that M. Bison in that movie is more of a knockoff Geese Howard?

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 38 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/Bl8ckl85h šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 12 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

I believe this was also the man who brought the terrible Shadow of the Colossus script to Woolie's attention.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 51 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/deeschannayell šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 12 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

city officials: No, we love our slums, it'S where all the people we leave to starve live

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 21 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/alexandrecau šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 13 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

This guys channel is really good and I recommend his other videos to watch as well

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 62 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/CALLOFKTUTLU šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 12 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

He also mentions what an editing mess Suicide Squad is.

Oh and he also has an episode on The Last Airbender movie. Just... everything about it.

I'm gonna enjoy this video when I get home.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 19 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/therealchadius šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 12 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

Echoing that you should definitely check out this dude's channel. Folding Ideas is a great series about filmmaking and the many, many mistakes that are made. The episodes on Suicide Squad, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman in particular highlight just how many small decisions added up to make truly terrible flicks. The three-part 50 Shades retrospective was super interesting too, even for someone who had never read the books or watched the films.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 14 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/jcbaggee šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 12 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

It's amazing how far they missed the mark for Chun in this movie. If you want a good Chun Li movie just make Super Cop or a Police Story movie with ki involved.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 7 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/KaiserGrey šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 13 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

Dan go on Castle Super Beast.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 3 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/lotusthepanther šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 13 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies

Man, that movie made me make an hour long text blog about how bad it was. I wish I still had that document. It was the gawd damn worst movie I've ever seen in my life.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 2 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/pirajacinto šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jan 13 2019 šŸ—«︎ replies
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I would start this with a gag about how thereā€™s nothing worth saying about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, but Iā€™m gonna be talking for, like, twenty minutes straight, so here we go, Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li, a massive failure of intent. [Title Theme] Street Fighter: the Legend of Chun Li is a very odd film. It feels like an honest attempt at taking the video game adaptation and elevating it to the same level of respect as literary adaptations, and does so by mimickingā€¦ The Transformers. You said cars pick their drivers. Sometimes they pick a driver with a cheap-ass father, out the car. Now, this isnā€™t to say that the literary adaptation is inherently high class, there are definitely greater and lesser adaptations out there On one hand you have adaptations like Annihilation that, while not strictly faithful to the original text capture the spirit of the novel in a way that takes advantage of the change in medium, and on the other hand you have stuff like Earthsea. Did you see those red marking on the side of its head? Yes, very attractive. I've read about a dragon once with markings like those. Fascinating, you can tell me by the fire one night. Wait a minute. Red markings? Like the dragon that ravaged Tavnor? That's the one, do you remember it's true name? The one to bind it? The one to subdue it to your will so you can ask it any three questions you desire? Yes! but that specific spread in quality, and the sheer volume of adaptations that have been made, means that a movie based on a book tends to get a pretty fair shake critically. The presuppositions created by the phrase ā€œbased on the best selling novelā€ are broadly neutral, trending toward positive. The same cannot be said for the phrase ā€œbased on the hit video game.ā€ The pursuit of the ā€œrespectableā€ video game movie has remained elusive, but boy are studios still trying. Tomb Raider and Assassinā€™s Creed would be the most recent failed attempts at securing some prestige, but letā€™s roll back a decade. Itā€™s 2009. The Playstation 3 and XBox 360 are hits, and high definition gaming is no longer next gen, itā€™s the standard. Blockbuster video games are investing more and more in narrative. Genres that would have previously done little more than pointed the player in a direction and just said ā€œyeah, uh, shoot the dudes in redā€ are expected to have a campaign laden with pathos, melodrama, full voice acting, and mocapped facial animation. Simultaneously so-called nerd culture has surged into the mainstream with the better part of the decade being dominated by huge geek franchises such as Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Transformers dominating the box office and, to a large degree, the cultural zeitgeist itself. In 2009 Capcom tried to capitalize on this apparent respectability by turning Street Fighter into an arty crime drama. By copying The Transformers. It did not work. I love this job While the dramatic qualities of Michael Bayā€™s 2007 Transformers have been the subject of endless ridicule and criticism, the spectacle still resonated with audiences, and those profits definitely resonated with investors. From aspect ratio to colour palette to story structure, everything about Legend of Chun Li is the budget-friendly version. Same aspect ratio, but using spherical lenses instead of expensive, troublesome anamorphic lenses. Same colour palette, but in broad, washed tones instead of an expensive frame-by-frame colour grade. Same plot structure with a superfluous Troopcop b-plot that only collides with the a-plot at the very end. Itā€™s actually kind of unsettling the degree to which Legend of Chun Li is clearly cribbing from Michael Bayā€™s notes, all part of an attempt at coding itself as a ā€œreal movieā€. It even aspires to a similar weight and intensity. Not just action, but capital D Drama, which brings us to the other primary influence, Ang Leeā€™s Crouching Tiger. On some level this project started as Crouching Tiger, they wanted Legend of Chun Li to be a martial arts action movie that was, at its core, a character driven drama, much like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That's not a bad goal, all told, and a character like Chun Li isn't a bad choice if that's the story you want to tell. Within the Street Fighter universe Chun Li is easily one of the more accessible characters. She's an attractive martial artist who works for Interpol, she's out to avenge her father's death, and... that's about it. Unlike a lot of the other characters from the games you don't have to exposit a deep mythology, explain magic powers, or introduce dozens of other core characters in order to tell her basic story. It is a straightforward origins and revenge plot, which frees you up to really focus on, well, character and story. A good cue to the dramatic intent of the film is in the specifics of the editing. The movie starts with a glory shot of the Golden Gate bridge which pans over to kid Chun Li playing piano and her father watching proudly while adult Chun Li narrates over top ruminating on her childhood dream of being a concert pianist. This moment lasts almost a minute and has only two edits for a very quick insert. From there the film cuts into a much faster paced sequence of aerial shots of Hong Kong, and the music changes from relaxed piano to tense electro rock. Both the editor and cinematographer are working to bring us into Chun Li's emotional space, they want us to share her viewpoint and understand the contrast in her life, the peace and serenity of her early years in San Francisco versus the uncertainty and chaos of Hong Kong. This is solid fundamental film making. So whatā€™s the problem? [Laughs] oh boy is the script terrible. Thatā€™s not the only problem, but if we were to point to a singular core issue that's what went wrong with Crouching Pianist Hidden Street Fighter: the script sucks. The performances leave a lot to be desired, but itā€™s hard to give a powerful performance when the script consists of gems like this: my father was an important business man Your father was a very well connected business man. Kreuk sounds like she's reading a bedtime story to a three year old. Which, yeah, sure, a great way to really elevate your video game movie is to condescend to the audience like theyā€™re actual children, sure, yeah. With my mother gone, the path in front of me was empty. I couldn't help feeling like I was being led somewhere new. Iā€™m actually willing to bet that this voice over, like many a terrible narrator past, was a late addition once they realized the plot was not particularly compelling on its own merits and audiences were having trouble following the setup because itā€™s boring. However Kreukā€™s condescending narration is not the least of the script's problems. For some brevity, let's just make it into a list of major flaws, though I'm not going to be able to get to all of these. 1 - Terrible dialogue 2 - Villain with unclear goals and motivations 3 - Poorly explained stakes 4 - Multiple extraneous characters with dead end plotlines 5 - Main character learns nothing worthwhile and does not change 6 - Changes are made to the source material that actively makes the story worse 7 - Inconsistent moral core in a movie about doing the right thing And that is the bottom line that weā€™re going to dig into here: this movie sucks because the script is terrible. Letā€™s talk about that plot, shall we? As a young child Chun Li wants to be a concert pianist. Her family moves to Hong Kong. She is taught Wushu by her father. However at a young age her father is kidnapped by Bison, played here by Neal McDonough doing his best to try and set himself apart from Raul Juliaā€™s sublime performance of the character by acting the character with a lilting Irish brogue. Chun Li grows up and does become a concert pianist. After a performance one night she receives an ancient scroll as a gift from an unknown person. On her way home she sees a man with a spider web tattoo on his hand get mugged in the subway, and she calls for help, but no one comes and then the scene just ends. This is the kind of moment that isnā€™t going to stand out on the first viewing, because you mentally assume theyā€™re going to fill it in down the line, but they donā€™t. I am, despite multiple viewings, hard pressed to explain the point or purpose of this mugging scene. Moving on Chun Liā€™s mom dies of cancer. Bison has his business partners killed for no discernible reason. Bison menaces Chun Liā€™s father who he has stashed away in a basement somewhere doing something. After her motherā€™s funeral Chun Li gets her scroll read and the woman tells her she needs to find a man named Gen, whoā€™s the guy with the spider web tattoo, and then I guess Chun Li becomes homeless in Thailand because thatā€™s her plan to find Gen? This isn't well explained at all, a lot changes very quickly, and none of her friends or family seem concerned that she's quitting her job and moving to Bangkok on a whim shortly following the death of her mother without making any prior arrangements for housing, finances, or contact. We'll come back to this plot point later. Bison acts menacing while talking about real estate. Chun Li fights off six guys while starving and sleep deprived, then collapses after murdering a man by dropping a shelving unit full of power tools onto him. She's picked up by Gen who takes her back to his place and trains her to make fireballs in an extended training montage and he tells Chun Li that Bison is the person who kidnapped her father, and so Chun Li starts spying on Bisonā€™s team. Actually, as a part of this he explains that he used to be part of Shadaloo, Bison's organization, but he grew a conscience so he started the Order of the Web to try and repair the damage that he had done as a criminal, but heā€™s only, like, fifty, which would mean these ancient scrolls are younger than a New Kids on the Block poster. So the next 20 minutes or so are largely concerned with Bisonā€™s real estate conspiracy. He is, I guess, extorting the city of Bankok into selling him the riverside slums so that he can kick out all the residents, bulldoze the neighbourhood, and build a series of luxury condos, but Iā€™m not sure why he needs to do all this extorting because this sounds like exactly the kind of garbage move cities are already more than willing to do. Also thereā€™s a MacGuffin called the White Rose that Bison is trying to smuggle into the city. This sub plot leads to Chun Li following Bisonā€™s henchwoman Cantana into a nightclub where weā€™re going to put the movie on pause and talk for a second about gaze. I have talked in the past about the Kuleshov effect, the principle of Montage, and the psychological mechanisms through which editing creates meaning. Now, gaze describes the act of looking. In a film context we are principally concerned with the gaze of the camera, meaning what the camera chooses to look at and how it chooses to look at it, and yes this involves anthropomorphizing the movie. No better are the ideas of gaze and montage demonstrated than when a film chooses to use its gaze to express the gaze of a character within the film, which is itself a situation manufactured to justify gazing. So, Chun Liā€™s plan to get information out of Cantana is to seduce her, a plan to which Cantana is potentially receptive because sheā€™s attracted to women, a detail that is communicated to us the audience via the camera following her gaze, and gazing on the women in the dance club. This isnā€™t necessarily condemnation, but I think itā€™s useful and instructive to actually break down the why and how of this information exchange, how is it that we, as an audience, come to understand that Cantana is attracted to women purely via the use of juxtaposed images. Being aware of these kinds of mechanisms makes us more alert as film viewers, more conscious of the ways in which a film is steering our attention and our emotions, and in turn making us better equipped to vocalize the messages that media is presenting us with, in this case the way that the film has chosen to justify staring at womenā€™s asses by using a female character as the agent of that staring. Anyway, this subplot ends with Chun Li fighting Cantana in the bathroom, and as sheā€™s escaping from the nightclub she shoots a man in the chest at point blank range. So, yeh, heā€™s dead. In a scene that is up there in the realms of ā€œwhere did they think they were going with this?ā€ Bison is using Cantanaā€™s dead body as a punching bag because sheā€™d already said too much. Alright, strap in for a second, ā€˜cus this is where things really jump off the rails. Like, the punching bag scene is definitely something, Gen fills in Bisonā€™s whole back story. So, in his youth as the orphan of some Irish missionaries who died in Thailand he used to just steal fish but crossfade time jump to much later in life when heā€™s I guess no longer homeless he takes his very pregnant new wife to a cave and kills her by ripping their baby out through her belly in order to put all his goodness into the baby so that he wouldn't have a conscience and would only be pure evil. We'll come back to this one too. Evil guys attack the secret hide out in the stupidest way possible. They send in ninjas to fight hand to hand when they have a rocket launcher in the car. Both parts of that are stupid, but it does give us the best line in the film. I'll do it myself In the explosion Gen dies, then Bison hires Vega to kill Chun Li then Vega promptly gets his ass kicked. Now, this next scene, Chun Li physically assaults a civilian for not giving up private shipping manifests and gets some more information about the White Rose, but for me the scene is more instructive because of the sound. I havenā€™t pointed this out up until now, but the dialogue in the film has overwhelmingly been re-dubbed, which is actually part of why the performances feel so flat and disjointed: the emotion of the face and lips just doesnā€™t quite match the sound that youā€™re hearing. Also thereā€™s a different character to the dialogue thatā€™s recorded in a sound booth versus the dialogue thatā€™s recorded on set. Itā€™s subtle, but pervasive. Now, if you listen to this guyā€™s lines, listen lady, I think it's time for you to go Hear how theyā€™re kinda mumbly and overlapping with a lot of room noise and echoes? I think it's time for you to go I wouldnā€™t be surprised to find out that most of the on set sound was like this, which is why thereā€™s so much dubbing like this What does this have to do with my father? Many people wanted those connections. People like Bison. The leader of Shadaloo Moving on with the plot, Chun Li gets trapped and captured. Bison kills her dad in front of her. She escapes, but takes a grazing shot in a market, and manages to slip away once a riot starts. Gen shows up because heā€™s not dead, just a dick, uses magic powers to heal her bullet wound in seconds, and she finally figures out how to make a fireball. Returning to the dock she threatens this guy again, there's a big fight at the docks, Gen fights Balrog, they figure out that the White Rose is Bison's daughter, Chun Li knocks Bison off the roof with a fireball, kills him in front of his daughter, buries her dad, plants some sequel bait, credits roll. Did you even notice the two supporting characters that I cut from the plot? These two? The interpol agent and the Thai detective? Nope? Guess we didn't need them. His name's Bison Iā€™ve tracked him through eleven major cities on four continents and never come close, not once. They actually take up a substantial chunk of the screen time, theyā€™re a couple of cops in pursuit of Bison and his Shadalaoo organization, but mostly they just sit slightly off to the side of the action or show up after everything is over. Theyā€™re pretty much just here for padding and innuendo. We should be more aggressive Looks like you got that down Well, unlike you, I don't lose my man Alright, [cracking noise] let's start with the whole "abandoning your past life" storyline. The first major flaw in this is that no one tries to stop her. Her mother just died, she's clearly in a deeply vulnerable place in her life, and not one of these people, friends, or extended family tries to intervene when she quits her job and packs up her house. this isn't indicative of a plot hole, it's indicative of a fundamental lack of drama or conflict. And this all ties in to another issue: she doesn't actually abandon everything. She doesn't get up and walk away from it all, taking only some bare essentials and living with the poorest of society. Oh, sure, she sleeps in an alley and skips out on showering, but at the end of the movie she's moving right back into her multimillion dollar Hong Kong mansion. Living on the streets for a couple weeks was probably instructive, but she was basically a poverty tourist. If she ever got tired of living in a slum there was always a mansion waiting back in Hong Kong. She sacrificed nothing. This ties directly into the character arc: Chun Li doesn't really learn anything or change. At the start of the film she's a confident, spunky, kindhearted person. As the film progresses she dabbles in poverty tourism, kills three men in cold blood without remorse, and returns to her life of wealth as a spunky, kindhearted, slightly more confident person. Now, that's not an irredeemable problem. Lots of good movies have main characters who don't learn or change all that much. But it IS a problem when your movie opens with the main character pondering how they turned into the person they are! Sometimes I wonder how I got to be the way I am. The writers have explicitly set up a transformation story. I used to be a little girl who wanted to be a piano player, now I'm a cold hearted killer who murders people for the greater good. I used to be a selfish, upper class snob, but I learned the value of hard work, community, and sacrifice. These are the kinds of stories that we are, very literally, being told to expect. Any transformation contrast is deeply compromised by the early scenes of the film, when her father is kidnapped. Now, the problem is not the existence of these scenes, but their proportional length within the film. We're shown that she's been exposed to this criminal world since she was a little girl and we only spend the briefest time with her as a civilian. This is a really good example of how movies need to function emotionally and not just literally. We can look at the opening of the film and extrapolate that logically everything between her father being kidnapped and her success as an adult was more or less normal but we donā€™t feel the respective weight of these things Because it's such a tiny part of the opening her time as a concert pianist feels more like a brief interlude in a life of violence, a hobby that she took up to pass the time waiting for revenge, rather than the normal world that she's pulled out of, and what little we see of her in that stage of her life is basically the same person we see at the end of the film. The only thing that changes is the number of living parents and felony murders. Next up is the whole thing where Bison transfers his goodness into a little baby. I have a couple problems with this scene. First, and least important, is that the intensity and violence of the scene is considerably out of place given the tone and treatment of violence throughout the rest of the film. It's an extremely jarring kick-the-dog scene that's meant to show the audience just how evil the bad guy is, but I think it becomes less effective because it's so relatively extreme. It's such a sharp break from almost everything else that it pulls you out to a place where it stops being the actions of a character and becomes the decision of some filmmakers. Youā€™re not thinking about the moment and its place in the emotional tapestry of the movie, youā€™re thinking about why the people who made this made it the way they did. The only other scene that comes close is where Bison is using Cantanaā€™s body as a punching bag, while everything else is sanitized, bloodless, fantasy violence. Beyond that is the implications of this scene on the metaphysical world of the film. So, first, things that happen in movies donā€™t need to be true. Like, characters can believe something without that thing being diegetically factual. It's one thing for this myth to exist, for Gen to tell Chun Li this mystical rumour that he heard, but it's effectively confirmed later in the film that his daughter is, in fact, the vessel holding all the goodness of his soul. That means that in the world of Street Fighter good and bad are tangible products that can be transferred from one person to another. While the implications on free will and morality are staggering, most importantly it does nothing to actually improve the story at all. It makes Bison less comprehensible. It doesnā€™t make his goals any clearer. We still have no idea what he's up to, what he's doing on a day to day basis, and what his end goal is. It actually makes it worse. By offloading the explanation onto supernatural evil the screenwriters fall into the trap where the villainā€™s actions are tautologically justified by them being the villain. Itā€™s fine for melodrama, Raul Julia understood that The day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me? It was Tuesday. But Legend of Chun Li is trying to take itself seriously. There's one thing I learned in the slums: when people are hungry there's nothing they won't do. Everyone has a price. There's a plot in here about buying up waterfront property for redevelopment, but they're extorting the city board into making the sale which makes no sense. Was the board zoning the area as a slum for purely altruistic reasons? It's like the writers couldn't decide if Bison should be using black magic, private military, shady business practices, or a Chinatown style shakedown, so they tried to squeeze them all in. It's hard to care about any of them since the stakes are so vague. The people who live in the slum get kicked out, then vanish never to be seen or mentioned again, not that we ever really connected with them in the first place. The big showdown at the end with Interpol, Bison, and Chun Li doesn't even have anything to do with the whole slum buyout anyway, and the plot line is never resolved. The only reason anyone cares about the White Rose shipment is because they think it might be a weapon, even though Bisonā€™s whole plan is pretty much just capitalism. To top it all off, the changes to the source material actively make the story worse. In her original incarnations Chun Li is alternately an undercover cop or an Interpol agent. Changing her from a cop to a concert pianist does nothing to raise the stakes or make the character more relatable. In fact it makes the story hard to tell because you now have to justify all kinds of crazy crap that's super easy to hand wave if she works for interpol. Why is she in Thailand? Why does she know martial arts? Why does she have combat training and not freak out the first time someone pulls a gun on her? Why does she care about the legal front of a criminal organization? all of this action nonsense is just explained in one line if she works for Interpol. The character conflict comes baked in: when she confronts Bison does she stick with her training and let the courts bring him to justice, or does she extract revenge and kill him herself? When she meets Gen does she stick with Interpol with its superior resources, but strict rules and expectations, or become a vigilante and join the Order of the Web? Instead we're asked to believe that a concert pianist who learned kung fu as a kid is going to be willing to throw herself at a well armed international criminal organization and not wind up as Jane Doe floating down the river. So, they wanted to legitimize the video game adaptation and they screwed it up with an awful script. Every single problem with this movie comes back to the script. The characters frequently make decisions based on information they don't have because the script needs to get them somewhere, the villains are an indistinct mass made of every bad guy trope possible, resulting in an antagonist that's too confusing to take seriously, and entire chunks of the film are flat out useless to the story. the funny thing is that they failed so hard that even when talking about video game movies, a sub-genre that is peppered with examples that plumb the depths of shoddy, hilarious, and hilariously shoddy filmmaking, that they made something most notable for how forgettable it is. It does all make the movie somewhat unique. You're not a schoolgirl anymore. Really in all the agonizing over when video game movies are going to finally be good we miss that they already peaked with Super Mario Bros. in 1993. Okay, look, how many Marios are there between the two of ya? There's three: there's Mario Mario and Luigi Mario Mike. Mike! Help these Marios around the side.
Info
Channel: Folding Ideas
Views: 451,482
Rating: 4.947175 out of 5
Keywords: Criticism, Legend of chun li, street fighter, bad movies, kuleshov, gaze
Id: 9Hl203g5k3Y
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)
Published: Fri Jan 11 2019
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