Why I love martial arts movies

This is Tony Jaa, who does all his own stunts - no CGI - in Ong-Bak The Thai Warrior, with a review here.  While the film is given 2 1/2 stars out of 4 here, Netflix gives it, I think more appropriately, almost 5 out of 5.

Over the past weekend, we watched three martial arts pictures, including the Indonesian Merantau, the first mention of which my son found at outlawvern.com, home of Vern, the Outlaw Critic and also home of Badass Cinema.  Of his 2006 Badass 100 titles, I, not to mention my son, have seen, if not all, certainly a lot.   This is how we roll when I'm not stamping or pondering or describing The Reading Man's PTSD.

Our third recent viewing, another Thai production, was Raging Phoenix.

Here are some of the reasons why I love martial arts movies.  It began as a shared adventure with my son after his father left.

He bought a book about Hong Kong action cinema - John Woo and others -  started reading it to me in the car on the way home.  We began to track down as many of the mentioned titles as we could.  While not all specifically martial arts, it was a new world and a place to begin.  There were themes of ghosts, revenge, myth, might, honor, valor and a lot of bad-ass-ness.  We have a Bruce Lee poster in the living room.

I find the action involving as it is real, actual skill and training being practiced there on the screen, discipline to be admired and appreciated.

How we found our way back to this genre last week was the result of trying to watch a Gillian Anderson mini-series which sounded okay and turned out to be yet another sad depiction of a serial killer.  I will not watch another underwear fetishist/psychopath and think of it as entertainment.  Correction:  I will not watch another underwear fetishist or fetishist of any kind/psychopath and think of it as skilled storytelling.  It is a cheap and lazy device.  Happily, our Netflix queue, thanks to Vern's recommendations over time, held other choices.

We were both flattened by whatever drains on psychic and other energies had hold of us and wanted to be transported, to other ways of being, to other locales.  The three movies we saw, on three separate nights, each followed by a new episode of Arrested Development, depicted, variously, commitment to tradition, values of honor, family and community above self, anti-materialism - not necessarily the intention but certainly the result - courage, physical and mental strength, focus, spiritual practices - lives with a strong spiritual component - and dazzling feats of skill. And attractive, appealing lead characters.  Always a plus.

Whether it is Jackie Chan, Tony Jaa, Jet Li, Iko Uwais, Gordon Liu, whether it is kung-fu (Shaolin and other varieties), Muay-Thai, drunken boxing, karate, Akira Kurosawa directing Toshiro Mifune's ronin (who undertook the most dangerous stunts himself), JeeJa Yanin playing an autistic woman with powerful martial arts skills in Chocolate, or a Quentin Tarantino-sponsored festival of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies rarely, if ever, seen in America, it is all Junior Mints mixed with the hot, fresh popcorn.  These pictures - action and stories - transport me, take me out of myself and restore proportion.  The village scene at the end of Ong-Bak, in which Tony Jaa demonstrates that his love of elephants is as great as his passion for martial arts, so touched me.  While our tradition of watching movies together goes back to my son's second or third year, our fanboy/fangirl status for martial arts has been going on for nearly 20 years.  It's a gift.