Man of Tai Chi

I've been thinking a lot about the devil lately.

I've never been a big fan of Christian-based horror fiction because it tends to make horror punitive, but I love the idea of the Devil. I love the idea of a monster that seduces and corrupts rather than simply causing havoc. It's subtle and more fraught with tension. Any psycho can stick a knife into someone, but it takes a special kind of monster to take your spirit. How many pieces of yourself can you give away before you're no longer you?

As cool as the idea is, the payoff never worked for me. There's a passage in Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Seasons of Mist storyline where the devil bemoans the ideas people have that he goes around collecting souls like a fishwife at market. A soul is too abstract and meaningless of a prize. The devil needs something concrete.

In Man of Tai Chi, the amazing martial arts film from Keanu Reeves, there's a moment when Keanu Reeves's sinister manipulator Donaka Mark is watching surveillance footage of Tiger Chen. He focused the camera on Chen's face, smiles, and says, "innocence." It's a chilling moment. Up until that point I'd assumed Keanu Reeves was a garden variety crime boss whose main business involved hosting deadly fights for rich perverts. The second he targets something as ephemeral as innocence he becomes something darker and more menacing.

Tiger Chen certainly doesn't lack for innocence. When I first saw the trailer, I wasn't sure I'd buy the actor as an action star. His body is too slight and he looked more like a teenager than a stern kung-fu warrior. He starts the movie with a sort of naive impatience. He's admirably centered in the face of his thankless delivery job, he's a loving son to his parents, and he trains with a wise old man living in a gorgeous temple. His sifu's talk of meditation and centeredness eludes him. While a nice guy, it's clear early in the film that he's got a serious case of Brown Belt Syndrome, the peculiar affliction most martial artists go through when they feel a burning desire to test their skills in a real fight.

Spotted at a kung fu exhibition by Donaka Mark's recruiters, he's invited to a mysterious job interview. Silent men pick him up in fancy cars and he's flown to an anonymous gray building. He's escorted to a room, left alone for a few unsettling moments, and suprise-attacked by a brutal Muay Thai fighter. Chen overcomes the man, gets paid a significant amount of money, and invited back.

The rest of the film follows Chen's descent into hell. The first dozen fights involve opponents using different styles and fights in the same anonymous gray rooms. As Chen's skill and bloodlust grow, he's brought into boutique fights on boats off the mainland, where he's forced to descend into new levels of savagery to overcome a pair of skilled opponents. Finally, when Chen has sunk to his nadir, Donaka Mark asks him to break his final taboo: kill his opponent.

By that point in the film, I wasn't sure that Tiger Chen wouldn't take Donaka Mark up on it. His later matches show him in complete control and he doesn't so much beats as dominates his opponent. He'd been kicked out of mainstream kung fu tournaments for excessive brutality, he became edgy and impatient with everyone, and he challenged his sifu to a rage-fueled match at the temple. The latter was a spectacular scene and it felt like a child furiously rejecting the teachings of the father. Unlike a lot of martial arts films, where the practitioner is almost saintly in their morality, Tiger Chen has fallen dangerously close to damnation.

But Tiger Chen does hesitate when told to kill his opponent. So Donaka Mark, clad in a black suit and obsidian mask, steps into the ring and snaps the man's neck. The way Mark looks up at Tiger Chen with wrathful eyes behind his expressionless mask reminded me of the inhuman Michael Myers from the Halloween films. By that point, I had no doubt that Donaka Mark was one of the most effective depictions of Lucifer I've ever seen. He'd recognized something inside Tiger Chen, cultivated it, and turned it in a darker direction. The best seducers understand exactly where you're weak and get you to believe that it is a strength.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the ending fight between Donaka Mark and Tiger Chen. I'd never previously thought of Keanu Reeves as a large person, but he positively towers over his opponent. Unlike a lot of the previous fighters, who attack with blindingly fluid swiftness, there's something stiff and methodical about Mark's fighting style. He comes off as unstoppable, again drawing a comparison to the unkillable Michael Myers. The fight ends and we're left with some ambiguity. Did Tiger Chen's sifu's philosophy sink in? Was Donaka Mark's corruption of Tiger Chen complete? The man who stares off into the temple valley at the end of the film seems sadder and more wise. Maybe he's won, maybe he's lost. Once you shake hands with the Devil, you can never come clean.

There's so much good stuff in the movie. Reeves turns out to be a surprisingly good action director. He tailors his directing style to the characterization of the fights. Fights were Tiger is in control are smooth exercises, whereas fights where he's confused or afraid are chaotic without getting lost in American-style shaky camera. There's a fantastic subplot where a female police officer attempts to shut down Donaka's fight club, and she's portrayed as both skilled and fearless. The legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping creates nothing less than a martial arts ballet, where disparate styles clash together elegantly. The script is strong, the performances are spectacular, and there's a lot of smart stuff about purity versus corruption. Most martial arts films I've seen lately are simply contests of the body. Action films in general are examinations of the body in motion. Very few are about the soul at war with itself.

The Crow

I've seen The Crow so many times that I never need to watch it again. I've internalized it. It's a part of me.

It is a beautiful film. There isn't anything like it, beyond Alex Proyas' follow up Dark City. It also carries an extra edge because the film's star, Brandon Lee, died making it in a horrific shooting accident. Fourteen-year-old me was a martial arts movie nut. I'd been studying shotokan karate for a year or two and I became one of those white kids who wore Bruce Lee tee-shirts. I'd seen Brandon Lee's big premiere Rapid Fire and I was excited to see what else he could do. I was devastated when I heard what happened. I bought every magazine covering the story, from People Magazine to Black Belt, and I devoured every scrap of information on what happened, as if information could provide control over grief. By the end, I came to the conclusion that it was a dislodged shell casing propelled by the gunpowder from a blank, plus it was the dark juju from a film featuring such dark subject matter, plus it was the secret masters of the martial arts world getting revenge on the Lee family for Bruce introducing martial arts secrets to the world.

The Crow came along during the right time of my life. I was really into horror and the occult. I was creeping into my goth phase. I had a headful of fairy tales, an angsty heart, no sense of scale or irony, and a mean streak fused with an adolescent's desperate desire to be loved.

The movie is a fairy tale. After a couple are murdered for nebulous reasons involving fighting tenant evictions and slum lords, the boyfriend comes back as a half-insane revenant. Guided by his spirit-crow, he butchers his assailants more-or-less effortlessly before returning to the grave with his angelic girlfriend. It's a story of True Love. Eric and Shelly are Meant To Be Together and they can't rest until he Puts The Wrong Things Right.

I'm not entirely sure when the film is supposed to take place but I assume it's one of those five minutes in the future kind of things. The Detroit in the film can't exist in real life. It's always night and the city is almost pure obsidian. Everything is wet and dirty and broken. The people are either junkies or sociopathic thrill killers or Ernie Hudson. The crime lord behind it all reminds me less of Scarface and more of the myth-speaking douchey yoga teachers in my neighborhood. In other words, it's stylized beyond reality. It creates a world of its own and works brilliantly within its own context. In a weird way, The Crow is an inversion of the Warren Beatty film Dick Tracy, which is another neo-noir set in its own unique world.

It's impossible not to be on Eric Draven's side. He's a walking raw nerve. He can brutalize a corrupt pawn broker and heal a junkie's poisoned body. He's pain and rage and empathy incarnate. At his most insane, he reminds me of Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. There's a scene where Draven interrupts a gang meeting looking for his last victim. When the Amazing Interracial Gang cut him in two, he recovers and massacres the room to My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's song "After The Flesh." Midway through the massacre he stops, picks up a sword, and says "you're all going to die" in a dead man's ice-cold voice. It thrilled me in a way I can only describe as visceral.

Yet, as influential as the movie was to my younger self, I I think I outgrew it.

The big issue I have with the movie is the whole idea of True Love. Eric and Shelly were perfect in every way. We see less than five minutes of their entire relationship and it consists of them being adorable, her smiling down on him like an angel, and the pair of them goofing around with masks and burned food. We never see them disagree or doubt or fight. In other words, we never see them act like two human beings in a real relationship. These days, I think it's interesting how we never really learn anything about Shelly. She's a cypher. She exists to be perfect, to be raped and murdered, and to be the ideal that inspires an ultimately horrible massacre. She isn't a person, she's a statue on a pedestal.

I don't have a lot of patience for avengers these days. There's always something patriarchal about them. You sullied my woman/family and took them away from me, so I have a man's right to do whatever horrible thing I want to in order to avenge it. I'm also too old for fairy tales. I'm too old for simplicity. "True love" doesn't exist. Real love is lumpy and complicated and painful because people are lumpy and complicated and painful, but there's an authentic beauty in that fragility. It has more weight because it has more humanity.

If I were rewriting the screenplay of The Crow, I'd make it abundantly clear that it wasn't Eric Draven running around in the tragedy mask. Eric Draven remains moldering in the ground. The thing moving through the city butchering people is an idea, a figment, and it commits atrocity because it's a broken thing created by pain. In other words, it's a slightly more noble version of the girl from The Ring.

I am looking forward to the remake, if it ever actually comes into being. There's a lot of meat on these bones. Grief and anger are central human emotions and, in many ways, The Crow is one of the purer revenge stories. Because Eric Draven is unliving and insane, he is Vengeance Incarnate. There's a line in the comic that always stuck with me (yeah, I know the comic is significantly different) where he asks a person if he sees Eric's smile. It's sad and evil. Sad because he's utterly alone. Evil because he's dead and he still moves. You see? A dead man visits you.