My father has always been a movie junkie, particularly old-school sci-fi and adventure flicks and we spent many a Saturday morning and afternoon watching MST3K and StarWars movies, or Star Trek or Indiana Jones. We love an epic adventure story. We love good vs. evil. And even more, we LOVE a great movie we can watch over and over again and never get bored.
While it's certainly true that many many stories have been retold in movies (sometimes several times over -- think of all the variations available on Peter Pan!), a truly classic tale can be exciting nevermind that you've heard it a billion times before. Which is why I was so incredibly excited the first time I saw this:
Oh Jackie Chan. How I love you so.
Is there anything you can't do?
Journey to the West has inspired a lot of other media. Well, it's an old story, older than Shakespeare, and as prevalent to the asian culture and media as the bible is to Christian cultures. The basics of the plot are that the monkey king is journeying west and destroys demons and rids the land of evil, meeting fellow travelers along the way and becoming enlightened.
Two different animated versions of Journey to the West.
Saiyuki likes to pretend it's not about man-love,
and DBZ likes to pretend that it has a real, honest-to-goodness plot. Pffft.
So really, it wasn't terribly surprising that I positively choked on my tongue when I saw there was a version of JttW coming out with Jackie Chan as a main character. AND Jet Li. For real. Here, feast on this tasty morsel of a trailer!
You can find out more about Journey to the West at the Wikipedia page. To see more about the Forbidden Kingdom movie, go to the Moviefone Page
2 comments:
I was pretty sure the main character is some white kid. Jackie Chan plays the drunken master..
I went and saw it this weekend and it was pretty good. There were a few things that weren't so hot about it, but over all it was well done and interesting I thought.
They made a lot of inside jokes and hat tips towards other movies.
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