Juggling Mike

Yesterday was the opening night for this year’s Fantasia Film Festival. Usually I go see both official opening films, but this year I decided to skip the first (and official) opening film. They were screening the Canadian premiere of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Jay Baruchel attending. While I don’t know if the movie is good or not, it just didn’t feel like a genre film to me. Since it is coming out in theaters soon, I felt no urge to see it that night. The Q&A was apparently pretty interesting though, so I would have liked to have seen that. Hopefully they were recording it (like in the prior years), and will be posted on the Fantasia site soon.

The second movie of the night was my first movie of the festival. I think that for the majority of fans, this was the REAL opening film. It is the sequel to last year’s hit Ip Man. This movie takes place after the events of the first with Ip Man trying to open a martial arts club in Hong Kong. There aren’t as many dramatic events compared to the first movie, but there are still some kick-ass fights. At one point, Ip Man must fight other local masters to prove that he is worthy to train his students. This takes place on top of a table which is hardly large enough to support two people. The entire cinema was cheering at this point. The fight between Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung was great stuff. As with Ip Man 1, there is an inclusion of a foreign master, this time hailing from England. He’s a western boxer and while he may not be as fast as the martial artists, he can throw a mean killer punch.

While I really enjoyed the movie, there are a couple of things that brought the overall rating for me down. The first is that I found the choreography in this movie to be slightly “unbelievable”. In the Masters fight, there were moments where both fighters’ arms would move so fast that they were a blur. While that is acceptable for a science fiction or fictional tale, I found it out of place in a movie based on a real person. Other scenes felt more like Wire Fu than Kung Fu. Besides the action, I also felt like the English actors overacted their parts. While this is most likely on purpose, (probably playing on the stereotypes the local population associate to the “foreign devils”) it felt slightly out of place to me.

Overall though, I still greatly enjoyed the movie and I highly recommend it to everybody. If you have never seen either Ip Man movies, then start with the original (which I still find superior) and you will want to watch the second movie right away. Donnie Yen does an excellent job as Ip Man, and the fights are all awesome!!