{"id":12947,"date":"2019-02-02T20:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-02-03T01:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12947"},"modified":"2019-02-02T19:42:57","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T00:42:57","slug":"a-touch-of-zen-1968-king-hu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12947","title":{"rendered":"A Touch of Zen (1968, King Hu)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first I&#8217;ve seen by the legendary King Hu &#8211; his followup to <em>Dragon Inn<\/em>.  I kinda love him, great compositions and movement, and killer distortion when he pans with the super-wide lens, which I know is a defect but in the fisheye 2019 post-<em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/12927\">Favourite<\/a><\/em> world it comes across as a feature.  Apparently the first Chinese film to be awarded at Cannes (in main competition with <em>Pastoral<\/em>, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/11824\">Kasper Hauser<\/a><\/em> and <em>Chronicle of the Years of Fire<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image18\/touchofzen1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>We follow Gu (Chun Shih of <em>Dragon Inn<\/em>), who is a well-meaning but unambitious scholar and painter, with a tendency towards being clumsy and ineffectual.  He&#8217;s the patsy witness to all the nearby political intrigue, falling for the hot girl next door, Yang (Feng Hsu of <em>Legend of the Mountain<\/em>, later a producer on Chen Kaige films), who is in hiding after her dad was tortured to death, then in the second half he inexplicably becomes a master of strategy and helps Yang and her loyal generals ward off the corrupt government attackers.  Some invincible monks get involved, there are a bunch of good faceoffs, Gu wears too much makeup.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image18\/touchofzen2.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first I&#8217;ve seen by the legendary King Hu &#8211; his followup to Dragon Inn. I kinda love him, great compositions and movement, and killer distortion when he pans with the super-wide lens, which I know is a defect but in the fisheye 2019 post-Favourite world it comes across as a feature. Apparently the first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[410,110,2526,1744,427],"class_list":["post-12947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1960s","tag-ghosts","tag-king-hu","tag-monks","tag-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12991,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12947\/revisions\/12991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}