Excerpts

"I read it again and again as a grad student. One of the things he said was that if you've thought about a problem from every angle, you'll recognize the right solution the moment it appears." — Google's AI Brain: Hassabis

It's essential to create space every day for your mind to wander away from your job, and to sort through your thoughts in a more creative way, one that isn't as tied down as ranking your tasks every day. — The Ride of a Lifetime

The best way to rebuild yourself is to go back to learning. — Poor Charlie's Almanack

I'm not going to Chang'an to depend on anyone. I'm going to measure the world with my own feet. — Blades of the Guardians

---

The Movie Blades of the Guardians

This week the Spring Festival movie Blades of the Guardians¹ came to Bilibili. I had nothing to do over the holiday, so I watched it.

I didn't watch a single Spring Festival movie in theaters this year. Not because they weren't good. It's just that how often I watch movies has fallen off a cliff since my student days. Partly it's because I work now and have less time to myself. Partly it's because I have to balance working out, studying and everything else that eats into that time.

I actually read the Blades of the Guardians comic a few years ago. I can't remember exactly when. All I remember is being bored in a bookstore and flipping through volume one. I've forgotten most of the plot.

The film's martial arts director is Yuen Woo-ping,² whose work is legendary. It leaves you stunned. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kung Fu Hustle, The Grandmaster, and internationally The Matrix and Kill Bill. Those are names every film fan knows today.

The cast is all-star, too, with veteran action stars like Jet Li, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Zhang Jin and Nicholas Tse. Next to them, actors like Wu Jing and Zhang Yi look a bit young.

When Jet Li came on screen, I felt a pang. Jet Li has really gotten old. I remember watching his Once Upon a Time in China, Fearless, Tai Chi Master and The Kung Fu Cult Master as a kid, and he was so young then. I also thought of Jackie Chan in Chasing Shadows, which I watched not long ago. The years show on his face too.

I don't know if actors of the Jackie Chan and Jet Li generation count as a memory for people born after 2000. But I grew up on their movies, and seeing how they look now always gives me a sense of how times change.

Back to the film itself. There's not much to say about the fight scenes. Online reviews over the holiday said the fights are great, and that it's fighting from start to finish. That's true. But for me, a plot that's just nonstop fighting doesn't really pull me in.

For me, in a movie like this, the fights are one part, and the dramatic scenes matter just as much. What do the dramatic scenes do in a movie? To me, first they build the characters, and second they move the plot. Only when a character feels three-dimensional do his choices make sense. When a character makes sensible choices, that drives the plot forward, and you don't lose the drama.

Blades of the Guardians has too few of those scenes, and the handful it does have felt too sketchy to me, thin for building characters. For example, who is Daoma in this film? Money-loving, freedom-loving, reluctant to kill, and his past is that he once served the court and lost his family because of it.

In the story, Diting³ stands opposite Daoma. They're both enemies and friends. Friends, because they were once close comrades. Enemies, because when both of their lives hit major upheavals at the same time, their different values set them against each other. Daoma pursues "Long confined in a cage, I'm back to nature at last,"⁴ while Diting is a bit like Song Jiang in Water Margin, though not exactly. He wants Daoma to go back to the court with him and restore order to their lives.

But this clash of worldviews between the two isn't drawn well in the film. The reason is that the adaptation skips a lot of character-building work, so it feels thin.

After watching it, I thought of a film I watched a few years ago, The Warlords. Jet Li is in it too, but back then he was still the lead. That film came out in 2007, when I was only five.

The fights in both films are great. But I think that years from now, when I see another film known for its fights, I'll probably still think of The Warlords, not Blades of the Guardians.

The reason is that on top of its great martial arts, the former fully develops its three characters, Pang Qingyun, Jiang Wuyang and Zhao Erhu. As the story unfolds, it uses the three brothers' different worldviews to fully show the complexity of human nature and the twists of political struggle. That's what makes the whole film so good.

I've always believed that good characters make a good story, because characters are what drive the plot. One truly great character can cover for the flaws of a whole movie.

There are countless examples. Abroad, there's the Joker in The Dark Knight, Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, Captain Jack in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and Forrest in Forrest Gump.

In China, what comes to mind? For me it's Mark in A Better Tomorrow, Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine, and Zhizunbao in A Chinese Odyssey.

I'm giving so many examples to make one point: a character built to the extreme can carry a movie that's otherwise ordinary.

So I think a film like Blades of the Guardians might have been better if it had been made twenty years ago. Movies these days seem to care less and less about building characters.

A few years ago I really liked a theatrical release called Creation of the Gods, directed by Wuershan. After the first one I thought it was great. But I never expected that once the first film made money, the director would simply not bother with the second. All the characters fell apart, the values collapsed, and I wanted to throw up watching it.

That might be why I rarely go to the theater now. My trust has nearly run out.

Look at the only big hit this year so far, Grandma's Love Letters. It doesn't rely on one extraordinary character. It relies on several restrained, true-to-life characters like Xie Nanzhi, Ye Shurou and Zheng Musheng.

That shows that in a movie, building characters doesn't require one perfect character. If you focus on making characters and telling a story, that can make a film too.

So these days I mostly don't choose to see movies in theaters anymore. When I do, it's for big audiovisual spectacles, new work from well-known directors, or re-releases of old films.

This year I've only seen one movie in a theater, Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic. And right now it looks like I'll probably also see Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday. I doubt I'll be interested in anything else.

One more thing. Blades of the Guardians ends with a bunch of characters galloping on horseback into the sunset, saying stirring things. It feels sweeping and moving.

But I think that feeling is actually thin and doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

I've seen this kind of impressionistic ending in more than one movie, but the most successful one is probably Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly. I don't know when this trend started, but a stirring ending can't be done with just a huge scene and a big shot.

An ending like that usually comes when the film has been building the audience's emotions the whole way, and then it uses an image that stands in for feeling to release everything that's been pent up. That's where a truly moving ending comes from.

Footnotes

1. Blades of the Guardians (镖人): a long-running martial arts comic by Xu Xianzhe, set at the end of the Sui dynasty. ↩

2. Yuen Woo-ping: a famous Hong Kong action choreographer and director, known in the industry as the "number one martial arts director under heaven." ↩

3. Diting: originally the mythical beast ridden by the Buddhist bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, said to be able to tell truth from lies. Here it's the name of a character in Blades of the Guardians. ↩

4. "Long confined in a cage, I'm back to nature at last": from Tao Yuanming's "Returning to the Farm to Dwell," poem 1, Eastern Jin dynasty. ↩