Irritated by excessive Wire- Fu ! (1 Viewer)

[Yee-Ming]

Absolutely. The problem I suspect is that actors, as opposed to martial artists, need to be let down gently, so the illusion is destroyed as they lightly touch down, or don't come down fast enough, whereas I guess when martial artists do wire-fu, their assistants more or less "drop" them when time comes to return to Earth, so you get a better "feel" to the whole thing. As a child, when I watched Hong Kong movies and TV shows, the illusion was indeed very compelling and I really believed these well-trained martial artists could leap that high -- until my father told me otherwise. Whereas most Hollywood actors (Matrix team excluded, though), are unable or unwilling to subject themselves to that sort of abuse, so you get a "float down like a feather" impression, which destroys the illusion.

 

[Matthew_Millheiser]

I've got to admit that even though I really like the movies, the wirework in the X-Men movies bugs me. It's like they spend most of the time in the movies doing a relatively realistic take on mutant powers, but then once Wolverine starts fighting everyone gets all floaty. It just doesn't fit.

I would put it to you that the "fight scenes" are the weakest aspects of the X-Men films. I really liked X2, but the Wolverine/Lady Deathstryke (or whatever the hell her name was) fight was not only unbelievably laughable, it ground the film to a screeching halt.

Wirework (and to a greater extent, CGI-assisted fights) works for something like "The Matrix" since it takes place in a VR world or certain Martial Arts films that are grounded in fantasy/unreality (Hero, CTHD, etc.). It just looks silly and artificial elsewhere.

What not only looks more realistic but has a stronger visceral impact? The fights in Hard Boiled or Daredevil?

 

[Tony Whalen]

Yup... I hate the sudden influx of wire-work.

While I realize that wire-fu takes effort...I *now* find myself to be much more impressed by fight scenes that do NOT use wire-work, or use it in a more subtle fashion. (Equilibrium comes to mind... great scenes there.)

Charlies Angels was supposed to be campy, but that lispy Barrymore fight just bit. I haven't bothered with Full Throttle.

Nope... give me REAL martial-artistry over wire-fu any day.

 

[Paul_Sjordal]

Sometimes wire work bothers me, sometimes it doesn't, and I can't find any rational explanation for when I get which reaction.

The wire work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon really bothered me. The wire work and CGI in Matrix doesn't bother me at all, because the "not quite right VR" excuse explains it all away. The wire stuff in X2 didn't bother me for some reason, but it did in the first X-Men movie.

I think one big thing to making wire stuff work is that you have to monkey with time (preferrably slow it down), so that the human eye is less sensitive to something being off.

 

[Charles CB]

Actually JoeMKal,

Ong Bak didnt use any wire-work I dont think. In fact on the DVD there is a Demo reel of the stars work thats states that he uses no wires. But you are right, this one of the best martial arts movies ever. Everyone, do yourself a favor and find it.

 

[Jeff Kohn]

Ong Bak didnt use any wire-work I dont think. In fact on the DVD there is a Demo reel of the stars work thats states that he uses no wires. But you are right, this one of the best martial arts movies ever. Everyone, do yourself a favor and find it.

Well, I checked netflix, dddhouse, and hkflix, and came up empty. Any idea where we can get this (preferably region-0)? How's the quality of the DVD?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

The only wire-work-movie I can stand is Matrix. There, at least they have the excuse that "hey, it's vr, and mind over matter can really matter in here!".

Watching the Charleys Angels remake made me want to hurl. Also, I'm not entirely certain that excuse of "well, you're not supposed to take it seriously!" is at all accurate... I think they were plenty serious making it, only after the fact did they realize they had made a total comedy and have to laugh unconvincingly...

If someone is going to perform feats that are inhuman, at least the story should be about someone who isn't entirely human. Superheroes? Great! Vampires? Super! Overweight little girls and/or anorexic girls with zero muscle tone? Noooo.

 

[David Rogers]

Once again, naysayers prove the point. It's not CG or Wire that's bad.

It's *BAD* CG or *BAD* Wire that's bad.

When used correctly to complete an illusion of motion on-screen, these tools create breathtaking visuals. When used poorly, they create very artificial looking visuals that are jarring and thus off-putting.

Matrix was a good example; the actors went through a physical training period where they were acclimated to the physical combat and the wire work. When the shots were done for the picture, the actors had bridged some of the gap between actor and stuntman, and the result were fight sequences that have a high degree of reality-look, yet also avoid the old-time “obscuring camera angles” to prevent revealing the replaced actor. Which is what audiences are after when we go to a action flick; we want unreal things to look real on the screen, preferably with us believing the Hero (and not his stunt double) is up to the tricks we’re hungering over.

Real people can’t do what we expect the heroes and villains in our favorite stories to be able to do. The worst action got used to be the ludicrous amounts of damage characters would take prior to getting up and finishing off their opponent at a dramatic moment (i.e., westerns and cop flicks where the hero was beaten from one side of the screen to the other for several minutes before suddenly shrugging off all the damage and laying the foe out), or the endless clips of guns during gunplay (where characters never reload despite firing continuously).

These days ‘bad’ has come to also include what we’ve now seen can be done badly with CG or wire; characters that seem to move in defiance of physical laws. It’s okay for characters to make impossible kicks and punches, jumps and runs, but they should *look* as if they’re realistically defying the laws of physics. Not as if they are painted characters from CG or clearly suspended from wires. For the action fan’s joy to be uninterrupted, the characters should retain the sense of mass and momentum we expect in the real world; they should retain thus *as* they make incredible leaps and flips, kicks and punches.

As an action movie fan who has a very critical eye towards action, there are a few common errors I’ve seen. Wire work that hauls a dropping character to a halt short of the floor looks very silly; anti-gravity is not what we’re after in action. What goes up should go down, when it doesn’t primal portions of our brain scream “WRONG, FAKE, HUH?!?”, which is very jarring to the action fan. Use pads or even CG to handle landings if the actor can’t handle the drop; slow them over the course of an entire downward arc very slightly, not abruptly at the end, to make it look more real on-screen. Harder to notice a ten or maybe even twenty percent slower drop over three or four seconds, vs a normal one that suddenly becomes abnormal in the last second. Let actors land more ‘real’ by dropping to knees and using hands on the floor; this protects them *and* gives us more of that real-look action fans crave. They hit as if it was a real drop, and looks good on screen. A landing pad can be CGed to look like floor with minimal effort, and surely a second’s worth of frames of the actor landing in the cushiony pad can be cleaned up to appear as the on-screen surface should (i.e., not-cushiony)? Also, CG actors are great, but when they lack any sense of mass and thus momentum, they look very very fake and wrench the audience completely out of the illusion. Lucas has used some very horrible looking CG’d actors in Episodes I and II, as one quick example. He’s also managed a few shots with CG actor inserts that worked much better (Obi-Wan vs Jango in EpII is a fairly well done little fight sequence that has several inserts that require minutia scrutiny to figure out).

Basically, action fans want action movies to try harder. Crap action is what gives action a bad name. Crap effects and crap physical stunts are what give modern techniques a worse than bad name. Basically we just want the best possible action on-screen. Show us everything you can and use clever camera work as sparingly as possible to get the rest of the way. Action fans are quite easy to please, actually. As long as it looks real we’re content, irregardless of how impossible it might *actually* be for two characters to have a fight while skydiving or who can jump in twenty foot arcs while dueling. Make us go “ooooh” when the action happens, get us coming out of our seats in amazement.

Just make it look real. However you did it, we could care less, as long as what ends up on screen looks real.

 

[JonZ]

I think the only time Ive see wire-fu that "works" is when its done for comedy like in Waynes World or Austin Powers (even though I dont care for either movie).