Best of QT-Fest Night 1

I really don't like missing films, but tonight I had to. If I could chose to skip a screening, it wouldn't be the first film of the Quentin Tarantino festival that had a really cool premise to it, but, like I said, Gus Van Sant is a cool guy.

So, afterwards, with a little bit of haste, good luck in parking and a friend, making it downtown in time for the second screening was not a problem. We were even able to make it in before the pass buyers were able to buy, so that we didn't face the chance of not being able to get in (something I was dreading). This lead us to...

Snake in the Monkey Shadow
Or Snake Fist, Monkey Shadow. Or a bunch of other names. Either way, it lead us to what was being billed as "The Greatest of the Snake Style versus Monkey Style films". I love the Snake Style. So fluid, full of motion. Monkey style is a bit unpredictable. I really couldn't have guessed who would win.

The movie is pretty straightforward with one little twist. At the beginning they introduce you to the greatest of the Snake Style fighters. You think this guy is it, he's going to be a badass and you're going to follow him through the movie as he uses his Snake Style to beat people up. Not true. Turns out he's the bad guy and the Monkey Style guy is the one who's the hero. The Kung Fu films that I've seen have never really gone out on the edge in terms of plot or any sort of edge in terms of story, so this was pretty welcome. A nice change.

The story line is still incredible baseline. A guy wants to learn Kung Fu, has to fight a bunch of guys, learns Kung Fu, gets revenge. That's basically all you need to know, and it's basically every Kung Fu film ever made. It's a winning formula, it doesn't need to change. Sometimes you can throw in the student fighting the master for a little bit of spice, but other than that, it's pretty much paint-by-numbers plot. What you do with it, however, is where everything lies in the Kung Fu flick. And Snake Fist accomplishes a lot.

For a movie about Snake vs Monkey styles, there's a lot of different styles used in the film, Drunken, Hook, etc. By the end the main guy is combining two and three different styles into a completely new style, letting him just beat up people however he wants.

The movie has fantastic choreography, some funny bits here and there, no huge gaps, but it still drags a little bit. Because late in the film is a scene that absolutely blew me away.

Snake vs. Monkey.

As in a real snake vs a real monkey. It's basically what everybody wants in a film, but can't name. If you ask somebody what they wanted in a movie, they'd probably say something like a good story or interesting characters, but what they really want is to watch a snake fight a monkey. Snake vs. Monkey might be the second best scene of all time behind the scene where DJ Qualls writes the backing track for "Whoop that Trick" in under two minutes. I really can't describe to you how amazing a scene it was to watch. Quentin's print is the only known copy of the entire sequence. Bootlegs and foreign DVD releases have very, very, very, very little of the scene (I have no idea why they would cut that out).

After watching that scene I really felt that I could do anything. Anything at all. I can stop a speeding train - I've seen a Monkey fight a snake.

What a movie.
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