It’s always been a mystery to me why the Far East developed such intricate forms of fisticuffs, while the round-eye laowai gwailo foreign devils never progressed much further than fancy pants fencing and swinging battle axes. The Eastern arts have the lame ass Queensbury rules beat down.

From the beginning, Asian cinema has taken full advantage of colorful and confusing history of martial arts, and elevated it to mythic status. So, the trick with most martial arts films is finding an excuse for a good fight. The old standby…the cheeseburger and fries of martial arts films if you will…is the Han Chinese resistance against the Qing Dynasty of the Manchurians. Martial arts filmmakers are obsessed with the premise, and Lord have mercy, it seems half these fu flicks are a variation of this theme.

Filmmakers occasionally break away from this premise in the never ending quest to find excuses for a punchfest. So you get your subgenres of Hong Kong Police procedurals, the old avenge my master but first train at the Shaolin Temple narratives, folkloric tales involving kinky ghosts and wacked out Daoist priests, the never-ending battle of the “Martial Arts World” (sort of a World Wrestling Federation thing that was going on during the Tang and Song Dynasties), the tournament to prove once and for all Chinese kung fu is better than everyone else’s fu, and the Chinese versions of Westerns, set in the western Chinese suzerainty of Xinjiang. You can combine any of these premises, throw in a dash of Manchu tyranny, and you’ll have even more plots that will give you plenty of excuses for your characters to start beating on each other.

The resurgence in the late 1980s of Hong Kong action films brought martial arts films into the mainstream, yadda yadda Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon yadda yadda…

Whatever. We’ve been watching fu flicks since we were kids…for me, it was KABC Channel 7 Black Belt Theater, which featured the “finest” in early 70s fu flicks from the redoubtable Shaw Brothers studio. The first time I saw the Shaw Brothers masterpiece Master of the Flying Guillotine, and I was shocked, appalled, and completely hooked. The trademark of these early 70s fu is bad English dubbing, which in itself forms a fascinating and compelling cadence and vocabulary. But when you start getting into the 80s and beyond, the natural soundtrack is mandatory, preferably in the original Cantonese. (Who wants to listen to bad Mandarin dubbing?)

Going beyond cliché icons Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, you will find the exotic weaponry of Jimmy Wang Yu, the intricate but brutal stories of Chang Cheh, and the thoughtful and graceful Donnie Yen. But I’m saddened how lame and weak Jet Li and Jackie Chan became once they started making American movies. Stick to their wonderful HK works, such as Tai Chi Master and the Police Story series. Speaking of crap, that brings up Western martial arts film ala Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, and the slew of American Ninja movies and what have you. Well, once you’ve seen the HK real deal, it’s hard to get into this arthritic and feeble offshoot. You Must Be Drunk to appreciate these films. I’ll leave those reviews to my colleague Kevin, who’s a far more accomplished expert in this genre. Indeed, I suspect Kevin drinks Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt Energy Drink before he writes his reviews, which would explain a lot of things.

Outstanding examples of martial arts films include 8-Pole Diagram Fighter, Fist of Legend, Magic Cop, 18 Legendary Weapons of China, Swordsman 2, Tiger Cage, Storm Riders, and Drunken Master 2. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface.

Your kung fu is good. But mine is better. Kung fu is the art of self-defense. I just want to show you how bad your kicks really are.

David and Albert Maysles’ Gimme Shelter is a remarkable achievement. What started as a vanity project funded by the Rolling Stones, to promote their new album, became a chronicle of the death of an entire generation’s hopes and dreams. The action starts, well enough, with the Stones giving a decent New York concert. After “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, we pull back to the Stones watching their footage, along with Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the third credited director.  The five Stones are complete ciphers, silently smoking their cigarettes as radio reports, giving grim autopsies of the free Altamont concert, paint a picture of complete chaos. No one’s talking about the music, rather about Hell’s Angels, rampant drug abuse, stabbings, and general anarchy. The brief afterglow left behind after Woodstock resulted in one of the most poorly planned and hastily organized concerts in history. “Four births, four deaths, and an awful lot of scuffles reported,” the reporter announces, making one hell of an understatement.

Meanwhile, Mick Jagger blabs on behalf of the Stones at a press concert, managers and lawyers scheme in a boardroom, patching together a free concert at Altamont Speedway after an intended booking at Golden Gate park falls through. The chronology is a bit confusing at first, then the regretful hindsight vantage point really begins to make sense around the time we get to the actual long, hellish day of the concert. Lines of cars stretch for miles, hundreds of thousands of hippies have massed in the middle of a shitty racetrack by dawn, most already bombed on some illegal substance or another. That’s where the Hell’s Angels come in, working as security guards in exchange for free beer. Their entrance, preceded by the roar of their bike engines, is quite ominous, scarier than any restless, drug-crazed mob. They part the crowds with a magical ease, brutally intimidating all in their path. It’s easy to see how they attained a mythical status during that late 60s period. However, this batch of Angels turn out to be violent, remorseless thugs, even more so when alcohol enters the equation. You can see the violence coming from a mile away.

Thanks to dozens of cameramen fanning out in search of abberant behavior or strange human moments, there is no shortage of weird scenes of hippies. Most, predictably, involve drug overdoses of massive proportions. Hippies incoherently babbling while hallucinating, openly making out while smoking joints, and a shocking amount of nudity. As the stage is swarmed, the performances cannot start on time. Delays cause restlessness in the crowd, which lead to some rather brutal “scuffles” amongst Angels and drunken, pissed off concertgoers. Then the music starts, rather dubiously, with the Flying Burrito Brothers, who get in one song before an Angel snaps a pool cue in twain over a half-naked hippie’s skull. Meanwhile, Mick and the rest of the Stones are marooned in their trailers by a restless mob. On and on the nightmare goes.

Jefferson Airplane are a class act, continuing to play on even as drunken Angels stomp what appears to be a harmless black guy, sitting on the stage. As the brother is battered into oblivion by at least four angry bikers, Grace Slick chants “Easy… Please be quiet,” for a while until the sound of general disorder begins to overwhelm her. The lead singer of the group is hit in the face while trying to restrain the Angels, then things get even more violent. “You’ve gotta keep your bodies off each other unless you intend love,” Slick goes on. “Let’s not keep fucking up!” They cut their set short, probably wishing they followed the Grateful Dead’s example and backed out entirely. Meanwhile, the crowd continues to grow anxious,  a general unease abated somewhat by the endless flow of drugs and alcohol.

Finally, long after midnight, after a dramatic re-entrance via helicopter, the Stones come in for their set. Jagger looks like even more of a jackass, cooing to the crowd about “keepin’ it togetha,” and saying the same “let’s have a look at ya” line that didn’t seem so utterly forced before the comparatively tame New York performance. Halfway into “Sympathy for the Devil”, wouldn’t you know it, some other sap gets pounded into the dirt and swarmed by Angels. The song was subsequently removed from their touring playlist. Cutting back to Jagger in the editing room, he looks increasingly put-off by his portrayal in the film. Indeed, as he fruitlessly pleads with the crowd to stop fighting, “behave as brothers”, “act like we’re all one”, and so forth, he couldn’t come across as more of a useless pansy. The rest of the band, chain smoking and being anonymous silent douchebags as usual, can’t even sustain interest in the disposable pop songs they’ve been playing for years on end.

Gimme Shelter doesn’t glorify the Stones in any way, despite their heavy involvement in its production. The cameras capture a lot of quick, fleeting action in massive crowds as well as giving plenty of ground-level angles to make the musical performances more interesting. As a “rock doc”, it’s servicable, with enough music to satisfy fans of the rapidly aging mega-group, but as a social document it’s invaluable. Everything’s raw, unprocessed, following the Maysles’ direct cinema doctrine, which forbids voiceovers or interviews. This is about the worst concert ever given on American soil, and the horror that comes hand in hand with expectations crumbling violently before your eyes.

The actual stabbing death of zonked out, would be assassin Meredith Hunter, is captured for a few fleeting seconds. Two stabs from an Angel’s huge-ass Bowie Knife prove to be fatal and a fitting end to the Stones’ set. A few minutes before sunrise, they finish with the obligatory “Revolution”, hop into a helicopter and get the Hell out of Dodge. Meanwhile, 300,000 concertgoers deal with hangovers and ungodly long walks to their parked cars. Poor Dick Carter, owner of the Speedway, trying to use the concert as a way to boost his reputation and instead causing the name of his race track to be associated with the metaphorical “death of the 60s”. At least nobody ever planned a free concert this poorly again. As the crew walks away into the cold December morning (appropriately, the dawn of December 7, that most infamous date), the title song plays. “Rape, murder… It’s just a shot away.” At least Hunter’s cheapo .22 revolver didn’t hit its intended target (likely Jagger). The decisive, yet excessively violent response proved to be a reminder, before this immense crowd, that Woodstock was a fluke unlikely to be repeated. Even with repeated attempts, some 40 years later this still turns out to be depressingly true. While Woodstock ‘94 wasn’t the complete anarchic meltdown that Woodstock ‘99 would turn out to be, it was no more than a depressing gathering of aging hippies and soulless “adult contemporary” artists. The zeitgeist done passed by.

Fun fact: George Lucas is one of the 23 credited camera operators listed in the end credits. Apparently he shot 1oo feet of unusable film before his camera malfunctioned.

Tokyo Godfathers is the latest attempt at an old chestnut of a story: three losers getting unexpectedly saddled with an infant. Instead of cowboy outlaws or swinging bachelors, it’s three homeless people who become the titular godfathers. I had already given up on Satoshi Kon after enduring the tedious Millennium Actress and the inexcusably goofy Paprika, but I’m happy to report that Tokyo Godfathers redeems these directorial missteps (at least retroactively in the case of 2006’s Paprika). Almost Altmanesque in its sprawling coincidences, Tokyo Godfathers transcends anime conventions in creating its grim yet hopeful Christmas story.

Taking a cue from Akira Kurosawa’s best works, Kon keeps this yarn purely street level as we follow the three homeless people on their quest to find the mother of an abandoned baby. At first, Kon introduces the principle players as broad sketches that risk stereotypes: Gin the failed alcoholic father, Hana the swishy drag queen, and Miyuki the surly runaway teen. Fortunately, Kon wastes no time launching into more nuanced character development, and my initial negative reaction to these clichés eventually turned to outright sympathy. From each of their vantage points, we witness a knowing and often harrowing slice of homeless life, from the characters having to endure an endless sermon for soup to a brutal scene of young punks beating up Gin to “clean up the streets”. There is a compassionate, sophisticated undertone to this work that upends the usual anime camp.

Kon infuses Tokyo Godfathers with a consistent black humor that keeps the story moving along and the audience off-guard. The death scene of an elderly wino is particularly moving and hilarious at the same time, and I could only wonder at the conflicted emotions it inspired in me. The strange series of scenes that illustrate an obese man’s explanation how he ended up trapped under a car reminded me of Quentin Tarantino’s playful experiments with time sequences.

Yet through its grim prism, Tokyo Godfathers remains doggedly optimistic that a Christmas Miracle will transfigure all the ugliness in this world. And this is where the film ultimately falters. Despite its street smarts, Tokyo Godfathers just felt too naive in its hopeful tone, and one too many coincidences began to weigh the film down. One wince-inducing sequence involves a ridiculous chase scene where a police officer actually allows Hana and Miyuki to jump into his squad car. And I kept wishing Kon would kill the reoccurring hit-you-over-the-head motif of angel wings.

Despite its obvious flaws, Tokyo Godfathers remains a fun ride and a solid addition to the Christmas cinematic canon. The animation is the first rate job that I’ve come to expect from the remarkable Madhouse, arguably the finest animation studio in the business. The alleyways and neon signs of Tokyo’s underbelly are rendered in all their glorious seediness, and provide a jarring contrast to a gangster’s swanky wedding banquet. Though at times Tokyo Godfathers veers a bit close to mawkishness, the film’s gritty sensibility, coupled with one rather horrifying scene involving a delusional woman, prevents things from becoming too cloying and convenient. That is no a small feat when there’s a cute baby enmeshed in the premise.