Category: Martial Arts

Martial Arts, Recaps3 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: Young, Scrappy, and Hungry

Keith Chow

AMC’s Into the Badlands might have gotten a ten-episode second season (up four episodes from season one), but there’s no slowing down narratively. Episode 2 — which is actually chapter 8, proving just how propulsive the story of the Badlands is — wastes no time getting Sunny out of the mines, after a pretty awesome, and gruesome, fight scene to open the show. I would put the rest of the episode into three distinct buckets, that just so happen to coincide with a line from Hamilton‘s “My Shot.” And yes, I’m keeping up these #IntoTheHamLands recap titles all season!

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Martial Arts, Recaps5 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: Friends All Scattered to the Winds

Keith Chow

After more than a year off the air, AMC’s dystopian martial arts epic Into the Badlands has finally returned! And with it, so have these NOC Recaps. Speaking of which, I’m going to try to title each recap with a line from Hamilton because 1.) seriously, have you met me?; and 2.) the Badlands writers have basically challenged me as much. So, appropriately enough, the Season Two premiere is named after a lyric from “Yorktown.”

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Martial Arts, Television6 Comments

Fans Sound Off on Into the Badlands Couple Sunny and Veil

Monique

Originally posted at Just Add Color

Into the Badlands is coming into its second season March 19, and even though we’re psyched about the level of action and and suspense, we’re also focused on the family aspect of the show, which is worrying about how Sunny’s going to get back to his family, Veil and their newborn baby.

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Martial Arts, Music, Toys4 Comments

Japanese Twitter Account Displays Bruce Lee and Freddie Mercury as the Best of Friends

Laura Sirikul

Bruce Lee was a cultural icon who revolutionized martial arts films. Freddie Mercury was the front man for the legendary rock group Queen and considered one of rock’s greatest all-time entertainers. Both of these artists sadly left the world too soon. But, thanks to a Japanese Twitter account, their memory lives on through a pair of action figures.

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Martial Arts, Movies28 Comments

Bruce Lee Movie Stars a White Guy Because Of Course it Does

Keith Chow

This morning, Deadline unveiled the first trailer for Birth of the Dragon, which recently made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ostensibly, the film depicts the legendary fight between Bruce Lee (played by Philip Ng) and Wong Jack Man (Yu Xia). But because this is Hollywood, the movie is going to be told from the perspective of a white dude.

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Martial Arts, Television8 Comments

Venturing Into the Badlands

Dennis R. Upkins

One of my favorite television series in the last year is Into the Badlands. The noirish dystopian Wuxia drama is the perfect blend of action, mystery and mysticism that keeps my eyes glued to the flatscreen.

As is the case with all things PoC excellence, Into the Badlands has caught its share of hate from racist white fandom. I’m not talking about legit criticisms but nitpicking and feeble excuses that are never made for legions of lesser white shows.

Needless to say I’m not having it.

When the shade is thrown, I’m honor bound to make the haters day a “Sunny” one.

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Martial Arts, Television3 Comments

The Imperator and The Widow

Eric S.B.

Last year was the year of the most iconic feminist leading lady in action/sci-fi, arguably the most in cinematic history: the one and only Imperator Furiosa played be Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. Thanks to a fellow NOC, I have finally finished the way too short first season of Into The Badlands. Following Furiosa and a long history of leading women in Hong Kong action cinema with better acting chops and doing more roundhouse damage than their male co-stars (Michelle Yeoh will be back soon as Yu Shu Lien people!), Into the Badlands also introduced us to strong heroines whose stories I hope to better understand in more detail in a second season. More than Wu’s Sunny, more than the avatars, even more than my man Cung Le, it was Emily Beecham’s show-stopping performance as The Widow that locked me in.

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Martial Arts, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: Bloody Barons

Keith Chow

After last week’s episode ramped up the stakes for our heroes, we headed into the first season finale with a lot of questions that needed answers. Who poisoned Jade? Will Quinn take advantage of M.K.’s gifts? Will Sunny turn on his young apprentice to secure passage on the River King’s ship? Did the Widow survive her duel with Sunny? Will Veil blame Sunny for the death of her parents? Will the show come back for a second season? And why are there only six episodes for the season?

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Hard N.O.C. Life, Martial Arts, Marvel5 Comments

Cole Horibe and Charles Pulliam Talk #AAIronFist

The Nerds of Color

The #AAIronFist train continues! For the latest edition of Hard NOC Life, we welcome journalist Charles Pulliam-Moore and actor/dancer Cole Horibe stop by to talk about why having Iron Fist be an Asian American character makes the most sense. We should also point out that this episode was recorded the day before Scott Buck was announced as the showrunner of the forthcoming Netflix series.

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Martial Arts, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: The Butterfly Effect

Keith Chow

Continuing our recap catch up, the penultimate episode of Into the Badlands was clearly the most interesting of the season. And that’s too bad because after this weekend’s season finale, we don’t know if AMC will be bringing the show back for a second one. We hope so since all the pieces are finally in place for an epic showdown between good, evil, and everything in between.

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Martial Arts, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: Warriors vs. Clippers

Keith Chow

Last night’s Into the Badlands — clunkily titled “Two Tigers Subdue Dragons” and not to be confused with this — was tasked with propelling us into the end of the season. In addition to a promised Baron v Baron showdown, the episode was the first to effectively use an episode-ending cliffhanger to guarantee viewers will tune in for the final two entries of its debut season. But did it deliver?

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Martial Arts, Recaps, Television

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: Who Run the World? Girls!

Keith Chow

The third episode of Into the Badlands — “White Stork Spreads Wings” — will be the last one to follow The Walking Dead since last night was the mid-season finale for everyone’s favorite zombie show. How Badlands will fare without its massive lead-in will be a question to be answered next week. If this episode is any indication, viewers should be coming back in full force even without a zombie pre-show.

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Martial Arts, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: #WheresWidow

Keith Chow

For obvious reasons, we’ve been riding the Into the Badlands train from jump, and now that it’s here — and a huge hit — we couldn’t wait to add the show to the Recap rotation. We’ve been holding on to this one for a while too, since we got an early look at episode two a few months ago. As much as I dug the pilot, I always thought the second episode was where the series was going to take off with audiences. And if nerd twitter was any indication Sunday night, everyone else agreed.

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Guest Post, Martial Arts, Television

The Daniel Wu Diet

Guest N.O.C.

by Lynn Chen | Originally posted at The Actor’s Diet

Oh, how I love when my fellow actors post photos of food, especially when they’re on set.  The yumminess below is from Daniel Wu’s Instagram feed, most of them captured in New Orleans while he was filming Into the Badlands, a martial arts TV show very loosely based on the classic Chinese tale, “Journey to the West.”

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Martial Arts, Television7 Comments

NOC Recaps Into the Badlands: The Time is Now

Keith Chow

Originally posted at Angry Asian Man

As we near the end of 2015, one thing is for sure: it’s a great time to be an Asian American television consumer. For the first time in history, you’ll need two hands to count the number of major television programs to feature Asian American leads! On ABC alone, you have shows like Fresh of the Boat, Dr. Ken, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Quantico.

This Sunday night, the biggest network of them all — AMC — throws its hat into the ring with Into the Badlands, a dystopian martial arts drama starring Daniel Wu. And I can safely say the show is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

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Martial Arts, Television1 Comment

Follow the N.O.C. to Win Into the Badlands Swag

Keith Chow

We’ve been gearing up all week for the debut of Into the Badlands this Sunday night after an all-new episode of The Walking Dead. Yesterday, we re-posted Timothy Tau’s Hyphen interview with star Daniel Wu. I also had a chance to briefly talk with the Hong Kong movie icon about martial arts and stereotypes, but more importantly, we’re teaming up with AMC to giveaway some really cool Into the Badlands goodies.

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Guest Post, Interview, Martial Arts, Television3 Comments

Daniel Wu Goes Into the Badlands

Guest N.O.C.

by Timothy Tau | Originally posted on Hyphen

Daniel Wu is a Chinese American actor/director/writer/producer that has already had quite an impressive career overseas in Hong Kong, appearing in over 60 films there — many of them box-office hits —  and also winning awards for his directing, producing and performance work (such as the “Best New Director Award” at the Hong Kong Film Awards for his directorial debut The Heavenly Kings in 2006, which he also wrote, produced and starred in, and a Golden Horse Award for “Best Supporting Actor” in Jackie Chan’s New Police Story in 2004. He will also be starring in Duncan Jones’ Warcraft movie in 2016.

Wu breaks into American TV airwaves on Sunday, November 15th (at 10/9c) with the debut of AMC’s Into The Badlands, which has been receiving buzz as a hotly-anticipated new martial arts drama/action television show featuring not just one but two Asian American leads — Aramis Knight, a young actor of Pakistani and East Indian descent, also plays supporting character M.K. alongside Wu’s main protagonist Sunny. In this interview, readers will appreciate Wu’s illuminating answers, in-depth insight no doubt informed by seasoned experience and hard-won achievements on both sides of the Pacific.

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Crowdfunding, Interview, Martial Arts
Black Tiger: Hunter Hunted

Interview with Black Tiger: Hunter Hunted Director Patricio Ginelsa

Nels

The same day that the final Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer hit this week, a lesser known project called Black Tiger: Hunter Hunted released its 20-minute pilot episode on YouTube. Black Tiger originally started off as a comic book mini-series in 2004. In 2014, a Kickstarter project to fund a short film based on the comic book was successfully funded. The short film, starring WWE Diva Angela Fong and Robin Shou (Mortal Kombat), premiered at WonderCon in 2014 and went on to screen at other conventions, winning the 2014 Spirit of Comic Con award at the Atlanta Comic Con’s Wizard World Film Festival. Director Patricio Ginelsa took time out to talk to us about the film and the funding effort to continue the web series.

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Martial Arts, Movies

The Challenger: No Challenge at All for a Few Minutes of Your Time

Eric S.B.

I had no interest in watching the first Democratic Party debate without analysis from Democracy Now and commentary from my favorite late night and podcasting comedy crews. So, it worked out well that on the same evening I was introduced to a short film that packs quite the punch: The Challenger.

Pun intended.

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Martial Arts, Movies2 Comments

Scored Too Soon? The Career of Michael Jai White: A Retrospective

Eric S.B.

In most sports, scoring early is a good thing. If you’re a soccer player or fan, though, you know the woes of scoring too early. If any of you listen to or watch Men in Blazers, you’ve heard this all before from Roger’s unending sadness with his Everton routinely scoring too early. This has happened to me both on the pitch, but mostly watching my beloved teams pay dearly for going up 1-0 in the first five minutes of matches only to be smacked down with three or four unanswered goals once the final whistle blows. It’s part of the roller coaster of emotions that is the world of football. I feel like this could be a metaphor for Michael Jai White’s career.

I recently had an evening to myself and while scrolling through the ever expanding Netflix streaming queue, I noticed a couple of recent Michael Jai White flicks I hadn’t yet seen. Double feature? Sure.

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Martial Arts, Movies2 Comments

Old Film Reviews: One-Armed Swordsman

David F. Walker

Originally published at BadAzz Mofo

The Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong was responsible for producing some of the greatest Wushu martial arts films of all time. In the 1970s kung fu flicks flooded American drive-in theaters and grindhouses, and some of the most memorable films came courtesy of Shaw Brothers. But the style and genre of film most Americans associate with Shaw Brothers was relatively new to the studio, part of a new generation Wushu films that was ushered in during the 1960s with titles like the seminal classic One-Armed Swordsman.

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Martial Arts, Movies5 Comments

The NOC Review: Donnie Yen’s Back in Kung Fu Killer

Dennis R. Upkins

As a rabid martial arts film nerd, I’m not easily impressed. It’s one of those things where if you’ve seen one film, you’ve seen them all. So a movie has to really step outside of the box to garner my attention.

The premise of Donnie Yen’s latest action flick, Kung Fu Killer directed by Teddy Chen, did exactly that in grand fashion.

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Martial Arts, Movies2 Comments

Enter the GTFOH

Shawn Taylor

On March 21, 2015 Ain’t it Cool dropped the mother, father, cousin, and incarcerated uncle of all bombshells: Brett Ratner wants to remake one of the most iconic films in cinema history, which starred one of the most iconic leading mean in the history of film. To even have the gauldacity to fix your imagination to entertain the idea is Greek tragedy level hubris. How could he even think that he has the talent, vision, heart, and narrative ability to remake Enter the Dragon? Who in our modern cinematic landscape has the charisma, charm, physique, sex appeal, and martial talent to even mimic Bruce Lee? I assure you neither Scott Adkins nor Ronda Rousey have it. No diss to them, but, no.

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