Review by Leonard Norwitz
Studio:
Theatrical: Mandarin Films
Blu-ray: Universe Laser & Video Co. (HK)
Disc:
Region: A
Runtime: 107 min
Chapters:
Size: 50 GB
Case: Standard Blu-ray case
Release date: February 13, 2009
Video:
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Resolution: 1080p
Video codec: AVC
Audio:
Cantonese LPCM 7.1; Cantonese DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1;
Cantonese Dolby TrueHD 7.1; Mandarin DTS-HD Master Audio
7.1; Mandarin Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles:
Feature & Bonus: Traditional Chinese & English
Extras:
• The Making of Ip Man (18:37)
• PreProduction (2:02)
• Shooting Diary (3:27)
• Main Sets (2:24 + 2:01 + 2:04)
• Interviews with Director & Cast (Yip: 23:12 + Sammo 8:03)
+ Donnie 22:09 + Simon 2:53 + Ikeyuchi 7:45 + Ka-Tung 8:56 +
Fan 4:49 + Ip Chun 3:27)
• Deleted Scenes (4:45)
• History of Wing Chun (Chinese text only)
• Ip Man – The Master (Chinese text only)
• Photo Gallery
• Trailer
The Film:
7
Given the cast and director, my expectations ran high for
this movie. Four artists from SPL reunited for this biopic
of one China's most famous martial artists: Director Wilson
Yip, actors Donnie Yen (in the title role) and Simon Yam (in
a supporting role), and the always impressive Sammo Hung –
here working behind the camera as fight choreographer. Ip
Man is, in a number of ways, a throwback to martial arts
movies from the time of Bruce Lee – not coincidentally,
since Ip Man was Bruce Lee's Wing Chun teacher. There is the
town with competing martial arts schools, each headed by its
own master; the bully (Fan Sui Wong) who comes to town to
set up his own school, but not before he humiliates all the
masters by giving each a brutal thrashing; and there is the
quiet master whom everyone in town knows is the best but who
heads no school of his own.
This would be Ip Man, a gentleman among men. Self-effacing,
but confident. He is also quite well off and lives with his
lovely wife (Lynn Xiong) and young son. Mrs Ip is given to
looks of disapproval every time her husband finds an excuse
to fight, even though he never gets hurt. He even tries to
make sure that the house furniture is not damaged when he
fights in his house. This is movie not without a sense of
humor – for the first half-hour or so anyhow.
But lightness turns bitter and grey when the Japanese come
to Foshan at the leading edge of what would become the
Second World War. The population shrinks from 300,000 to
70,00 and we assume that not all of the difference are made
up of refugees. Ip's residence has been consigned as the
Japanese headquarters and Ip and his family are now among
the homeless. It's very hard for him to swallow his pride
and try to find work, which he finally does after pawning
all the remaining family trinkets.
The Japanese general assigned to this town (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi)
is another sort of gentleman altogether. It is his fancy to
round up those men desperate enough to fight his men in an
arena. If one of these miserable people should live through
it he gets a bag of rice. If he fails to demonstrate the
proper humility, he may have to fight the general, who is an
amazing piece of work in his own right. One thing though:
the general doesn't appreciate it when his officers take
matters into their own hands and kill off his subjects in
the arena. Killing is for the streets.
Well, we can see where this is all going. Donnie Yen seems
tailor made for the role of Ip Man – proud, assured, and
unbelievably kick-ass in his newly learned Wing Chun kung fu
skills . But even more than another excuse for Donnie Yen to
show off his stuff is the unabashed pride that the Chinese
take in the way this story unfolds, even though it may be
seriously fictionalized. I don't expect that Western
audiences would find the story quite as engrossing for this
reason, even though its themes are not unfamiliar. It is not
so much of a stretch to see in Ip Man echoes of High Noon or
Destry Rides Again – the idea of a lone man who only fights
when provoked beyond endurance, and then he takes his
six-shooters out of mothballs and courageously stands to
face his fate.
Image:
6/8
The first number indicates a relative level of excellence
compared to other Blu-ray video discs on a ten-point scale.
The second number places this image along the full range of
DVD and Blu-ray discs.
I suspect that the transfer is an accurate representation of
the director's intentions, but of those intentions I must
offer a personal note of disapproval. The picture is thin,
desaturated and grainy – especially when the Japanese arrive
(but not, alas, with any consistency). We've seen this
before and we'll see it again - a fashionable but uncreative
and tiresome metaphor for a historical drama. By this
reasoning, American Civil War movies should be blotchy and
blurry and movies, about Biblical times should be a series
of still images carved in stone. In retrospect do we really
think that Roman Polanski's film about Water & Power in Los
Angeles set at about the same time as Ip Man would have been
more compelling if it too shared a similar artistic ethos,
or that Richard Attenborough's epic biopic about the little
brown man who changed the course of history in the first
half of the twentieth century would have been more authentic
if its color levels changed with the times? It's too
ludicrous to contemplate. I shall say no more.
Audio & Music:
5/7
Dialogue is disproportionately subdued compared to action
sequences, whose combined effects and music makes for an
uncomfortable imbalance. I found it necessary to ride the
gain. Once set appropriately for dialogue or fight sequence,
the sound was clear enough and had plenty of crunch in the
fights. I might mention here that the looped dialogue,
regardless of the mix, is never in sync.
Operations:
5
Ip Man is quick to load, without promotional theatrical or
video previews. The non-expanding chapter thumbnails aren't
very large, nor do they have titles, but they're easy enough
to make sense of. All of the menu functions have English
subtitles. The one real complaint with the menu is the lack
of Play All functions for the eight cast Interviews of from
3-23 minutes each or the several related making-of segments.
The English translation was pretty much error-free and
idiomatic. The white subtitles for the feature film remain
outside the image in the letterbox border area.
Extras:
7
All of the extra features are shown in non-anamorphic,
letterboxed 480p. They are of variable, but generally decent
quality, and all of them, except the two that are Chinese
text only, have English subtitles – that's over two hours of
subtitled bonus material – a real plus.
Bottom line:
6
While not a Thumbs Down exactly, I find I can't really get
very enthusiastic about this Blu-ray. As I said earlier, the
image might be faithful, but it's not one that wears very
well in the medium (the latter part of the movie once the
Japanese enter, I thought fared better.) The fact that audio
levels are unbalanced doesn't help. All of this leaves the
movie and the presence of Donnie Yen and a couple of amazing
fight sequences, brilliantly staged by Sammo Hung, on which
to hang our hopes.
Leonard Norwitz
March 20th, 2009
