RETURN TO WUXIA
My festival of feature-length films recently left me with the feeling you get after you read a lot of short stories: you want a big novel to really sink into.  So I have found another Chinese TV series, 33 episodes based on the original Korean feature film Bi Chun Mu (which usually seems to be referenced in tandem with Musa, as "not as good as").

Oh, how I have missed the sword play by attractive young men in long robes and waist-length hair and a loose top-knot ponytail. It seems so elegant, compared to the violence of a couple of non-Chinese films from my festival of the past week or so, Al Pacino classics, Scarface and Carlito's Way.  The contemporary godfather of the American criminal and cop genre, Pacino owns those roles as the eponymous protagonists...the New York Italian playing a Cuban and a Puerto Rican. I'd sorta like to see him with a sword: "You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!"  Not sure the hairstyle would work though, the eyes are all wrong, and he's too short, really. I think he might look like Yoda in a Ming-era robe.

In Bi Chun Mu (Dance with Sword), the TV series, I find all the usual wuxia elements--hidden identities, mysterious motives, common people  pitted against the nobility, secret sword techniques, bamboo forest choreography, revenge, and unrequited love -- at least at episode 8 it looks like it will be that way.  And it's a Chinese production; I thought it would be Korean as Bi Chun Mu the film was.  So, some Mandarin exercise.

And a new face to contemplate, here, the Chinese Wang Ya Nan, outstanding among the Koreans in the cast, plays a rich boy wastrel who develops a strange deep affection for the apparent commoner-orphan,  Joo Jin Mo (who comes across a little like the young Jackie Chan). Little do either know the orphan is really the prince of Korea.  The orphaned royal heir brings Ya Nan's character out of his drunken womanizing to proceed to feel real love for his new best friend's paramour. "I feel like a beast," the well connected and wealthy Ya Nan says. "I want my best friend's girl."   She wants nothing to do with him, preferring the orphan whose father, so predictably unknown, was killed by hers. (She is his daughter by a concubine.) There is a vague bisexual element in Ya Nan's performance that leaves open the possibility for another story line --he loves both his friend and his girl deeply. I doubt such modern sexual intrigue will become part of the plot.

So I'm hooked again. Not quite a Korean soap opera, but close.  I found the Tai Seng videos for a very good price at my rarely visited WalMart, purveyor of everything Chinese-made if not necessarily Chinese in character.  Don't know if you can find these things at YOUR Wal-Mart.  But they are easily found on line.