hero

stuh, yes, Tae Kwon Do is a joke, and useless in a proper street fight. Stick with the -jitsu styles. Very effective. Mantis Kung Fu I am only vaguely familiar with. We did Tiger-Crane. Bagua, or 'Pa Kua', I am somewhat familiar with...the 'Eight-Trigram Boxing' form, based on the I Ching. It is closely related to Tai Chi (Yang-style). Hsing-i is one 'soft' form I have no experience with. I digress, and will keep my opionions on "Hero" until I've actually seen it.

Your definition of "high concept" hardly applies here and is can be questioned what films do or don't follow the general meaning: a movie's premise or storyline that is easily reduced to a simple and appealing one liner. "Ghostbusters" was an example but also had the effect of putting comic horror flicks on the map. It's a term within the industry and not especially directed at film audiences but film producers who can be sold making a film from a short description.

Here are some one word film titles that fit the definition of high concept:

Godfather
Splash
Gladiator
Braveheart
Jaws
Twister
Armageddon
Speed
Alien
Titanic
Godzilla

All of those were sold and had financing before any final script was written and, granted, some were sold on the reputation of the director as well.

Still didn't get a list of Asian films that you like. You seem to be generally against Hollywood products so I felt you must have a very long list of foreign films which are almost all not high concept movies.

It took over nine hours of movie to tell a story of a small portion of the saga of Middle Earth. Don't think they'll be filming any of the "Simarillion."

If this doesn't fit into any genre you can think of, how about historic action adventure drama?

Are you sure you saw this movie straight?

Knowing your taste fairly well, cav -- I think you'll like it. It's like one of your gourmet meals that looks so great on the plate, you hate when your finished dining on it. But then, there's always dessert!

A really good non-high concept film I recently revisited was "Sunshine." It's not about the sun shining at all but a historic drama of a Jewish family and one of the sons who becomes an Olympic fencing champion. The film ends up in Stalinist Russia and I won't give away any of details of the story as you couldn't even sum it up in a "high concept" one-liner. You have to see the film to discover what the title refers to. It would be a film that could only be sold on a complete script (and it was).

cav,

Bagua is a lost art. It is known only to He Jinbao and his former master Dr.Xie, who was following the tradition of keeping the art secret and having one lifelong disciple that he would pass it onto. Unfotunately, his first disciple died...and so did his second. He Jinbao is the third, but Xie has passed away. There is another student who has focused on the medicinal aspects of Bagua, Jinbao has only learned the martial side...and he is extremely deadly! Before Xie passed away, he allowed the art to go public, violating former traditions, in the interest of preserving it because he was afraid it could be forgotten. I feel very honored to have Jinbao as a family friend

edit -- also, tae kwon do is like marijuana. it's a gateway into the world of martial arts for many people, so it's good for that! I know that Jinbao didn't think bagua was similar to taichi, he ridiculed the tai chi people for practicing too slowly, he likes to practice with power. the jiu jitsu stuff is a heck of a lot of fun, by far my favorite simply because you can go all out in practice, but for the same reason I don't think it's practical at all--it is like wrestling. it would only be useful in a fight where I wasn't TRULY trying to incapacitate the person...and I would never fight with someone unless I was defending my life with intent to incapaciate.

Lightwizard,

Indeed there are a lot of movies which I like, some of them foreign, but I was only listing movies of genres that I thought overlapped with this one, as Cav asked

Don't quite get "genres that overlap this one." Your premise was that this is a "high concept" movie and it just doesn't qualify. It also isn't a Quentin Tarantino even though he was impressed with the movie and was involved with the US distribution and lent his name, obviously for marketing purposes. It's already made over 100M in it's Asian market release nearly two years ago.

It is to its credit that it helped knock out "Exorcist: The Beginning" to fifth place this week. That'll be on DVD before my next sneeze and I have allergies.

(What I would call a "low concept" film 'cause the director must have given the all the producers blow jobs under their desks).

So it's not a high concept then. I didn't say what genre it belonged to, I listed off 4 or 5 genres that I could think of for it to potentially belong to and answered the question in terms of each.

I gave it a genre as it crosses many genres -- it isn't just simply a Kung Fu flick. I still don't believe we saw the same movie. If you're not familiar with Kurosawa or other fine Asian filmmakers, it could be a good time to start. The same director's "Raise the Red Lantern" is superb storytelling, a picture of the morality of Chinese society wrapped up in an engimatic mystery. The art of its cinematography makes most Hollywood directors envious.