Ip Man

Hmm.  The salvation for this movie was that I had no little red envelopes sitting on the night stand awaiting my popping them open.  "Ip Man" was all I had.  Thank goodness.  The first 20 minutes of English voice over almost made this unbearable.  Cheese of the grandest scale was what I witnessed, but as I had no other discs to toss in the player, I soldiered on and am glad that I did.  This got better, much better. 

It is weird in how things attract other things.  WW II had just been finished with my watching "The Pacific" HBO series and then bam, this movie.  "Ip Man" follows (from what I read the following day) not too closely the life of Ip (Yip) Man.  At first I thought 'Ip' was an adjective of some sort and was thinking that like "Repo Man," which starred Emilio Estevez as an extraordinary repo man, the movie was going to follow the story of some dude who was really good at ipping...whatever ipping might be.  I digress.  So in following the life of Ip Man, we see the peaceful warrior hanging out in China through the invasion of the Japanese in WW II.  So there you go, another WW II movie and the law of attraction.

Ip Man is living the good life in China and is the dude in the village that no one can beat, but also a dude that does not go looking for fights.  No matter how much he works to avoid them, fights find him.  All good.  The Japanese come, hardship befalls, etc.

The directing is good, the story is good, the acting is good, and the cinematography is good as well.  The only goofer is that towards the beginning and end, there is Kanji (I think) that was not translated.  All good.  The visual and all makes it pretty easy to grasp what is going on.  As for a thumbs up or down, well, who knows, it was better than ok.