cmovies: Swordsman Trilogy (aka "What's a binary?")

This trilogy has one of the more impressive goes at regularly trying to outdo itself regarding crossdressing and gender confusion that I've come across.

We start of with your standard case of a girl dressing like a boy to run around having adventures with her male friend. In the next movie, we add a male sorcerer who uses sorcery and castration to basically gain superpowers, and then he turns into a she, and then she becomes the latest crush of the I-am-totally-straight-no-really-my-brain-will-break-if-you-make-me-question-my-sexuality hero. In the next movie, the sorcerer's ex-girlfriend is now living as a man (specifically, impersonating the then-presumed-dead sorcerer), and her concubine is a crossdressing ninja.


(Tsui Hark: Once dedicated to squashing your ideas of the gender binary with the aid of Brigitte Lin.)


There's also a lot of people being run through by s couple dozen threads, the ability to create snakes out of nowhere, and a character who literally sucks the life out of people, causing them to wither and shrink. Sometimes, this one makes heads accidentally come off.


There's also drinking. A whole whole lot of drinking.


The first two movies in the trilogy are based on Jin Jong's The Smiling Proud Wanderer/Laughing in the Wind/Xiao Au Long Nu. The third is tied to the book and first two movies only by being featuring one of the villains as the lead.


The first movie is pretty standard wuxia: guy and his master's crossdressing daughter who is in love with him are off on a mission, get caught up in a feud, then uncover secrets and betrayal. The second movie picks up a year later and starts throwing all the crack at you. Most of the leads get recast, and the main character went from someone I liked to someone I wanted to shake and then make go away most of the movie. (Now played by Jet Li, which made disliking him weird because I'm used to liking Jet Li characters.) Brigitte Lin shows up as the sorcerer with the magic sex change (That was a literal statement, not an attempt at cleverness.) and unsurprisingly steals the whole show. That one is mostly worth watching for the cast and so that you have a clue what's going on in the third movie. The romantic plotline is a bit irritating by ok in the first movie, but downright aggravating in the second. And, apparently, the complete opposite of the original story, where the romance sounds enjoyable and the main guy like someone I would like considerably more.


Then we get to the third movie, where the kung fu world is in an uproar and darned foreigners are invading. (My subs for this one were kind of bad, which saved me from noticing as many bad stereotypes as I might have otherwise.) Everyone is running around trying to be Brigitte Lin so they can take over, but there is only one Brigitte Lin, though Joey Wong fools quite a few. More secrets! More conspiracies! More betrayals! Brigitte Lin and/or Joey Wong in almost every scene! And much much much pretty. At some point in there, Brigitte Lin rides either a shark or a dolphin 20 feet above the water. I forget which it was.