My site is celebrating 10 glorious years on the internet and to honor that I'm going to be tossing out a few top ten lists over the next few months. This movie themed list hearkens back to the very origins of this site.

Ten years ago Drunkenfist.com was mostly a repository of my writing for Boston's late, lamented Shovel Magazine. At that point I'd been writing 1-2000 words a month on Hong Kong movies for a couple of years, so there was a lot of content to share. Since then, the site has transitioned from mostly film writing to mostly art, but at its heart the site still has a lot of cinema flowing through its veins.

Because of that, it's only right that I start with this list of ten films released over the past ten years that fit the Drunkenfist.com aesthetic to a tee. If I were still Mr. Movies the following 10 films would have been trotted out at every opportunity. For those of you who followed my writing back in the day, imagine the geeking out I did over Iron Monkey and you'll get a clear picture of how much I like the following films…

So, without further ado, here are 10 movies that have kicked my ass over the past ten years (in one way or another )

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If I was slightly disappointed by the last Shaw Brother movie I watched, Heroes of the East cleared that disappointment up in a hurry. While it's almost entirely plotless after the first 30 minutes, what plot is there serves its purpose admirably. That purpose? Setting up an hour of non-stop fights between Lau Kar-Fai and a stream of Japanese martial artists- each brandishing a different style or weapon. It's structured like kung fu porn.

Yes.
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Only about 30 minutes of The Magic Blade really grabbed me. It was 30 minutes of non-stop, lurid action. Weird characters, cannibalism, freaky weapons and sets- it had it all. The rest of the film? Not so much. It was good, just not as appealing to me as the mayhem filled middle section. Which is something of a disappointment as I'd heard good things about this film.

Oh well.
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Some facts about Challenge of The Masters:

• Lau Kar-Fai (Gordon Liu) plays Wong Fei-Hung
• One of the climactic battles is with his adopted brother, Lau Kar Leung
• Lau Kar Leung also direct the film

So yeah, Challenge of the Masters is pretty good.
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Simply, Ip Man is a great pure martial arts movie. Everything that's right about the genre is present here and, for my money, that makes this one a keeper.

Directed by Wilson Yip (SPL) and starring Donnie Yen, one of the greatest screen fighters of all time, The film tells the story of the Wing Chun master (and teacher to Bruce Lee) and does so in a wildly appealing style.

Appealing? Why, you ask? Fights, baby. Fights. Intricate, bone-crunching and impeccably filmed, the fights in this film are as good as screen fights can be. For someone like me who got into this stuff because of the incredible fight and stunt work done in the 1980s and early 1990s, seeing the tight choreography on display here was a real joy. While the wuxia flavored, art-house favorites like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers and the effects heavy, comic book stories like The Storm Riders and Seven Swords are absolutely adored here at DrunkenFist manor, they don't really produce the same visceral impact that a film like this does. With the recent exception of Jet Li's Fearless, that impact has really been missing since 1994, the end of the last great martial arts movie boom.

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