Quiet Earth has pointed out the super sleek The Cup of Tears from Gary Shore. which was all shot on Red camera. The official synopsis is this:

The narrative follows a scorned geisha who creates a magical cup made of tears that causes any man who drinks from it to fall under a stasis of permanent sleep. One night the cup is stolen, setting off a chain of events that threatens civil war amongst the clans. Taro, a once gifted samurai, and his companion Jin set out to find the cup and the one who can break the spell before inner turmoil.

But I'm way more interested in the stunning visuals....

The Cup of Tears film trailer. Dir. Gary Shore from Gary Shore on Vimeo.

A gallery of Kung-Fu Cyborg concept art went up at Sina.com (more at the link) including some battle scenes and some awe-inspiring hardware:

Kung-Fu Cyborg had its premiere over the weekend, and CCTV.com provides this plot synopsis:

The story takes place in a futuristic world, where robots are at war with each other. Hu Jun plays a police officer who becomes a cyborg. Sun Li plays the adopted sister of Hu Jun, who falls in love with a cyborg. Wu Jing plays a robot who has become evil but eventually turns over a new leaf.

The visual effects, from the same team who created Kung-Fu Hustle, are supposed to be amazing. And actor Eric Tsang promises: "Many cinema goers burst into laughter at the beginning of Jeffrey Lau's film, but leave the cinema in tears. When they are back home recalling the scenarios, they laugh again."

The film gathers together three of the most famous Bruce Lee "clones" that starred in movies after his death: Dragon Lee, Bruce Le and Bruce Thai. The "plot" is pretty flimsy, involving one of the Bruce clones going to work for a corrupt film-maker while the other two swan around. And eventually the mad professor goes totally insane and orders the three Bruce Lees to fight each other to the death, so whoever is left will be the King. "And I will control the King ha ha ha ha ha!" Luckily, the Bruces finally break out of the professor's mind control. This amazing sequence also shows quite how great the dubbing in this film becomes:

The long answer is, Dragon Ball was originally intended as a sort of Fractured Fairy Tale, a play on the Chinese legend Saiyûki (Journey to the West). (The same legend used as source material for the 2007 Monkey: Journey to the West stage musical and Jamie Hewlett's 2008 animation sequence, Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, the 1978 Monkey TV series, Kazuya Minekura's bishonen manga Saiyuki and much more.) Although his personality and appearance are quite different, Goku is loosely based on the Monkey King; that's why he has a monkey's tail, a magic staff and rides around on a cloud. (Most of these elements are jettisoned in Dragonball: Evolution.) Toriyama also added to the mix a large dose of Hong Kong martial arts movies, particularly Jackie Chan's Drunken Master. Toriyama has even said that Jackie Chan in his youth would have been the ideal person to play Goku.

The celestial bureaucracy of the Dragon Ball universe, in which there are several layers of by no means omnipotent "gods" in charge of the earth and the universe, is also vaguely reminiscent of Chinese mythology, although no comparisons to any real-world religion are intended. When asked about his world's religion in the January 2003 issue of SHONEN JUMP, Toriyama replied "To be honest, I wasn't really thinking about it too deeply."

The other big influence in Dragon Ball is science fiction. Toriyama is a fan of sci-fi movies (his favorite is Alien), and Dr. Slump is full of gags based on Star Trek, Star Wars and other sci-fi and monster movies, not to mention plenty of fanciful cars, hovercrafts and dinosaurs. In fact, the Chinese style of Dragon Ball was originally intended as a break from Dr. Slump's Western sci-fi themes. But over the long course of Dragon Ball the story loosened up and acquired more and more science fiction influences. Gamera has a cameo in the series, as does a thinly disguised Arnold Schwarznegger from The Terminator, and Freeza, one of the villains, transforms into a creature clearly based on H.R. Giger's Alien. Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball even take place in the same universe-the Dr. Slump characters appear in a lengthy cameo in Dragon Ball volume 8.

The clearest point at which Dragon Ball turns from mythology to sci-fi is the shocking revelation which opens the Dragon Ball Z part of the storyline-in which Goku, previously just a weird kid with a monkey's tail, is revealed to be one of the Saiyans, a race of mercenary space aliens. Of course, this was all made up retroactively, as Toriyama himself admits; originally Goku was just supposed to be like the Monkey King. Did we mention that in Dragon Ball, the gods are aliens too?

Note: I mention kung fu above, but I'm also going to touch on other martial arts in this post. I hope that's OK.

Totally random factoid: as a young reporter, I wrote a story about Sir Run Run Shaw, the legendary Hong Kong movie producer responsible for Five Fingers Of Death, and actually met him and shook his hand. I am still excited.

1960s.

Bruce Lee co-stars in The Green Hornet, a scifi-ish Shadow ripoff about a newspaper publisher and his Asian valet, who team up to fight crime as the Green Hornet and Kato.

The Legion Of Superheroes introduces Karate Kid, whose superpower should be pretty obvious, in Adventure Comics #346, published in 1966. Karate Kid is the son of Black Dragon, a 30th century Japanese supervillain, who gets defeated by Japan's main superhero Sensei, who raises him to be a good guy and appreciate painting and sculpture. And he's been playing a major starring role in the recent Legion cartoon, as well as Brad Meltzer's revival of the Justice League comic. In his first appearance, Karate Kid was one of four teen heroes who applied to join the Legion — but one of them was secretly a villanous infiltrator. (Shockingly, it was the one named "Nemesis Kid.") (And check out this fantastic Legion cover gallery.)

1970s.

Sonny Chiba starred in a number of classic science fiction films, including Message From Space, a Star Wars-inspired film about the peaceful planet Jillucia under threat from the evil space Emperor. Sonny Chiba has to rescue a set of "holy seeds" that can save the planet somehow.

A volcano opens up and the evil Princess Dragon Mom emerges, in Hong Kong's Infra Man (1976). A scientist named Rayma volunteers to be implanted with electronics so he can become the unstoppable martial arts fighting machine Infra Man. Besides super strength and amazing martial arts skill, he also gains X-ray vision, plus ray beams and rockets coming out of his body. We have the original trailer above.

Doctor Who suddenly starts featuring a lot of martial arts, with Jon Pertwee's version of the Doctor claiming to be an expert in "Venusian Aikido" and "Venusian Karate." (Supposedly the producers preferred aikido because it's mostly a defensive art, and fit in with their vision of the Doctor as a pacifist.) Here's someone's compilation of the Doctor's greatest smackdowns:

1980s.

In 1983, director Kirk Wong puts out Flash-Future Kung Fu, a mash-up of Blade Runner and old-school martial arts melodrama. In a grungy neon-lit future, Eddy Ko, the star pupil of a martial arts school, secretly takes part in underground "black boxing" bouts. And a group of Neo-Nazi punks wants to take care of Ko and his friends using an army of mind-controlled zombies.

Just a year after Robocop hits in the U.S., Hong Kong puts out Roboforce, a comedy version featuring a robot dominatrix who shoots missiles out of her arm.

Japan creates the Super Sentai Series, about a team of super-soldiers in color-coded outfits who use martial arts and super-advanced weapons to fight monsters. They also join their robotic vehicles together to form a giant robot to fight giant monsters. In the 1990s, the Super Sentai Series got redubbed in English and mixed in with new footage of American actors, to create the Power Rangers series. The most awesome version of Power Rangers is Power Rangers In Space, in which they have to fight a villainess with the amazing name of Divatox.

1990s.

Hong Kong puts out a few awesome science fiction films, chief among them Tsui Hark's Wicked City, which features Yuen Wo-Ping in a supporting role. It's been a while since I've seen this film, but I don't remember it having much martial arts, despite Yuen's involvement. Hark also produced Black Mask, starring Jet Li as a super-soldier engineered not to feel any pain, who goes AWOL and tries to lead a quiet life as a librarian — until his old squad starts killing innocent people. And then he dons the eponymous black mask to bring down his former comrades. Hark also directed a sequel, Black Mask II. Here's the masked Jet Li kicking a guy about 20 times, and then dealing with rollerskating machine-gun thugs, using only a couple of compact disks (Kenny G is deadly!) And meanwhile, some crazy dominatrix turns out to have a razor blade in her mouth, which might make this scene not entirely work safe. And then there's Robotrix.

Plus, director Nam Lai Choi put out one of the strangest martial arts movies of all time — The Cat (Lao Mao), about an alien entity that goes around possessing people and creatures. The movie's setpiece, a giant martial arts smackdown between a dog and an alien-possessed cat, uses all of the cliches of martial arts movies, including the slow-mo wire work and the instant replay. (But no naming of the moves as you're doing them, sadly.) Here's a clip:

Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme puts out two of the greatest science fiction movies of all time: Universal Soldier and Timecop. He's an unstoppable cyber-zombie, or he's a windmill-kicking law-enforcement master from the distant year 2004. He kicks you so hard, your arm shatters. There's also 1995's Virtual Combat, in which a virtual character from a fighting video game somehow gets into the real world and kicks people in the head. A lot. Oh, and Milla Jovovich first starts smacking weird creatures around in 1997's The Fifth Element.

1999-today:

Yuen Wo-Ping arranges the fight sequences for The Matrix, the movie which proves virtual worlds feature more awesome flying head-kicks than real ones. The wire work is gorgeous, plus it's put together with a new "bullet time" special effect that makes all of the soaring and kicking look even more impressive.

The Matrix trilogy gives rise to a ton of kicking, smacking, chopping imitators, including Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Ultraviolet, which introduce the new and amazing martial art of gun-kata. Now at last people can use guns to create a graceful battle tableau, instead of having to fight with fists or feet. Plus the Resident Evil movies and a host of other video-gamey films.

Jet Li also stars in the mega-awesome The One, in which alternate universes are real, and you can gain awesome superpowers by killing all of your alternate selves. There are only two Jet Lis left, and only one of them has cool hair. Which one will smack the other one into oblivion and become a dimension spanning god? And then of course there's Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo, where a super-suit gives him amazing martial arts skills... and the ability to channel James Brown.