The Legend of Wisely

The film that once changed my life. When I was a five-year-old rascal, raised on bedtime stories and Vinnetou, I saw an adventurous spectacle full of fights, cars, aliens, monks, or camels in the company of my all-knowing grandfather, and it was done - the memory of the epic finale was deeply rooted. The twenty-year search for rediscovering one of the reasons for my love of film eventually paid off, and even though today Wisely with David seems highly amusing in many aspects, Perla still deserves credit. I won't let nostalgia cloud my judgement, but the memory is golden, more than ever before. (22/08/2010)

Today I take The Legend of the Golden Pearl as a guilty pleasure, but in my childhood I used to gush over it shamelessly. The film premiered in Czechoslovakia in 1989 (as did the thematically similar The Golden Child). Back then, there weren't many films in this country that combined exotic visuals, pulp adventures with action scenes, supernatural elements and humour. The Legend of the Golden Pearl captivated me at the time precisely because of its magical incongruity. How many other films would have allowed me to go to Hong Kong, the Himalayas and Egypt to see adventurers, Buddhist monks, gangsters and aliens and experience kung fu fights and chases in cars, on motorbikes, camels or in planes? All in a 90-minute running time. It wasn't until much later that I discovered that the film was actually one of a multi-part film series. The cinematographer, Peter Pau, would later win an Academy Award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (06/11/2003)