These days my movie viewing rarely veers into the action zone; it must be all those lame attempts of mine to meditate in the imitation of the Buddha, or even more depressingly that steady increase in oestrogen levels swirling inside me as I age. Anyway, give me a nice Hallmark or Oxygen Channel-type drama of a movie, and you get a contended me rising from the seat with a supressed sniffle or two.

When I borrowed a French movie titled "Banlieue 13" from the library last week, I thought it would be some drama set in the Parisian ghettos that went up in flames and riots last year. Yes, the setting was very much those slums but instead of a nice drama what I got smacked on the face with was a full blooded action movie with an opening sequence that seemed like a French speed-tripped reply to the brilliant chase scene in "Ong Bak", the last action movie I will admit to seeing at the movies.

I later googled for B-13, and discovered that the chap performing in that opening sequence, David Belle, is a master of an urban street sport called "parkour" - a sport that consists of using one's body to elegantly "flow" and "fly" through the built environment. If this sport has a motto, it must be a Zen-like, along the lines of letting the body be one with the building that one is ascending or descending. My bones are too inflexible to do the stuff these guys do with seeming effortlessness but I must admit I am hooked to watching parkour performances such as this, this and this.