Hong Kong Cinema

[therewillbeblus]

I always figured I wasn’t the biggest fan of Sammo as director, but looking through his filmography, I actually like a good number of them:

Enter the Fat Dragon (the best thing to come out of the Brucesploitation craze)
Encounters of the Spooky Kind
The Prodigal Son
Wheels on Meals
Millionaire’s Express
Eastern Condors
Dragon’s Forever
Pedicab Driver
Mr. Nice Guy

That’s a decent slab of films, actually. Maybe I’m actually a Sammo fan?

Yeah good point - I guess a lot of them just aren't "great" to me, compared to Jackie Chan and others, but I like all those films I've seen. Now that I'm looking at a list, Eastern Condors, Dragons Forever, and especially Wheels on Meals are much better than Spooky Kind in my opinion

[knives]

His recent The Bodyguard is really great for those who haven’t seen it.

[Mr Sausage]

Duel to the Death (Ching Siu Tung, 1983)

How interesting to see Ching Siu-Tung before he fell under the sway of Tsui Hark. In his subsequent work, it can be hard to tell where Tsui stops and Ching starts. But while they worked well together, he didn’t need Tsui: this film is brimming with talent and ability. It looks terrific, first off, especially the end fight on the cliffs overlooking the booming sea. The fights are less wire heavy than his 90s work, using more cuts and trampolines/reverse footage. It’s on the nuttier end of wuxia, especially whenever ninjas show up. Indeed, the movie ascends to such a blitz of craziness that at some point it’s hard to even process it. There’s one unforgettable scene where a 15 foot tall ninja shows up and then bursts apart into a whole band of regular sized ninjas for a frenetic fight both above and below the sand, only for the lead ninja to tear off his clothes to reveal a woman, who proceeds to fight naked while her monk opponent tries to shield his eyes from her nudity. An old Japanese strategy, I guess: when fighting a monk, show your tits. Utterly inexplicable given how the plot is so simple and straightforward: a Japanese and Chinese master are scheduled to duel to the death out of personal and national ambition, ie. an uncomplicated story of Chinese resilience against Japanese arrogance and imperialism. The film is at best semi-coherent, and undeniably xenophobic. None of the Japanese characters act or speak Japanese, and they certainly don’t fight using Japanese techniques. They’re also comically treacherous and villainous, and express values like “winning is all, even if you have to kill your own brother!” The movie does at least make the lead Japanese fighter a noble man who’s become a pawn to nationalist politics, but so much of the plot is about how the Japanese want to steal all of China’s martial arts secrets (Japanese martial arts not being good enough, you see) in order to conquer China that, however noble the lead Japanese character, he still represents an evil nation led by an evil Shogun, abetted by this or that traitorous Chinese. Whatever. This movie is madness, beautifully choreographed, electrically filmed madness. I loved it.


The Sword (Patrick Tam, 1980)

A delicate, stylish romantic-drama-as-wuxia. The more Patrick Tam I see, the less singular Wong Kar-Wai comes to seem. You find in this movie the seeds of Ashes of Time. So much pining and melancholy for past loves and times that cannot be recaptured, so many current relationships that cannot get started because of past relationships never entirely fulfilled, and a general sense of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. In fact I think you can draw a direct line from this movie to the consciously art house wuxia of the 2000s like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, etc. Like them, Tam uses wuxia in order to drive and justify the intense emotional palette. The way Tam organizes his moving camera so that it captures people moving in and out of frame at odd and unexpected angles, how he frames stillness and emptiness, how he overlays melancholy music, you feel the wuxia not only being transformed by the spirit of the Hong Kong new wave, but also becoming the embryo for so much that would happen down the line. Ching Siu-Tung provides the choreography, and it is whiplash heavy and impossibly frenetic; but even so, you see Tam reigning it in compared to Duel of the Death to create these wonderfully intense parallel scenes to all the ripe, pent up emotion that goes under-expressed among all these guarded people. A wonderful movie that was ahead of its time.


The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2015)

Having watched so many wuxias recently brought home what a strange film this is. It sets out to tell a complicated historical-political plot with a minimum of narrative devices. Very little is communicated, or maybe it’s better to say that a lot is communicated through the tiniest means. The movie risks being incomprehensible, but then most wuxias do that anyway, so that at least is conventional. This movie is fixated on stillness, distance, and pictorialism. We’re not brought into the narrative, we sit outside of it, viewing it through various real and metaphorical veils. Hou uses a number of distancing devices to achieve this, along with his customary use of slowness. As someone with attention issues, a movie like this can be difficult. I ultimately found this beautiful and moving, but getting to that point could be a chore. This is a refutation of everything Hong Kong filmmaking stood for. I admire the uncompromising style even as I suspect it may not be wholly successful in avoiding boredom and shallowness. But as I said, it did in the end make me feel something, so I’ll continue to grapple with it.

[Mr Sausage]

Ninja in the Dragon’s Den (Corey Yuen, 1982)

Two legends, Corey Yuen and Ching Siu-Tung, made their directorial debuts within a year of each other, both batshit ninja actioners with scenes where a woman’s breasts are used to distract a guy mid-fight. Here, the bumbling sidekick rips Hiroyuki Sanada’s wife’s kimono down, shooting laser bolts(!) right into the face of a magician fighter, leaving his head with a halo of sexual energy, I guess. The man is defeated, and the sidekick proudly proclaims in the film’s penultimate line: “No weapon can beat a great pair of tits!” Yes, like Duel to the Death, this movie is crazy. Not quite as frenetic (what is?), but a movie with such restless, unending creativity that it’s hard to see how Yuen and co. managed to come up with it all. There is no fight scene that doesn’t attempt to exhaust every single possibility in its given situation, before coming up with a new situation and exhausting that, rinse/repeat for, like, ten minute stretches. It’s creative madness. The choreography shows traces of the 70s style, but otherwise is pure New Wave adrenaline. Conan Lee handles this with grace and athleticism, but it’s a Hiroyuki Sanada in his prime that really impresses. Yes, he has grace and the abilities of a gymnast, but his kicks are wicked looking, showing a robust power and force behind the perfect technique. And unlike Duel to the Death, it’s nice to see actual Japanese actors properly wielding their katanas and using kendo and karate stances. Funnily, I also watched Chang Cheh’s House of Traps today, also from 1982, and this film overgoes its central conceit by several magnitudes with an astonishing, constantly transforming, seemingly unending fight scene between Lee and Sanada in which Lee has turned his house into a nightmare of booby traps as the two flip around each other, Sanada trying to escape, Lee activating trap after trap to contain and kill him. This turns into a battle for light, with Sanada flipping about putting out candles and Lee countering by rushing about to reignite them. Continuing the creativity, their penultimate fight in a room with alternating black and white walls sees Lee use a blanket, one side white and the other black, to blend into the various walls and hide from Sanada, striking out at random only to disappear again. I won’t spoil how Sanada solves this problem, you should just see this outpouring of a life’s worth of unused ideas into a single 90 minute stretch. Did I mention there’s a whole fight scene on stilts? Just amazing. Oh, and its opening credits are basically a ninja music video to a super catchy bit of 80s cheese. Why are all my favourite ninja movies from Hong Kong? Shaka ninja!


The Miracle Fighters (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1982)

Yuen had been directing since the late 70s, making excellent traditional martial arts films mainly with Jackie, Sammo, and Yuen Biao, and infusing them with his talent for choreography and inventive imagery. Looking to do something different, he gathered together the whole Yuen clan and made this, a riotous, often indescribable kung fu comedy about warring magicians and a young man caught in their midst. The movie is indescribable except as a parade of bizarre imagery and ideas. It’s a rare treat to get one or two new images in a single movie, and here you have a new one every five minutes, each one outdoing the last in invention and unpredictability. This remains a largely singular film in Yuen's oeuvre, but counts among the best things he’s ever made, a paean to joyous cinematic creativity and all its potential for entertainment.

[feihong]

Just saw a trailer for an interesting-looking new Hong Kong martial arts movie, "Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In." A gangster story set in a really interesting-looking recreation of the Kowloon Walled City, the film is directed by Soi Cheang, written by Au Kin-Yee (screenwriter on Mad Detective, PTU, Triangle and Life Without Principle), and it features Louis Koo, Sammo Hung, and Richie Jen, along with a bunch of serious-looking martial arts actors. The camerawork looks muscular, the action looks pretty hardcore, judging by this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_izOZGDoLs

I'm still waiting to see between 3 and 4 as yet unreleased Xu Haofeng movies (I guess 100 Yards is out at festivals, at least), but otherwise this looks like the first Hong Kong movie I've wanted to see since...Septet, maybe? And before that, maybe Office. It's been a while. There's some past Soi Cheang movies I haven't hated––Dog Bite Dog, SPL 2...yeah, so here's hoping.

[Mr Sausage]

I just noticed Patrick Tam’s The Sword, which I wrote about a couple posts above, is free with ads (or plain free if you have an adblocker) on youtube in 1080p. A beautiful and underseen movie from a major Hong Kong director most are unaware of. I really encourage everyone who hasn’t seen it to check it out while it’s still widely available to stream.

[joshua]

There's some past Soi Cheang movies I haven't hated––Dog Bite Dog, SPL 2...yeah, so here's hoping.

I think I like him best when he is working under the Milkyway house style (as with Accident and Motorway), although I have not caught up with his films Limbo or Mad Fate yet. Both of the later having two Milkyway scripterwriters attached though, with Au Kin-yee on Limbo and Yau Nai-hoi on Mad Fate, has me interested.

I just noticed Patrick Tam’s The Sword, which I wrote about a couple posts above, is free with ads (or plain free if you have an adblocker) on youtube in 1080p. A beautiful and underseen movie from a major Hong Kong director most are unaware of. I really encourage everyone who hasn’t seen it to check it out while it’s still widely available to stream.

Adjacent to this, If you are interested in more Patrick Tam, keep your eye on future Kani releases over at the Vinegar Syndrome site because they have My Heart Is That Eternal Rose doing a theatrical run currently.

[Mr Sausage]

I was lucky enough to see a theatrical screening of My Heart is that Eternal Rose at last year’s Fantasia Film festival and was impressed with it. With its gangster cool, melancholy atmosphere, and Christopher Doyle cinematography, you see immediately Tam’s influence on his protege. Definitely a highlight of 80s HK cinema. And the restoration looked terrific, especially with all the bold primary colours against the black night scenes.

[Finch]

Kani confirmed on their Facebook feed two or so weeks ago that My Heart is that Eternal Rose will be getting a Blu ray release in the summer. They've been plugging the theatrical release a lot on their social media and confirmed the BD in the comments section. I'm thrilled it's coming but wouldn't be surprised if there is also a UK edition forthcoming from Radiance or MoC. It feels like the sort of title Fran might be interested in, especially after the release of A Moment of Romance.

[Finch]

I wanted to thank Mr Sausage for his recommendation of The Sword. The score especially stood out for me and some of the images are amongst the most painterly I've seen in a Hongkong movie. If you are usually turned off by Hongkong movies because of the mugging and un-PC jokes of the period, you should be fine with Tam's film. It's not relentlessly grim (not necessarily a criticism) like Killer Constable which I think is from the same year but the hunt for the sword and the fame that the searchers believe it will afford them leaves many innocent people dead in its wake and the protagonist disillusioned and broken. One of the most melancholic and clear-eyed wuxias I've seen, and the final freeze frame is perfect. Curiously, the last handful of shots in the upload from Hai-yah!, Well Go USA's streamer, to Youtube, looked ropey in comparison to the rest of the film. Copyright was from 2010 and Fortune Star probably haven't done a new scan since but it looked fine while streaming. Hoping that either Eureka or 88 Films are on to this film and give it a physical release.

[Mr Sausage]

Patrick Tam

Wow, Tam is a major Hong Kong director, a seriously overlooked one. Most of his films are almost impossible to see, and yet they're so singular and vibrant. Tam is constantly surprising you. You can never predict what his next film will be, from slasher films, to romantic comedies, to gangster flicks, to wuxia pian, each film is has a new subject. Yet under everything he does, there's this sense of loneliness and disconnection, of fleeting romance and quick burning passion. Each film is undeniably his, yet very different in subject and form. Tam is also the most experimental HK stylist I've ever seen. His formalist sense of colour coordination, his personal engagement in set design, his baroque camera movements, his inch perfect editing. He's a master, and yet he goes largley unrecognized amongst his new wave peers.


Love Massacre (1981)

An odd, uncomfortable, formally rigid movie. Tam abandons the elegance and emotional immediacy of his first film, the brilliant The Sword, for starkness, geometry, and distance. This movie organizes its visual style around static shots and blocks of primary colour. Indeed, one early scene in a museum has the characters standing in front of Rothko paintings, announcing the film’s visual motif. The bare plot description sounds like your average thriller: a young Brigitte Lin plays a woman whose friend tries to commit suicide. When the friend’s brother arrives to help, he and Lin begin a relationship that turns dark and possessive as his secret past comes out. The film lurches between genres, beginning as a serious romantic drama before suddenly becoming a suspense thriller and then ending as a full on slasher. This shouldn’t work, but the discomfort of Tam’s formal strategies becomes the bonding agent between the different narrative types. Tam also shifts formal strategies slightly with each section: he doesn’t violate the primary aesthetic set in the opening, but as the Hitchcockian thriller section starts, he inserts orchestral music reminiscent of a Hollywood thriller where the first section was mostly soundtrack free, and uses more controlled, deliberately paced camera movements to create suspense (or at least suggest the filmic idea of it). The final section uses all the strategies of a gore-filled grindhouse slasher, with shock music, stalking sequences, and sudden intrusions into the frame. The film is garish, melodramatic, and contrived, but not meant to be taken at face value. There’s a knowing, self aware quality here, a mood of formal play and reflexive comment where genre styles are both indulged in and held up for examination. The slasher section does this in particular, starting out as ugly and brutal, but moving quickly into the ludicrous both by having the same basic kill scenario play out five times in a row to the point of absurdity, and by progressively upping the gore until it becomes cartoonish and comical. Tam doesn’t parody his chosen genres, he burlesques them, playing them up in knowing and artificial ways for a self-aware audience. The movie calls endless attention to its own devices. With its formal audacity, narrative mutability, flattened characters and psychologies, and the way it pushes itself constantly to extremes, even ludicrous ones, this is a difficult film to come to grips with. It ends up almost as a phantasmagoria on filmic themes—an energetic, formalist riff. Tam leaves a clue to what he’s up to in a glimpse of a book by Antonin Artaud, as his movie is extravagant and theatrical, rife with intense and violent imagery, in ways meant to jolt and purge. I’ve seen a million movies like this without ever seeing something quite like this. A provoking experience.


Nomad (1982)

What a frustrating, mesmerizing, inexplicable film. The way it mixes tones like the frothy and the sexy, the romantic and the melancholic, the insular and the cosmopolitan, in ever more extravagant ways, and done with an energy and visual elegance notable even in Hong Kong filmmaking—I hardly know what to say, except that it overwhelms and provokes. A mix of high and low art that’s unabashed. Lost, heady youths, trapped in themselves and their utopic ideals, flinging themselves headlong into love and sex, who nevertheless dream of some kind of escape to who knows where, someplace exotic and half real. It’s impossible to predict how intense and erotic the movie becomes given how frivolous and bouncy it starts, and in a transition so smooth you only realize once you’ve transitioned back. Aching eroticism sits back to back with sex comedy scenarios, and political motifs crash into action cliches. Trashy and contrived, beautiful and genuinely felt, wild and unpredictable, and gorgeous to look at. One of the characters is described as “coarse and tender”, and that’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a contradiction. This was a strange, sometimes frustrating experience, but one I loved. I never knew where this movie was going to go, even up to the end. It risked so much, pushed itself to such odd narrative extremes, and was so set in its aim to mix high art with popular entertainment to the point of creative lunacy, that I came to love the experience. This is weird, original cinema, and as good an example of the wild creativity of the Hong Kong New Wave as I can think of. Wonderful.


Cherie (1984)

Tam doing a straightforward rom com. Aerobics instructor Cherie Chung is romanced by two idiots, an old rich guy played by prolific kung fu director Chor Yuen, and a young fashion photographer played by Tony Leung Ka-Fei. Both men lie, cheat, and deceive to get what they want from her, while trying to avoid upsetting her fierce temper. Tam reigns in his taste for formalism and experimentation: there is still a striking use of colour, composition, and meticulous set design unusual in a broad romantic comedy, but it’s subdued compared to his previous three films. Tam’s visual skills and energy carry the movie, tho’, especially in several abstract romantic sequences with Leung’s photographer, because otherwise the plot and characters are generic, and the comedy is antic and crass in the usual Hong Kong way. Once again, Tam uses a book to suggest his meaning, here one titled Laughable Loves (couldn’t make out the author), which could be the title of the movie. Tam does sneak in a low key sense of melancholy and loneliness that’s easy to miss, one you sometimes glimpse in Cherie Chung’s eyes and expression; but Tam limits it, even undercuts it at times, such as a scene of Chung looking mournfully out at the water that’s made slightly ludicrous by the huge number ducks that paddle around, quacking away. Tam was far more comfortable with heady eroticism and sexual passion than most Hong Kong directors. Both Cherie and Nomad sexualize their stars, and indeed show the women characters eagerly pursuing adult sexual relationships without judgment or moralizing, in stark constrast to the discomfort most HK directors felt towards female sexuality. Cherie even has Cherie Chung show juuuust enough to count as nudity, including one artful tableaux done entirely for the audience (while fitting the voyeur theme), which’ll shock any HK fan. Big HK actresses never did nudity. For the most part, nudity only came from softcore or Japanese actresses (eg. Naked Killer, where the only naked person was the Japanese actress playing a minor character). Tam’s open embrace of sexuality is refreshing in an industry that could be so prudish. Overall, Tam’s film is visually interesting enough to be watchable, without transcending the bad comedic taste like, say, Tsui managed in A Chinese Feast. Still, Cherie Chung is gorgeous and expressive, the romantic scenes are wonderfully sexy, and the production design is marvelous. I’m torn on whether I liked this or not. It’s the weakest Tam movie I’ve seen so far, more annoying than funny, but plainly the work of a confident auteur, and that confidence in form and technique inspires a lot of goodwill. I haven’t seen a lot of Hong Kong comedies, but there’s more here than in most.


Final Victory (1987)

Tam experimenting with his style, moving away from the geometric formalism, pictorial emphasis on isolated moments and incidents, and the cool sophisticated camera moves, in favour of a breathless, charging, mobile filmmaking that still allows for his interest in colour design and expressive camera movement. This is more freewheeling and less designed than his first three films without losing the visual opulence and outrageous style. Things feel freer and less controlled, which suits Wong Kar-Wai’s aimless script of people moving about the various dim bars and rundown teahouses of nighttime Hong Kong, unsure of themselves and their futures. But Tam’s film is broad, farcical, and loud, rarely stopping to let us feel the well of loneliness and disconnection that bubbles under the surface. Tam keeps all that emotion in check until the end, when it bursts out in a mixture of loss, sadness, and doomed romance that is so perfect you wish the rest of the movie were a masterpiece to justify its perfection. But this one doesn’t quite hit you like Tam’s best. For starters, Eric Tsang plays his character as so pathetic and snivelling that it’s impossible either to invest in him or buy his romance with the wonderful Loretta Lee. There needed to be a balance that Tsang’s one-note performance doesn’t provide. Another problem is that the movie is basically running in place as fast as it can, a narrative style that can be effective, but here grows wearying since Tam declines to settle down. I think Tam would do a more effective version of this style and set of themes in his penultimate movie, the masterful My Heart is that Eternal Rose. But there’s so much in Final Victory that’s astonishing and masterful (the editing in particular is so finely-tuned and lends such dynamic energy that you see why Tam became an editor on other people’s films, including Wong’s). Very much worth seeing, even if it feels like minor Tam.


Burning Snow (1988)

Begins as a grim exploitation thriller before changing into a lugubrious melodrama. Tam piles on the misery, a series of sexual assaults, beatings, degradations, and everything else suffered by the main character, a young woman sold to a family to be the middle-aged son’s wife in an empty rural area. Her husband assaults her every night and verbally berates her during the day. Rowdy teenagers stop by their store late at night and assault her too, causing her husband to start physically abusing her on top of everything else. This is all in the first half hour, and shown in graphic detail. There are some moments of tenderness and psychological insight here and there, especially in one sad conversation between the girl and the houseboy; but mostly it’s a series of abuses. Enter Simon Yam, a convict on the run whom the girl hides, falls for, and begins a torrid affair with. The film picks up after that, exchanging the exploitation for a slow, sad story about thwarted lives, loneliness, and imprisonment. If Tam had shown more sensitivity and restraint, if he hadn’t lain it on so thick, this could’ve been a triumph given his skills. The film certainly looks terrific, all cold blues and whites courtesy of Christopher Doyle. But it's offputting more than transcendent, and its unvarying sadness and misery weighs it down rather than invigorates it. I’d put this with Cherie as Tam’s weakest effort.

[Mr Sausage]

For anyone even a bit interested in Tam, these are masterpieces and well worth tracking down:

The Sword
Love Massacre
Nomad
My Heart is That Eternal Rose

[Mr Sausage]

Seeding of a Ghost (Chuan Yang, 1983)

A gonzo Shaw Brothers splatter fest. It starts slowly, with a lot of trashy sex hijinx and a brutal rape scene with some impressive stunt work by the actress’ stunt double. Once you hit the halfway point, tho’, the black magic insanity begins and the film takes off. There’s plenty of sleazy weirdness and bizarre imagery to be found. A taxi driver’s philandering wife is raped and murdered. The rich perps go free and her beau cripples the taxi driver in a fight, so the man enlists the help of a black magic priest for his revenge. The plot is similar to Pumpkinhead, actually. This is very much in the spirit of Shaw’s Black Magic series from the 70s. The film is sleazy nonsense, but it showed me lots of things I’d never seen before when most movies, even better ones, fail to show me anything new.


Running Out of Time 2 (Johnnie To and Law Wing-Cheung, 2001)

More laboured this time around, and with worse performances. Lau Ching-Wan and Lam Suet are dependable as always, but Ekin Cheng doesn’t have the charisma to anchor his side of the game, Kelly Lin is flat and unconvincing, and Hui Shiu-hung gives a goofy, annoying performance. The movie makes a number of silly directorial choices (the CGI eagles--whose bright idea was that?), and has this jaunty tone to it that tips the movie into being silly and inconsequential where the original pulled off a deft balancing act. It’s not only the acting and the tone; the script is also to blame: Ekin Cheng’s character is a magician, meaning he does the impossible whenever the plot needs him to, so there's no tension or proper pay off. And the original revealed Andy Lau’s predicament/motivation at the start, so we could sympathize with him and enjoy his give-and-take with Lau. Ekin Cheng’s character is a mystery, so we’re just watching him torment Lau for obscure reasons while he sports a superior grin (the film never does reveal anything about him or his motives, even at the end). The best way to describe it is that the sequel feels like an irritating prank to the original’s cheeky game. This is best summed by its cruel humour, especially towards Lam Suet’s twitchy, gambling detective, who is constantly smacked, beat up, and put upon in whatever scene he’s in, each one shot to make him seem pathetic and ridiculous. I don’t know. This is not a bad movie by any means, but it was constantly off tempo, and a movie like this lives or dies by its grace and rhythm. I’m guessing this was a Lunar New Year film; it has that frivolous, consequence- and tension-free feeling I’ve gotten every time I’ve watched one.

[togg]

I watched The Wild, Wild Rose by Wong Tin-Lam recently. https://letterboxd.com/film/the-wild-wild-rose/

So passionate, loved it. It was a new restauration, I hope it will come out on bluray soon.

[mrb404]

For anyone even a bit interested in Tam, these are masterpieces and well worth tracking down:

The Sword
Love Massacre
Nomad
My Heart is That Eternal Rose

The Director's Cut of Nomad has been recently restored in 4K and has been screening in a number of film festivals.
Carlotta is presenting some of these screenings so a physical release in France will most certainly follow.

[Maltic]

But Love Massacre is "lost", is what I heard? In the sense that we're unlike to get a good BD/UHD version.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

To calibrate expectations accordingly, the restoration of Nomad is actually a new cut, not a heretofore-unreleased director's cut from 1982. Tam wasn't able to do one at the time, since he'd been booted off the production after spending the entire budget to shoot only half the movie. The producers brought in sundry others to finish it quickly and cheaply, eliding most of what Tam had planned for the second half (which would've required a roughly three-hour runtime). Tam was able to shoot his intended ending, which was broadly similar to what's in the released version but with a different outcome. For whatever reason the producers had it reshot by Terry Tong, a minor New Wave figure. Until recently it was thought that Tam's ending was lost, but the new cut "recreates" it, whatever that means. It has a different opening as well, but I haven't found info about any changes in between. The footage deleted by the censors is apparently still missing and was most likely destroyed; ditto for Love Massacre, although there are extant versions with varying degrees of censorship, the most complete being a 35mm composite the Hong Kong Film Archive assembled around 2007.

[Mr Sausage]

How much of the theatrical release is footage shot by Tam?

I had no idea the movie had had such problems. This accounts for the frustrating quality, tho’ happily it retains enough brilliance that it still works.

[andyli]

Until recently it was thought that Tam's ending was lost, but the new cut "recreates" it, whatever that means. It has a different opening as well, but I haven't found info about any changes in between. The footage deleted by the censors is apparently still missing and was most likely destroyed

From what I heard and read at least some censored footage was not lost. For example, the sexually charged tram scene was extended in the new cut using whatever was left from the cutting floor. The inserted footage was available as bonus material in the OOP Japanese DVD and can still be viewed in the Internet Archive.

So yes this sounds like a reconstruction job from whatever material they had all along. If lost footage was discovered I'd imagine it would have been much bigger news.

[andyli]

How much of the theatrical release is footage shot by Tam?

I had no idea the movie had had such problems. This accounts for the frustrating quality, tho’ happily it retains enough brilliance that it still works.

The only completely reshot part is the ending I believe. And since Tam had the final cut then, he did what he could in the cutting room to salvage any value (like better framing and pacing) from Tong's rushed work.

[pistolwink]

I think the ending actually works really well, having seen it before knowing that it wasn't at all what Tam intended. I hope that, whatever happens with this "reconstructed" version, that a decent version of the released cut is made available as well. (In other words, that the original doesn't succumb to Wong Kar-Wai syndrome.)

[feihong]

I think the ending actually works really well, having seen it before knowing that it wasn't at all what Tam intended. I hope that, whatever happens with this "reconstructed" version, that a decent version of the released cut is made available as well. (In other words, that the original doesn't succumb to Wong Kar-Wai syndrome.)

Absolutely. The movie was already great, I also hope we get some version of the theatrical cut restored as well.

[Mr Sausage]

Chang Cheh


Golden Swallow (1968)

Despite the title, this is more a Jimmy Wang Yu film than a Cheng Pei-Pei one. Indeed the script radically changes the Golden Swallow character, dropping her masculine energy to make her more traditionally feminine, and making her the love interest in a conventional love story. The love story is bonkers and as unhealthy as I’ve ever seen: Silver Roc, pining for Golden Swallow, slaughters people across the country side and then frames her for the atrocities in an attempt to get her to seek him out. This puts Swallow’s life constantly at risk with all the revenge-minded gang members pursuing her, but she accepts this with feminine mildness even as Silver Roc turns demonic from, ego, obsession, and vengeance. The location photography is beautiful and the fights nicely filmed. By and large Chang avoids Hu’s mobile camera in favour of tripod swivels and zooms. The action is wonderfully staged, tho’, even seeming modern at times with its extended sequences of choreography shot with a shaky hand held camera. Chang prefers here a rough, brawny kind of action to Hu’s dance rhythms. Despite less spraying blood in the fights, Chang makes a more grimly violent film than Hu, with scenes of men being whipped, quartered, or having their hearts cut out, and one particularly strong scene of an adolescent disembowelling himself while his father is tortured in the background. Indeed there’s a theme of men scouring and mutilating their own bodies to prove their virtue or loyalty, taking their own lives proudly and willingly to prove their devotion to this or that ideal. Characters also prefer being ripped apart in violent combat to a quiet death in a woman’s arms. There’s something more crass in Chang’s style; there isn’t the elegance of King Hu, which accounts for the differences in their reputations. Hu is more easily claimed by art house audiences, while Chang is unapologetic about his aim for low entertainment. This is also not a political tale full of plots and machinations, but concerns much darker emotions like erotic obsession, greed, vengeance, and other propulsive forces that bring people into violent confrontation. I greatly enjoyed this, but it’s a much different pleasure from Come Drink with Me, a darker and more mean-spirited one.


The Deadly Duo (1972)

This movie grabs you and never lets go. Chang opens immediately with scenes of bloody torture, before pulling out an epic battle that by any reasonable standard ought to be the climax of a movie, with its dozens of combatants, beautiful choreography courtesy of Lau Kar-Leung, and camera that whips from one mid-size fight sequence to another all in long takes, giving the impression of one large ongoing battle while showing off everyone’s technical mastery. Bravura filmmaking. The movie never quite equals it, but you hardly notice given how relentless the movie is. This is a short, simple film that distinguishes itself with an incredible amount of action for its run time. We barely slow down for a second before something exciting happens. Chang finds a lot of meaning in violent self sacrifice, especially in the name of large abstractions. So Chang sees much that is worthwhile in the staggering loss of life here, where nearly everyone dies, while Hu in The Valiant Ones, for example, saw something futile and self defeating in much the same thing. In Hu, all the violence and craziness was political, and so on some level petty and ideological; for Chang, politics is transcended by ideals like brotherhood, honour, and sacrifice, which get worked out in ritualized fashion. The two filmmakers are polar opposites, but they do share something vital, an ability to make all this violence dynamic and exciting. As an aside, there is one genuinely funny scene where three men all die doing the exact same thing, one after the other, in a display of idiocy so bizarre you can hardly believe it. I think it’s my favourite part of the movie. Just three guys trying to cross a dilapidated bridge one at a time, and every time someone falls through the slats to their death, the next guy shrugs, sets down his weapons, and jogs right across to the same fate. By the time number 3 goes, he’s already seen two people die doing this, and yet he just goes ahead and sacrifices himself on the alter of stupidity for no discernible reason. Three guys basically running right off a cliff one after the other while everyone on the cliff-side stands there pulling faces like it’s some great tragedy—hysterical, just comedic gold. As for the movie in general, it’s nearly empty of plot and character while crammed with tremendous action.


Ten Tigers of Kwangtung (1980)

The film is borderline incoherent, with its large cast of characters out of history or folklore (all given on-screen titles no matter how tertiary their role), its intricate flashback structure, its melding of different stories across time that mixes political intrigue with generational revenge, all in a brisk 90 minutes. The film seems to presume a lot of prior knowledge on behalf of the audience. As for the fighting, I’m not the biggest fan of the style of hand-to-hand choreography in Cheh’s venom mob era. There’s a lot of posing and intricate hand fighting that shows off the variety of traditional fighting styles, but always feels a bit stiff and performative. The weapons work is amazing, tho’, especially a duel in a restaurant late in the movie where one guy keeps pulling out weapon after weapon from under his cloak, each one wilder and more improbably hidden than the last, while the other guy makes a weapon out of whatever object is to hand. That fight bristles with energy and imagination. Looking around online, it seems the bulk of the movie was completed in 1977 but production had to be shut down when Alexander Fu Sheng injured his neck. The movie was completed years later using the wrap around frame story. That explains not only the bizarre plot complications and truncated feeling, but also why all the best fights, including the one mentioned above, come in the frame story rather than the flashbacks: in those three years, choreography had changed considerably, incorporating more dynamism and invention. While needlessly complex and oddly short, the movie is a ton of fun, mostly serving to show off the wildly different personalities and fighting styles of its large cast of characters. And the way the villain is dispatched is so left-field bonkers I genuinely burst out laughing from incredulity.


House of Traps (1982)

I’d thought this would be a kung fu Cube or Saw, with the Venom Mob trapped in a house full of devious traps they have to navigate with their individual fighting styles, but it’s more a twisty story of theft, intrigue, hidden identities, and obscure loyalties, with the titular house playing a pivotal but secondary role. That’s not to complain; I enjoyed the movie a lot. This is pure Chang, with his themes of loyalty and brotherhood, and his fascination with bloody and creative torture methods (he loves when people mortify their flesh to prove their ideals). But even as I enjoyed it, I was aware that Chang was starting to show his age. Tho’ released in 1982, the film feels earlier. The New Wave had already left its mark: compared to Spooky Encounters and The Sword in 1980, Human Lanterns and Ninja in the Dragon’s Den in 1982, and Project A, Duel to the Death, and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in 1983, Chang’s film can seem like a relic. This era saw the debuts of future luminaries and innovators like Corey Yuen, Ching Siu-Tung, Patrick Tam, and Tsui Hark, while directors, stuntmen, and choreographers like Yuen Woo-Ping, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao would start to perfect their styles. By this point Chang was an old guard stylist on one side of a transition point. These are not criticisms; I’d watch a film like this even if it was from 1992. It’s just interesting to see these later Chang’s at the same time as these New Wave films. They feel from different eras despite coming out at the same time. Maybe this is just a sign of stagnation at Shaw Brothers, a refusal to alter their house style. Who knows what Chang’s films would’ve looked like had he migrated to Golden Harvest. King Hu by contrast seems comparatively timeless. Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain aren’t particularly New Wave, but neither do they seem old school. They’re their own thing, a refinement of Hu’s signature style to produce something outside the major trends of the period.


Invincible Shaolin (1978)

It’s Venom vs Venom in this terrific kung fu movie. It’s not as fight heavy as Chang’s other work, much of the second act given over to training montages full of weird and creative training methods. But the methods are so fun and lively, and filled with gentle humour, that they’re the highlight of the thing. The movie is as efficiently structured as you’re going to find in a kung fu movie: the first act sets up the personalities and fighting prowess of the trio from North Shaolin as well as the conspiracy plot; the second shows the trio from South Shaolin learning the techniques to counter the masters from the North; the third is a grand finale where we see all those techniques we’d been familiarized with come into bloody confrontation. Maybe the best Venom Mob film I’ve seen so far, tho’ it doesn’t have the loopiness of Crippled Masters, my previous favourite.


The Kid With the Golden Arm (1979)

Why is the hardest, beefiest Venom named after the softest metal? Whatever. Chang gets these Venom movies off and running with enormous speed. We start with the plot already in motion, there is a brief moment of exposition, two or three lines at most, to get us up to speed, then some Venoms are introduced and we’re off. Here, a Qing Dynasty leader wants to move seven chests of money to help some refugees, and the members of the Deadly Valley, all with their own unique weapons and fighting styles, want to steal it. The rest is a shifting set of characters and strategies. Also, was Chang Cheh queer? Philip Kwok grabs Lu Fung’s spear and then they have a conversation about how he’s the first one to ever touch Fung’s spear, or I guess “spear”. He also ends a fight by impaling a guy through the groin as the guy jumps down at him, after which the impaled guy offers a last paroxysm while blood pumps suggestively from his groin. A lot of people are impaled in this movie, and the one swordsman takes every opportunity to charge away from his girlfriend to grapple with men in vigorous combat. I mean, yes, there’s always something a bit queer about the hyper masculinity of action films, but this one seems particularly suggestive.


Return of the One Armed Swordsman (1969)

A fun sequel, but a downgrade. The trouble is the drama is sucked out of the movie half way through. The first half is a “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” plot with the retired One-Armed Swordsman being forced out of retirement to stop a group of evil sword clans terrorizing the countryside. That’s fine, but once he makes his decision, the character is flattened by Wang Yu’s ego. The natural thing is to have the One-Armed swordsman have to regain his technique after years out of practise, but the movie not only has him pick off exactly where he left off, it makes him impossibly skilled. He defeats everyone easily, he spots every trick or stratagem from the start, and he has the solution to every problem. As long as he’s there, the outcome is assured. He struts through the film like the ultimate badass, which becomes kinda silly given how unconvincing Wang Yu is. He has none of the grit or charisma of an Eastwood or Bronson, qualities the movie needs to work. He just has a little sneer. Wang Yu worked better in the original, where he was a broken man, an underdog scrabbling out of the depths despite his handicap. Here, he has no handicap, no weakness, just improbable skill. It’s less effective. Thankfully, the fights are exciting and bloody, with the great variety of unusual weapons and styles, from spinning blades, to poison shooting swords, to tunnelling fighters, countering the missing drama with perpetual excitement. It’s not a great Chang, but it has enough of his good qualities to be watchable. Oh, and speaking of homoeroticism, this has the gayest shot I’ve ever seen in an action movie, a man killing the person choking him from behind by pushing a sword through his own stomach and into the other man, with the money shot composed to look like the one guy is mounting the other, replete with a great spurt of blood from right below frame and what can only be described as an O-face on the guy topping the other. I was so astounded I rewatched it twice.


The Flying Dagger (1969)

Opens grimly with an extended rape/murder scene, one the victim comes to enjoy before her murder. Not a promising start. Cheng Pei-Pei, witnessing this, kills the attacker, a noble’s son, setting the plot in motion (the opening events narrated by a chorus of singers). This has one of my favourite scene transitions, where the black and white of the opening transitions to colour through a splash of red blood suddenly hitting the camera, followed by a cut to the middle of a fight scene. It’s always nice to see Cheng Pei-Pei in a film: she brings an intensity and presence you don’t find in other female performers of the era, and offers a respite from Chang’s tendency to use women either as meek, passive beauties or dragon lady temptresses. It’s a shame she never worked again with Hu once he left Shaw Brothers, or that filmmakers couldn’t resist pairing her off with a male star like Wang Yu or Lo Lieh. It’s Lo Lieh here, playing a real bastard, someone who not only sexually harasses women but tries to buy Cheng Pei-Pei’s sexual favours in exchange for saving her family. Chang then sets up a romance between them late in the film, hoping that Lieh’s sob story will make us forget all his ugly actions and buy him as a love interest. The film’s sexual politics are uncomfortable and mar what is otherwise a thrilling swordplay drama. I really enjoy Chang’s 60s swordplay period; it may be my favourite era of his filmmaking, tho’ I’ll need to watch more Ti Lung/David Chiang era epics to decide for sure.


Five Shaolin Masters (1974)

Even among Chang’s quick openings, this one is notably breathless: a brief voice over setting up the historical situation lasts all of ten seconds, then the five characters and their main antagonists are introduced in a montage of fighting. Unlike so many Shaw productions, this is shot mainly on location. It’s shaolin monks on the run after the burning of the shaolin temple by the Qings. After movies full essentially of superheroes, it was refreshing to get a movie where the five shaolin masters are in fact outmatched by their enemies and have to train and improve through the latter half of the movie. It gives a more human tinge to the political drama. Chang, especially in his later movies, would often let the action drive the narrative, the confrontation between styles and gimmicks dictating who would go where. Despite the large numbers of fight scenes here, the movie has a heavier narrative focus. So even though it’s only a few minutes longer than many of the Chang’s above, it felt longer and more epic in scope. I have to admit, I found my attention wandering here. I don’t think it’s the film’s fault; I think I’m just getting Chang fatigue. His films are so numerous and his style and themes so specific—I ought to break up these viewings more.

[yoloswegmaster]

Just saw a trailer for an interesting-looking new Hong Kong martial arts movie, "Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In." A gangster story set in a really interesting-looking recreation of the Kowloon Walled City, the film is directed by Soi Cheang, written by Au Kin-Yee (screenwriter on Mad Detective, PTU, Triangle and Life Without Principle), and it features Louis Koo, Sammo Hung, and Richie Jen, along with a bunch of serious-looking martial arts actors. The camerawork looks muscular, the action looks pretty hardcore, judging by this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_izOZGDoLs

There was a press screening for this in Beijing and it received some very positive notices. I wasn't a big fan of the last film Soi Cheang made and thought it was a let down compared to his other films like Limbo, Accident, and SPL 2, so I'm hoping this is a return of sorts.

Also interesting to know this was in-development since the aughts, with John Woo and Johnnie To originally being co-directors and starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Sean Lau, Louis Koo, and Anthony Wong.

[feihong]

Also interesting to know this was in-development since the aughts, with John Woo and Johnnie To originally being co-directors and starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Sean Lau, Louis Koo, and Anthony Wong.

You're going to make me cry. That sounds like a more wonderful movie entirely.

I don't expect these two pieces of art to be like one another, I know they won't be. But my favorite piece of art about the Walled City is Anne Oppotowsky's Walled City Trilogy of graphic novels, each with different artists, including His Dream of the Skyland, Nocturne, and a third volume which has yet to be released (reputed to be finished some 3 or 4 years ago at least, but somehow not yet published––which doesn't bode well). The story follows a young man with autism whose new job working in the dead letter department of the post office takes him into the depths of the Walled City in its early days. It would be a wonderful movie––though without the hardcore kung fu action this Soi Cheang movie seems like it will offer.