971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

Discuss releases by Criterion and the films on them. Threads may contain spoilers!
Message
Author
User avatar
Cronenfly
Joined: Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:04 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#51 Post by Cronenfly » Sun Jun 30, 2019 12:15 am

What release would people recommend, this or the Eureka? It looks like the Eureka is being re-released without the booklets soon, and I have access to a DVD copy of the Criterion, so I’m guessing I should go for the Eureka with the additional cuts. Nonetheless, I’d be happy to hear what someone more familiar with these releases thinks.

User avatar
senseabove
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:07 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#52 Post by senseabove » Sun Jun 30, 2019 3:46 am

Cronenfly wrote:
Sun Jun 30, 2019 12:15 am
What release would people recommend, this or the Eureka? It looks like the Eureka is being re-released without the booklets soon, and I have access to a DVD copy of the Criterion, so I’m guessing I should go for the Eureka with the additional cuts. Nonetheless, I’d be happy to hear what someone more familiar with these releases thinks.
I've not seen either release myself, but there've been complaints that the Criterion release boosts colors, crushes blacks, and has a poor encode prone to macroblocking, which are all pretty readily visible in the caps-a-holic caps: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0 ... 91&i=3&l=0

User avatar
tenia
Ask Me About My Bassoon
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 11:13 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#53 Post by tenia » Sun Jun 30, 2019 4:46 am

Regarding the slight difference in contrast, isn't this just a difference in gamma ?
In any case, it seems to be helping in some cases to lessen the effect of Ritrovata's LUT so it doesn't seem only negative to me.

User avatar
EddieLarkin
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 10:25 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#54 Post by EddieLarkin » Sun Jun 30, 2019 5:21 am

Coincidentally I watched Police Story 2 last night via the Eureka disc and the blacks are terrible. At no point is there an instance of true black like there is with the first film. All of the blacks are several clicks above the letterbox bars. And whilst the grain is encoded perfectly (unlike the CC), these dark areas of the image are filled with unsightly compression blocks.

David has confirmed this is how the master arrived to him, but Criterion definitely did the right thing in adjusting it (which they definitely did, as the Blu-ray.com user who provided the audio tracks to them confirmed).

Switching over to PC Levels/RGB Full/0-255 brings the disc in line with the Criterion disc and the first film.

User avatar
senseabove
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:07 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#55 Post by senseabove » Sun Jun 30, 2019 3:27 pm

I readily admit I'm not very knowledgeable about gamma settings and the like, so I welcome being corrected. Just happened to come across some chatter elsewhere in the wake of the Eureka re-release announcement. I definitely trust you lot to be more knowledgeable.

While we're on the topic—is there an amateur-friendly primer on blu-ray gamma standards anywhere? As with other encoding-related concepts like macroblocking, ringing, DNR, etc., it's one of those words I've had to fitfully work my way backwards toward understanding when it comes up in context, but as this proves, it's not as "A/B-well that one's obviously better"-able as something like macroblocking.

User avatar
Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#56 Post by Adam X » Mon Jul 01, 2019 4:47 am


User avatar
senseabove
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:07 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#57 Post by senseabove » Mon Jul 01, 2019 10:48 am

Thanks for that. Just what I was looking for.

User avatar
zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#58 Post by zedz » Sun Sep 29, 2019 3:17 pm

These films feature amazing stunt sequences, but the rest of the films range from mediocre (plot, acting) to insultingly bad (almost all of the gags - including everybody's favourite: the rape joke). Still, they fill a gap in the collection, and there's a solid set of extras that focus on what make the films important (i.e. the stunts). Seeing Maggie Cheung reduced to the "idiot girlfriend" role was pretty depressing.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#59 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Sep 29, 2019 6:11 pm

That's really what makes the Michelle Yeoh character in Police Story 3: Supercop so refreshing, as after all the undeserved punishment meted out to Maggie Cheung in the previous two films there is someone who gets to share the heroic stunt action (though that character is also there to do a bit of Mainland China vs Hong Kong, Red Heat-style opposites teaming up across political divide things, which might not play so well right at this current moment!)

User avatar
tenia
Ask Me About My Bassoon
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 11:13 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#60 Post by tenia » Mon Sep 30, 2019 2:47 am

I was left mostly unimpressed by Super Cop despite this trade-off. I alrady thought PS2 to be over long and poorly paced, but Super Cop (despite its shorter runtime) felt the same.

User avatar
The Elegant Dandy Fop
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 3:25 am
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#61 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Mon Sep 30, 2019 4:57 pm

As a small aside, there's also Supercop 2 where Michelle Yeoh plays her character from Supercop that's also directed by Stanley Tong. I've only seen this on VHS in it's original title and language, Project S, and have to say it's an absolute mess. It's a sloppy melodrama about mainland China and Hong Kong relations before the Hong Kong passover with some pretty pathetic action sequences and an ending ranks among the most unsatisfying in cinema history. Worst than that is that movie halts for ten minutes to have an irrelevant Jackie Chan cameo in drag. I can't recommend it to anyone.

User avatar
Cold Bishop
Joined: Tue May 30, 2006 9:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#62 Post by Cold Bishop » Mon Sep 30, 2019 7:29 pm

I don’t if I can agree with all that. For starters, that’s where Maggie Cheung was at her career at that time: the young, chipmunk-faced gamine who did a lot of these throwaway roles. Frankly, I’m not sure she had come into her own as an actress even if a more dramatic role had been written for her here.

The film structure is still climbing out of the slapstick segment-film form most of these Cantonese comedies were made from: these films were just stringing together various gags, setpieces and routines, a la a WC Fields or Laurel & Hardy films. It may not be as dramatically coherent as some of it’s contemporaries or successors, but I do think the merit comes from the value of the individual segments which, in the first film at least, are uniformly strong and often astounding. And the film still manages to generate enough dramatic tension in our desire to see slimy Chor Yuen get his comeuppance.

Of course, the equal weight given to slapstick as much as action, has always been the linchpin for certain viewers. I will say that one of the more interesting things about seeing these films theatrically over the years, with a baseline audience of college age students being the one constant, has been how the reaction to the comedic sequences have changed. I know when I first started seeing these, those sequences would usually be met with silence or superior snickering. Yeah recently, I found the audiences to be responding to the films at their own level, laughing with them not at them. The slapstick sequences here met with genuine laughter when I last saw the film in Seattle. And that’s been true for other revival screenings from the genre: there’s a long apartment scene in Dragons Forever, all a clockwork piece of slamming doors and mistaken identities, that brought the house down with laughter the last time I saw it theatrically. And rightly so... and I say that as someone who used to be not give much appreciation to the comedy in these films.
colinr0380 wrote:
Sun Sep 29, 2019 6:11 pm
That's really what makes the Michelle Yeoh character in Police Story 3: Supercop so refreshing
It’s worth pointing out that, despite the way it was sold in the west, this was not nearly as much an upending of genre expectations as one would think. Michelle Yeoh’s (nee Khan) Yes, Madam! came out a full month before the first Police Story, and it’s if anything even more tough and dramatically tense than the Chan film, and features two bonafide action heroines with Cynthia Rothrock making her debut. It was also another smash hit, making stars of both of them.

User avatar
zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#63 Post by zedz » Mon Sep 30, 2019 9:45 pm

Cold Bishop wrote:
Mon Sep 30, 2019 7:29 pm
I don’t if I can agree with all that. For starters, that’s where Maggie Cheung was at her career at that time: the young, chipmunk-faced gamine who did a lot of these throwaway roles. Frankly, I’m not sure she had come into her own as an actress even if a more dramatic role had been written for her here.
So it's Maggie Cheung's fault that her part was terribly written? That doesn't make any sense.

And she appeared in As Tears Go By the same year as Police Story 2, and Song of the Exile a couple of years after that, so I don't think the problem was her lack of range.

User avatar
Cold Bishop
Joined: Tue May 30, 2006 9:45 pm
Location: Portland, OR

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#64 Post by Cold Bishop » Tue Oct 01, 2019 12:10 am

My understanding of Hong Kong in the era was that a lot of young actresses were picked straight from modeling agencies and the beauty pageant circuit: you pretty much had to learn how to be a good actress on the job. Some actresses pulled this off, some didn’t. The fact the dubbers were there to pick up a lot of the emotive slack and fix line readings made this more feasible. Cheung works in As Tears Go By but that’s as much to do with Wong tailoring the role around Cheung’s youthful naive screen persona. By most accounts, Song of the Exile was part of her big dramatic breakthrough in ‘89-‘90: I don’t know if comparing stuff before and after is fair.

It’s a shallow characterization, but I don’t know if that particular segment of the film required anything beyond surface characterizations from any of the supporting players. If anything, I’m surprised they didn’t just make it a Jackie Chan-Bridget Lin romance and call it good.

User avatar
feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#65 Post by feihong » Tue Oct 01, 2019 4:03 am

I think the reason they didn't go in that direction is because Jackie has absolutely zero actual romantic chemistry with his leading ladies, with the exception of Anita Mui, who made those scenes palatable, but whom Jackie seldom treated like a romantic interest except in Miracles. Most of the girlfriends Jackie's character has in these movies fit some variation of the role Maggie plays in these films. She plays a girl Jackie can throw up his hands and scream at, and then when he gets a serious look on his face all her anger at him melts into "romantic" sympathy. But Maggie is somehow a little more callow–seeming in these films than Jackie's other leading ladies, and a little bit more harassed (though his girlfriend in Project A is certainly dizzier; and an even less impactful role than May provides in the Police Story films). I remember an interview where Maggie talked about being cast in these movies, and she said something like "I think Jackie looked at me and thought, 'there's a girl who won't mind when I push her down these stairs.'"

Jackie Chan movies have often left an acrid taste in my mouth because of the roles women are subjected to in them––so often just shy of being tied to the railroad tracks in a silent picture. The roles for women in Jackie's films are just so out of step with the kind of roles there were for women in other Hong Kong movies of the era. It seems casually misogynist of him to demand such shrill hysterics and so little depth from these performances, but then I remember Michelle Yeoh's competence in Supercop and Kara Hui aplomb in The Inspector Wears Skirts. Maybe Jackie only gets along well with actresses who are really physically adroit. Brigitte Lin often seems to have come out of another movie in her scenes in Police Story. Her role isn't terribly sophisticated, but she seems bemused by Jackie and skeptical of his antics throughout. I think she acts circles around Jackie––though she seems in a more generous mood to Maggie Cheung, and she plays against Maggie pretty well. In the outtakes Brigitte looks less comfortable in the stunt sequences than others. I doubt making this movie was a very pleasurable experience for her. And she never did another movie like this again.

Nowadays I find these movies more enjoyable than in the past, mostly because I watch them now as a record of stunt performers going through incredible complex routines. Police Story 2 is pretty miserable, though. I still can't watch that one at all. I prefer the ones with Jackie, Sammo and Yuen Biao though, partly because that air of disinterest/sadism towards the women in the film is not so much an aggressive part of the story.

Orlac
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:29 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#66 Post by Orlac » Tue Oct 01, 2019 8:07 am

Maggie's injury in PS2 was unwarranted, as you can't even tell its her in the outtake of her being hurt.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#67 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Oct 02, 2019 3:52 am

I would generally agree with the lack of chemistry between Jackie and any of his female co-stars. It often feels a bit big brother and little sister-ly in some ways. Even when surrounded by three female co-stars of varying ethnicities in Operation Condor: Armour of God 2, there's an almost palpable anti-chemistry going on there. Which is usually fine because the focus is so much more on the action and stunts that everything else, even the de rigueur romantic subplot, often takes a back seat, but as said above it sometimes gets a bit iffy on those occasions when the female characters are taking blows full to the face as part of the comic antics rather than when its your standard stunt guy!

And whenever the action has to stop for 'plot' to occur, that can usually be the least interesting part of the films. It has been a while since I saw it but one of the few that I felt did work was 1999's Gorgeous, with an early role for Shu Qi (who the year after would be in Millennium Mambo, then love interest in The Transporter, and later in The Assassin) and support from Tony Leung (in the gay best friend of the female lead part!), but I attribute that a lot more to the director Vincent Kok and it being his first (and only?) Jackie Chan film. That was quite an enjoyable film, though it was a bit of a shock to have it be much more about Shu Qi's character with Jackie in a supporting role that it took some getting used to and having to adjust expectations accordingly.

Maybe in these kinds of situations stars get constrained by their personas as much as themselves into not wanting to venture outside their comfort zones, as the expectations are so set in stone about the type of figure that "Jackie" (as opposed to Jackie Chan himself) is, that it is difficult to portray a different kind of figure than the athletic lovable 'bigger brother' type.

Plus I guess there is that more general need to have the action hero as always potentially 'sexually available' to the audience: we don't want Jackie getting hitched any more than Indiana Jones or Ethan Hunt or James Bond. Because if they settled down with one particular person they could not possibly jump through the screen and whisk us out of our seats instead! There would also be no continuing adventures if the character was fulfilled. So they need to be perennially unlucky in love (with either a string of failed relationships or dead spouses or lovers in their wake) or love 'em and leave 'em types, like Bond (or Ryu Saeba as Jackie portrayed in City Hunter). Or pretty much asexual, which I think is where Jackie ended up despite the regular appearance of girlfriend-types to surround his characters.

_

The really great film from this era for female leads in Hong Kong action (aside from Peking Opera Blues, with Brigitte Lin) is probably the two Johnnie To directed Heroic Trio films, starring Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh and Anita Mui. That really gives all three the room to shine in roles that complement each other nicely. Though those films are getting into the much more fantastical, wire work side of things than the relatively more grounded practical stunts of films like Police Story.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#68 Post by knives » Wed May 19, 2021 11:42 am

Is there any reason they included over an hour of My Stunts and not the other twenty some odd films?

Also, those early martial arts films Hendrix mentions sound amazing and I’d love to be able to see any of them.

User avatar
Noiretirc
Joined: Tue Dec 09, 2008 6:04 pm
Location: VanIsle
Contact:

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#69 Post by Noiretirc » Fri Dec 16, 2022 1:08 am

So, having perused this thread, I must ask: Do people actually watch these films for "plot"? :wink:

And, may I ask?: Are the dub tracks on this good/bad/embarrassing? (I have a 14 year old who wants to see more Jackie Chan. We are debating subtitles vs dub.)

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#70 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 16, 2022 1:16 am

I grew up on Jackie Chan English dub movies, so I love that option, but that's primarily from his American-HK period when I imagine the punchlines were at least partially crafted with the dub in mine, to maximize the effective impact in English (i.e. Rumble in the Bronx's "Are you okay?" "No!") - I believe I watched these with subs the last time around, but I doubt it makes a world of difference (though I did try to watch Dragons Forever's dub earlier this year and it was pretty rough, so you never know)

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#71 Post by knives » Fri Dec 16, 2022 7:16 am

The dubs are a good option. I was actually thinking recently how I wish dubbing options were more common. I was watching Petite maman and thought how amazing it must be for young kids, but how the lack of dubbing basically forces it in English speaking places to become adult only.

Orlac
Joined: Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:29 am

Re: 971-972 Police Story & Police Story 2

#72 Post by Orlac » Fri Dec 16, 2022 7:37 am

I've seen so many HK dubs...the original on Police Story is cheesy but tolerable.

For the love of god, avoid the dub on Return of the One-Armed Swordsman should that ever come your way!

Post Reply