Tsui Hark

[L.A.]

I sincerely hope We're Going to Eat You (1980) gets an UHD, even a Blu-ray would do just fine. Absolutely bonkers film . Too bad Hark himself hates it though.

[qw0aszx]

Just saw the 4K DCP of Green Snake at China Film Archive and it's definitely not a new restoration or scan, I think it's just the old HD restoration upscaled to 4K with brief scenes with snake redone in CG, the details look identical to old HD one. I remember someone saw The Butterfly Murders, also advertised as a new restoration from See-Yuen Ng, reported it just a scan of print in bad shape with fuzzy appearance. So I don't believe these new "restorations" from See-Yuen Ng any more. The only good news is that Nova blu-ray of Green Snake should be the old HD one without redone CGI scenes, since the one on Korean streaming service is the original one.

[Calvin]

Nova's release of Green Snake will be available to order on July 22nd

[andyli]

Funnily they had Ng See-yuen down under “Original Story by.”

[beamish14]

Nova's release of Green Snake will be available to order on July 22nd

This is phenomenal news. I hope it’s with the original VFX

[Calvin]

It's out in a week and is now available to pre-order. As per Nova's usual practice, there's no extras bar a trailer.

[Calvin]

Nova's Green Snake Blu-Ray still has the rubber snake

[andyli]

Yes. I think it's safe to say this is the best the film has ever looked on home media, and likely will remain so for years to come (if the fucked up "4k restoration" is to replace the current version of the film by the copyright holder). Some additional screen grabs shared below.

[Mr Sausage]

Knock Off (1998)

I've been on a Van Damme kick recently, so I thought I'd give this another shot for the first time since its theatrical release, when I was 13/14. What's nice about this movie, unlike Maximum Risk and Hard Target, is that it doesn't feel Hollywood, it feels HK. Where Woo and Lam were largely subsumed by their first Hollywood experiences, Tsui is working in Hong Kong with a Hong Kong crew and so gets to be creative and playful, indulging in whimsical or nutty visual ideas. The movie is all style and energy, with a camera so restless it even zooms inside electronics, phone wires, shoes, anything. Van Damme is usually a brooding, po-faced hero, but Tsui (with Van Damme's willing assistance) pokes a bit of fun at him, turning him into a low-rent playboy fashion designer full of sleazy charm. Even the obligatory Van Damme ass shot is turned into a joke, with Rob Schneider taking the opportunity to whip him in the glutes with a decapitated snake to urge him on in a rickshaw race. It's welcome to see Van Damme actually have some fun. The frustrating thing, tho’, is that apparently the fight scenes, choreographed by Sammo Hung, were severely cut. Who makes a Van Damme movie and cuts down the fights? I have to feel this was a studio decision, but what a clueless decision. I'm surprised at how much fun I had with this. The movie really embraces its own ridiculousness. Tsui would ultimately take this movie's style to greater heights in Time and Tide, his best film from this post-handover era, but even this trial run is good fun. I'd say Knock Off joins Sudden Death as my favourite Van Damme's.

Double Team (1997)

Another one I haven’t seen since my early teens. Tsui Hark’s first move following the handover was to break into Hollywood with this buddy movie starring Van Damme and…Dennis Rodman? Also Mickey Rourke in his pre-Wrestler slump, playing a body-building arms dealer. This is a weird, unsuccessful movie caught somewhere between big budget Hollywood actioner and Hong Kong nuttery. It’s garish, too, taking its visual cues seemingly from Rodman’s characteristic style. It has lines like: “With this gun, I can shoot the dick off a hummingbird”; “He’s like a snake: you look him in the eyes, and he gets you in the back.” Not sure the writers have ever seen a snake before, but ok. The plot’s all over the place, one moment a standard espionage thriller, another moment an adaptation of The Prisoner. I can see why Van Damme fans couldn’t get behind a movie this weird—it does seem to want to undermine the typical heroics with a prankish, grotesque sensibility. I wanted to like it for this reason, but it doesn’t come off, and anyway Tsui would do a much better job with Knock Off. The highlight? A crazy fight with longtime Tsui collaborator Xin-Xin Xiong, an exceptional martial artist and acrobat. Also occurred to me during the fights—Rourke and Van Damme were both legitimate professional fighters. Wonder if they got a bit competitive with each other.

[hanshotfirst1138]

Hark’s Hollywood films are probably not “good” in any conventional sense, but it’s amazing that Hollywood ever greenlit things so utterly insane.

[Mr Sausage]

The Lovers (1994)

A rich melodrama for Tsui to explore two of his regular interests: Chinese folklore and gender bending. This is based on the famous Chinese folk tale of the Butterfly Lovers. A young woman from a well-to-do family attends a prestigious school dressed as a man. There, she meets a driven but impoverished young scholar, and the two become friends and, eventually, lovers. The movie stops just short of being an outright queer romance. But it does flirt with the idea. The young man, San-pak, does come to worry that he is in fact gay, something that causes him mild concern but no panic. But his growing affection is shadowed by increasing suspicions of Ying-Toi’s true nature, and there is otherwise no attempt by the movie to make Ying-Toi particularly masculine. All the students seem equally attracted to her femininity, tho’ they don’t outwardly recognize it. The movie forms a pair with Green Snake, both being lush, colourful adaptations of romantic folktales that serve as a showcase for Tsui’s gorgeous style. This is a charming, effortlessly lovely film, filled to bursting with beautiful and tender scenes. Two of the most moving are set to music: San-Pak, bathed in moonlight, playing a traditional stringed instrument all night as Ying-Toi is forced to endure a punishment; or Ying-Toi attempting to play the same instrument to express her emotions over San-Pak leaving school, her fraught emotional state revealing itself through an increasing set of missed notes until she breaks down. Or there are astonishing visuals like Ying-Toi’s heavy makeup being washed away in a torrential downpour, or her tears turning red and streaking her face. The movie’s designed to craft a magic spell, and it worked for me. The movie’s emotional palette is intense and charged, but never uncontrolled no matter how it soars. It’s interesting to see Tsui reign himself in and aim for a balance of complementary tones that shift appropriately with the story. So light comedy slowly transitions to romance and from there to melancholy, ending in a burst of wind and lightning. It’s hard not to like a movie so visually alive. A bundle of restless cinematic energy. I wonder why I hear this talked about so little. It seems one of Tsui’s best.

[tenia]

I'm not sure how things are about it in the UK and the USA, but it got a quite prestigious DVD release in France years ago which gave the movie a huge new visibility, and it is now often quoted as one of Hark's best movie probably thanks to that.
It's been a long time since I haven't seen it, but I remember its last 15 minutes as being amongst the best stuff I ever watched.

[yoloswegmaster]

Spectrum Films in France is strongly hinting at a release for Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind.

[yoloswegmaster]

Spectrum Films in France is strongly hinting at a release for Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind.

They are also teasing a 4K release for Shanghai Blues.

[feihong]

Spectrum Films in France is strongly hinting at a release for Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind.

They are also teasing a 4K release for Shanghai Blues.

Hawt.

[yoloswegmaster]

Tsui Hark to begin production on Legends of the Condor Heroes later this month.

[Mr Sausage]

I was lucky enough to see Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind on the big screen today, in a print that looked really good (tho' the night scenes were too dark). It was my first time seeing the censored version, which restructures the film and includes newly shot footage. In the uncut version, three disaffected youths set off bombs in public places for fun. A sociopathic young woman witnesses it and blackmails them into further antisocial acts. In the censored version, the three youths go joyriding and accidentally kill a pedestrian in a hit and run, after which they are blackmailed. In the uncut version there are subplots involving the police officer brother and a number of ugly local crimes that flesh out the environment, while the censored version inserts more footage expanding on the foreign criminal organization from the original and the authorities' (including John Shum) attempt to track them.

So the two are basically the same, but the uncut version is a more interesting and cohesive experience. The bomb plot is more provocative and unsettling than the hit-and-run, and losing the former means we also lose a lot of footage with the youths in their apartment block, setting up their characters and living situation. The censored version is a bit choppier with a poorer sense of the social conditions in which the characters live. While the new footage does a better job introducing the foreign criminal organization than the original (in the uncut version they just show up unannounced half way in), it's poorly integrated, often interrupting the main narrative without ever dovetailing with the original footage, and often killing the film's momentum. John Shum's character in particular is awkwardly inserted into scenes as an observer in a poor attempt to integrate his subplot into the rest of the film. And the opening is botched: we start in the apartment block, setting up the grim realities of the location through atmospheric shots of the psychopath's apartment, and then cut to a long scene of the police talking around a table, then a scene of guys fencing, followed by a murder in a shower. By the time it cuts back to the apartment complex to introduce to the main characters, all the atmosphere of the opening has been dispelled. In the original, it cuts right from that hellish first scene to introduce the main characters, letting the depiction of the apartment as this grim, cramped, ill-lit place surrounded by bars and barbed wire carry over into the apartment complex itself in the next scene, connecting the three youths both with the ugly location and the psychopath.

The cut version is still a fascinating, energetic look at urban hell, but it's not as incisive or satisfying. It's just a shame that the uncensored scenes only exist on VHS tape transfers, so the censored version will remain the best looking option. The movie's imperfect in either version (and the animal cruelty is such a blight on the thing), but it is a Hong Kong masterpiece and a remarkable experience. I couldn't believe how much visceral energy the thing has, and I'd seen it before!

[tenia]

Wait, are you in Lyon ?
(I'm seeing this tomorrow evening)

[Mr Sausage]

Wait, are you in Lyon ?
(I'm seeing this tomorrow evening)

No, Canada. Local film festival is showing it.

[tenia]

I wondered for a minute as the movie's first showing at Lyon Film Festival would have fit !

[Mr Sausage]

I wondered for a minute as the movie's first showing at Lyon Film Festival would have fit !

Huh, weird coincidence. Wonder if they're both using the same source (the print or file used here was Cantonese with French subtitles).

Which cut of the film are you more familiar with?

[tenia]

I'll feed back here but it should be a new 2k restoration of the censored version, restored for the French label Spectrum.
I've watched only the uncensored cut but on DVD like 15 years ago, so I wouldn't say I'm familiar with any cut.

[Mr Sausage]

I'll feed back here but it should be a new 2k restoration of the censored version, restored for the French label Spectrum.
I've watched only the uncensored cut but on DVD like 15 years ago, so I wouldn't say I'm familiar with any cut.

Ok, that's exactly what I saw (I remember the Spectrum card before and after the movie). It's the best looking I've ever seen the film, but the night scenes were sometimes too dark to make out what was happening.

[tenia]

I'll see what this looks like this evening then. It seems like the restoration has been handled by Lumiris, who did the 2k remaster for God of Gamblers' Return and it was quite good though I felt it was slightly grain managed. Its grading however looks quite well balanced, and certainly not too dark in such scenes.

[tenia]

Ok yeah, same here : not all but clearly some of the darker scenes are way too dark. The speeding car scene after the foreigner hitman discussed with his bosses is pretty much undecipherable now. The rest is OK-ish but most certainly display black crush à-gogo here and there. The elements seemed to be damaged because probably the last half hour has constant scratches on the top third of the frame. There are also some heterogeneities in terms of texture, it seems fine mostly but some shots looked too smooth to me.

As the movie which I hadn't seen in years, I echo the sentiment : this censored cut makes regularly no sense in terms of story or in terms of structure, and several people were asking after the movie if it was them or if the movie was borderline not understandable.