Hong Kong Cinema: A Guide

[Maltic]

I misremembered, sort of. What Kline said on the podcast was:

John Woo's The Killer is a good example where they must have made hundreds and hundreds of prints off the original negative, and when we finally got to it back in the early days of DVD, it was a mess. I don't even know where that negative is now, but...

Nice to know that The Killer is on his mind, but it doesn't exactly sound like he's working on a release...

On the other hand, there's this Twitter reply from the KLStudioClassics account on August 17, 2020

Again, we would love to release them [Hard Boiled and The Killer], but last we heard they were both with another label, who'll most likely release them on Blu-ray, but not 4K.

Another North American label that doesn't do UHD... it does sound like Criterion. Of course, it could still take a years for Criterion to get them out, assuming they're the label in question.

I wonder what that Hawaii DCP looked like.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

In a way if Criterion are going to tackle anything Hong Kong cinema related I would love to see them do some more John Woo. I don't know if Hard-Boiled and The Killer are available to return into the collection, but something like Bullet In The Head (which came to mind last week whilst watching The Deer Hunter, which Bullet In The Head is a kind of 'reimagining' of) would be a perfect fit for Criterion. But even with that, it would need someone with specialised knowledge to be able to go into some of the details surrounding the different versions there.

I recall a user on here saying that they went to a screening of 'Bullet in the Head' with John Woo in attendance, and John had said that the negatives for his preferred version were damaged. However, Grady Hendrix had said that the restoration had to be put on hold since the negatives went missing, so who knows what the real reason is for the delay.

That user was probably me. Woo didn't say it was damaged. He said it was probably thrown out. This is unfortunately some of the frustrating nature of Hong Kong cinema and their lack of preservation. Also the little bit of extra footage that exists of this film comes from a VHS submitted to film festivals. Not sure how the original ending was preserved as I believe the VCD has this less action oriented ending.

In terms of films by major directors, Ann Hui's debut The Secret has portions that came from a Betacam copy of the original cut and the original version of Tsui Hark's masterpiece, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, comes from a VHS his editor saved. I often think of how all these Hong Kong films were remastered with sloppy and awful 5.1 audio in the transition to DVD and that all these Blu-rays coming out of Hong Kong films are sourcing the original mono track to laserdisc copies of these films. Sort of insane to consider.

[beamish14]

In a way if Criterion are going to tackle anything Hong Kong cinema related I would love to see them do some more John Woo. I don't know if Hard-Boiled and The Killer are available to return into the collection, but something like Bullet In The Head (which came to mind last week whilst watching The Deer Hunter, which Bullet In The Head is a kind of 'reimagining' of) would be a perfect fit for Criterion. But even with that, it would need someone with specialised knowledge to be able to go into some of the details surrounding the different versions there.

I recall a user on here saying that they went to a screening of 'Bullet in the Head' with John Woo in attendance, and John had said that the negatives for his preferred version were damaged. However, Grady Hendrix had said that the restoration had to be put on hold since the negatives went missing, so who knows what the real reason is for the delay.

That user was probably me. Woo didn't say it was damaged. He said it was probably thrown out. This is unfortunately some of the frustrating nature of Hong Kong cinema and their lack of preservation. Also the little bit of extra footage that exists of this film comes from a VHS submitted to film festivals. Not sure how the original ending was preserved as I believe the VCD has this less action oriented ending.

In terms of films by major directors, Ann Hui's debut The Secret has portions that came from a Betacam copy of the original cut and the original version of Tsui Hark's masterpiece, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, comes from a VHS his editor saved. I often think of how all these Hong Kong films were remastered with sloppy and awful 5.1 audio in the transition to DVD and that all these Blu-rays coming out of Hong Kong films are sourcing the original mono track to laserdisc copies of these films. Sort of insane to consider.

It truly infuriates me that films from the 1990's (and even as recently as the 2000's in the case of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and possibly All the Pretty Horses) have unrecoverable original edits and that there is so little investment from studios to restore them. WB can piss away $100+ million USD on Justice League but can't toss in a red cent for films they tried their hardest to destroy like Being Human and Mike's Murder.

[L.A.]

DVD Compare has reviewed The Untold Story from Unearthed Films.