Hong Kong Cinema

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

It was:

SpoilerShow

Looks like the same art was also used for a Dutch release.

[feihong]

So I wonder; was the bra painted on after the fact, as a concession to popular taste, or did the painter present the painting, and the producer said to him, "where're the nipples?" Or, I suppose, he'd say, "Wo sind die brustwarzhen?" And the painter responded, "was?"

I love how incredibly degraded the VHS cover for Top Squad is there––it looks like it was rescued from a post-apocalyptic future. Is that dried blood congealing on the bottom of the spine? All of this just seems so incongruous for the "Police Acadmy"-style film that is The Inspector Wears Skirts.

[pistolwink]

Honestly, all exploitation films given restored Blu-Ray releases should come in packaging that looks like it was found at the bottom of a poorly-packed box recovered from your uncle's basement after a nasty flood.

[therewillbeblus]

Dreaming the Reality is grindhouse filmmaking at its slickest, embracing all the aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the movement, down to what appear to be deliberate marks scratching the celluloid around a rather pristine image for back channels. I like Death Proof okay, but this feels like what Tarantino's entry would've looked like if he was willing to downplay his compulsions to be loquacious for the sake of visual wit, and it's all the better for that trade-up. There are many strengths to be found here, but the majority of the praise should be directed at Chun-Ku Lu's eclectic technique regurgitating incessant optical flourishes, imbuing experimental angles and unhinged but controlled editing that is nothing short of electrifying. Some bits feel like the closest inspirations for Kill Bill out of all the influences cited that I've seen (I also wonder if NWR stole the pole stabbing scene for Drive, since one of the early fights features a carbon-copy image), but everything is pitched in a dreamscape somewhere between exploratory liberation found in experimental arthouse cinema and the grounded nature of precise economy common in HK action cinema. However, that would be too derivative an explanation, as just when you think you understand which poles of influence this is striking a balance between, it goes and films a boxing match like a documentary, tilted a bit more into raw realism than Raging Bull's handheld techniques that involve us in the action. Like the best HK films, its style is all over the place, but focused with an internal logic of composition that makes us feel both securely contained and continuously surprised in this world.

It's difficult to describe the depths of this film's pleasures, but I liken them a bit to anime's, in that outside of the imaginative action and set pieces, we're invited into character through similar paths as manga. Moon Lee is such a badass, giving a detailed sheen of cool to a character who normally wouldn't have that piece of her prioritized but actually demands it. The strategy helps involve us into her world, and most importantly, invites us to be confident in her skills along with her- not just based on what we observe but in how we relate and trust on a level divorced from demonstration of those skills. The trust is built the way it is when we meet people in our lives whose behavior gives off those confident vibes, so we know her on two levels: detached evidence, and also harmonic faith in her will and personality to transcend barriers to actualizing goals. This might seem like basic character development, but it's heavily understated while still providing these critical opportunities to join her, and full credit is due to Chun-Ku Lu's proximity and attention, and Moon Lee's performance, to achieving this effect. Someone much more knowledgable than me could probably write more in-depth rationales for the connection to anime, but so much is expressed and peripherally (rather than internally- the information never punctures the psyche) known about Moon Lee's rich dimensions with so little effort, and that's really where this film shines: It's a shining example of cinematic economy- in narrative, creative visuals, action choreography, pacing and editing, and characterization; and just a blast all-around

Are there any other Chun-Ku Lu films worth seeking out? I can't overstate how impressed I was with his directorial skills

[Mr Sausage]

Are there any other Chun-Ku Lu films worth seeking out? I can't overstate how impressed I was with his directorial skills

I really liked Killer Angels (Moon Lee gets a song and dance number!) and Devil Hunters.

Tho' rather than go the auteurist route, you really just ought to check out Moon Lee films in general. There are some bangers. If I were you, I'd go right to Kickboxer's Tears and then follow that up with Killer Angels, Iron Angels, and Angel Terminators 2. You'll have a blast.

[therewillbeblus]

Cool, thanks! I actually had a few of these on my list already, but had no idea she was in them. I found her to be uniquely charismatic for a HK action star, and I'll be curious if this is a consistent persona, and if so, how different filmmakers choose to prioritize the space to exploit its value. The director and her were very in sync here, so I expect Killer Angels will be more of the same

[Mr Sausage]

I found Moon Lee a consistently enjoyable presence in HK action cinema. She has this wide-eyed pixie charm that shifts effortlessly into steely resolve and aggressive fighting. It's great, and a far cry from someone like Cynthia Khan, who could fight but had no identifiable screen presence. One of the most annoying things about the Iron Angels series is how it increasingly sidelined her even tho' she's the best part! She's good at comedy, too. With her dance background and comic sensibilities, in another universe she could easily have been the queen of musical comedies. Thanks to the left-field absurdity of Hong Kong, she's one of its best action stars instead. Here's hoping 88 films or whoever gets around to putting out her stuff.

Oh, and I'd forgotten Chun Ku-Lu co-directed Angel Terminators 2, which I remember mainly for Yukari Oshima's skin-tight pants with 'slut' written all over them. And the great fights, of course.

[feihong]

Moon Lee is great value in Hong Kong cinema, from the A-list pictures she did (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Mr. Vampire) to this sort of B-level where she really finds her groove. I'd co-sign everything Mr. Sausage said, but I'd add more movies to the list, including Devil Hunters––the movie where Sibelle Hu and Moon get caught in an explosion, burned, and Sibelle gets significantly scarred (you can see scars on her hand in Dreaming the Reality, and an accompanying change in the way she plays roles––she is much more rangy and comic beginning with Dreaming the Reality), Beauty Investigator, Mission of Justice (shot by Chun-Ku Lu at purportedly the same time as Dreaming the Reality), and Princess Madam (the most coherent movie Godfrey Ho ever directed).

The original Iron Angels (I grew with the film being identified as just plain "Angel") is a favorite of mine, along with Dreaming the Reality and Angel Terminators 2. Devil Hunters, Killer Angels, Beauty Investigator, Princess Madam and Kickboxer's Tears I'd probably rate just a smidgen below those. The later Angels movies are so weird, and I totally agree with Mr. Sausage that it's a hugely bonehead maneuver to pick Alex Fong as the focal character in the two sequels, over the obvious charisma and intensity of Moon. I think they just should have brought back Yukari as Moon's partner in the sequels and made it about them, continuity be damned.

There are a few lesser movies in this cycle. I would steer clear, for instance, of New Kids in Town. But by and large these movies know what they're about, and get right to it. There is a movie mostly overlooked in there, which is...maybe not great? But I think it's really interesting. That's Yes, Madam '92: A Serious Shock. It's a picture with Moon, Yukari, and Cynthia Khan (also Lawrence Ng, from Sex & Zen, getting killed when his wife jams a fork in his throat and nails him to a wall). The shock is probably that, for the only time in her career, Moon plays the villain, with Cynthia the cop and Yukari as an arms dealer, if I recall right––who team up to get Moon fired from the police force––fatally.

An unsubtitled HD print has shown up on Youtube of what is apparently Moon Lee's last movie, where she's sidled with a bunch of kung fu kids. I haven't tried to watch it yet. It's a shame Moon never came out of retirement the way Kara Wai and Fennie Yuen have. Apparently she has taught dance and had students place in Hong Kong dance competitions since then.

[therewillbeblus]

Moon Lee is great value in Hong Kong cinema, from the A-list pictures she did (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Mr. Vampire)

I love both of these, but don’t recall her screen presence- though in fairness my adoration for each is largely due to rhapsodic pleasures that threaten to usurp attention to any performer’s finer dimensionality. But I’ll take any excuse to revisit them

[feihong]

She is Brigitte Lin's aide de camp in Zu, who end sup joining Yuen Biao and Mang Hoi's co-conspirator by the end. In Mr. Vampire she's the corporeal love interest, but she's very feisty and fun. The climax of the film involves her having to kiss the vampire corpse, delivering the spell that will defeat him. It doesn't work, but she tries it anyway. Her disgust is palpable.

She's in a few more A-list movies of the 80s, like Winners & Sinners, Twinkle Twinkle, Lucky Stars, The Protector and The Champions, the first sequel to Mr. Vampire (I legitimately did not remember her in this one), a tearjerker with Josephine Koo, as well as a couple of supernatural movies of the 90s, including The Revenge of the Angel, Bury Me High: The Legend of Wisely, and a movie called The Nocturnal Demon––another Ricky Lau horror movie, like Mr. Vampire, probably a comedy, since Moon co-stars with Alfred Cheung. Haven't seen Nocturnal Demon yet, but I'm pretty interested. Apparently Moon fights Yuen Wah in that one.


She's also in a 1986 Taiwanese biopic called The Story of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, which boasts a packed cast, with Alex Man playing Sun Yat-Sen, and co-starring Pauline Wong, Derek Yee, Kara Wai, Gordon Liu, Chin Siu Ho, Deanie Yip, Eddie Chen, Ray Lui, Melvin Wong, Paul Chung, Lung Shihun and Ku Feng––and which apparently utilizes a narrative approach incorporating Chinese opera techniques. Looks interesting.


Update: I watched The Nocturnal Demon tonight––the whole film is on Youtube, in pan-and-scan VHS quality. Errr...don't bother. Even though it's directed by Ricky Lau, who helmed the first Mr. Vampire––and even though Moon fights Yuen Wah in a plastic-looking bob haircut, a Blade-Runner-ish clear blue raincoat, and roller skates, the movie crashes hard. There is a lot of inane comedy, and, jarringly, a blackface sequence. The idea of two Alfred Cheungs in the movie––one a serial killer and the other a hapless nerd who gets blamed for his crimes––has potential that this movie trades away in favor of this increasingly desperate search for laughs. There are very few Moon Lee fight scenes. A real shame.

[Mr Sausage]

It's difficult to describe the depths of this film's pleasures, but I liken them a bit to anime's ... Someone much more knowledgable than me could probably write more in-depth rationales for the connection to anime...

I watched Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers a couple days ago and fell in love with it, but one movie it made me think of might surprise people, and that's Peking Opera Blues. Tsui is a huge fan of anime and I think his movies often approach a similar effect. The way Tokyo Godfathers moved seamlessly from social or character-based realism to heightened adventure or adrenaline pumping speed, something the very nature of its being animated primes us to accept, mirrors the effects of Peking Opera Blues. Much like Kon's film, Tsui ends his movie with an astonishing series of outrageous action bits that, on paper, ought to contrast bizarrely with the rest of the movie. And yet it doesn't. Moving into the heights of cartoonishness feels appropriate, somehow, just as Kon's move into improbable and outrageous action never violates the spirit of his movie even tho' it's unprecedented in the narrative. If the movies are working for you, the endings are not just appropriate but sublime.

I think what happens is Tsui manages to create an atmosphere of theatricality mirroring that heightened magic feeling that comes naturally to animation and that Kon manipulates so well in his own films. Kon and Tsui can get away with making movies by turns quiet and outrageous for a similar reason. They can construct persuasive characters in an identifiable social reality and yet break the laws of conventional reality without seeming to violate any internal logic because something about the quality of the visuals and the atmosphere suggests artifice and constructedness, and that prepares you for the inflations and deflations. You can get away with this more in animation, so it's doubly magical how Tsui manages this in live action, both here and in a number of his other movies (Shanghai Blues has a quieter version of this effect, and Green Snake's over-vivid painterly compositions for sure want to approach comic books or animation).

[Mr Sausage]

Dreaming the Reality (Chun Ku-Lu, 1991)

Like a combination of Iron Angels and Kickboxer’s Tears. Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima are two sisters trained from childhood to be assassins, and Lee gets PTSD when one of their assassinations accidently kills a whole family. Sibelle Hu is a gambling, hard drinking, arm wrestling bar owner who helps manage her brother’s fight career in Thailand when they run afoul of a local gangster. It’s two separate movies entirely that the film melds through no less than an amnesia and a psychic subplot. The film is like two half-remembered dreams, the strands of which get tangled in your recollection. It’s all crazy energy and momentum carrying you across way too many tones, genres, storylines, characters, and themes. It fails to be a proper movie, but succeeds at being its own fun thing. You have to love its grotesque logic, too. Suitcase handcuffed to a guy? No worries, just shoot the arm off and spend the scene running around with a hand dangling from your briefcase. I don’t normally notice outfits, but Yukari Oshima is always dressed so wonderfully in her movies. I love her punk swagger; it makes a great complement to Lee’s wide-eyed innocence. While I’d’ve liked more fight scenes, the fight amidst the trip-wires was superb, one of the most creative bits of action in HK cinema. The last thing that struck me was how nice it was to see, in such a typically masculine genre, so much revolve around sisterhood and female relationships; how it’s Moon Lee and Sybelle Hu who are left to grieve, take stock, and band together to take revenge on what is undoubtedly an image of the patriarchy: a possessive and domineering father with his lapdog son. One of the more pleasing contradictions about Hong Kong was how this more traditional society could give so many strong and even gender-bending roles to women in traditionally masculine genre films. Compare to America, where Cynthia Rothrock was almost never put in a film without a strong male partner, often one she played second-fiddle to, even tho' the advertising always used her name and image to sell the movie.

[therewillbeblus]

I inexplicably left out praise for Sibelle Hu in my writeup, since she’s actually the character I wanted to single out as the richest, anime-like persona, rather than Moon Lee (at least I think..). Whoops

[Mr Sausage]

I inexplicably left out praise for Sibelle Hu in my writeup, since she’s actually the character I wanted to single out as the richest, anime-like persona, rather than Moon Lee (at least I think..). Whoops

Did you mix up Moon Lee and Sibelle Hu? Lee is the assassin girl with amnesia who gets semi-prophetic dreams; Hu is the swaggering bar owner with the chucklehead brother.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I'm almost certain that I did- a good excuse to revisit the film and find out

[Mr Sausage]

You should still check out Moon Lee films, she really shines in them. But Sibelle Hu steals the show in Dreaming the Reality.

[Mr Sausage]

Fatal Termination (Kam Yeung-Wah, 1990)

A movie infamous for its child endangerment: a car chase done with an actual five year old being dangled by her hair from a car window. The movie is stuffed with plot and characters: Middle Eastern revolutionaries are shipping guns through Hong Kong. Robin Shou is the corrupt customs official who helps steal them; Simon Yam is the reckless cop on the case; Moon Lee and Ray Lui are a couple who also work as customs agents; Philip Koh is the gang leader Robin Shou tries to manipulate, and who not only kills Moon Lee’s brother but had his own brother killed by Ray Lui from the latter’s days in Narcotics. And this is all in a breakneck 90 minutes. The film is surprisingly coherent, but this coherence seems to come at the cost of action, which is brief and sparse for the first hour. The final third is an unending stream of insanity, tho’. It’s like the film drops all pretense of being an actual movie and just starts throwing as much nuttery and energy at the screen as it can. The kind of nuttery where one character stops another from drowning a suspect in a puddle because “he’ll die too easily that way!” The kind of nuttery where a character is shot full of holes and stands there in close up spitting blood and laughing maniacally. If the whole movie had been that, it’d be an HK classic. As it stands, it’s a decent thriller with an unmissable finale full of unrestrained tastelessness and mayhem.

[Adam X]

Which all makes it sound like a perfect HK release for Vinegar Syndrome.

A movie infamous for its child endangerment: a car chase done with an actual five year old being dangled by her hair from a car window.

I just listened to a recent interview with Mike Leeder & Arne Venema where Arne mentioned he spoke with the stunt coordinator about that scene, who claimed it was perfectly safe. But of course rejected the idea that he’d have been ok using his own kid for the stunt.

[feihong]

I feel like in this particular case, you can just clearly see on screen that the stunt isn't safe––though I think Arne's observation is very telling.

Incidentally, the endangered young actress in the scene is Cheuk Yan Chan, the same actress who had a memorable role as Ka Ka in Ringo Lam's Wild Search. She is adorable––and terrible at delivering lines. In 5 years––from 1988 to 1993––she appeared in 11 movies. And that is her whole filmography, according to IMDB. Her last picture is the Johnnie To/Ching Tsiu-Tung flick, The Heroic Trio. I seem to recall her there as a kid who falls from a tree trying to save a cat––and then Anita Mui leaps into the air and saves both her and the cat. She gives Anita a kiss as thanks for saving her, and bows out of film-acting, apparently. Kind of a wild career, really. She apparently was nominated for best supporting actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Wild Search.

I thought it was very strange how much the advertising for Fatal Termination highlighted Moon Lee's participation––considering how limited her participation in the film turns out to be. I wondered if there was maybe an injury, or some other reason she couldn't be there for more of the actual drama of the movie. Or maybe the time she had to spend on action scenes took up too much of the shooting schedule, and they had to finish the dramatic scenes very fast. Either way, she takes up 3/4 of the poster, and is in less than 1/4 of the film, as I recall.

Always really enjoyed Dreaming the Reality more than most of the Moon/Yukari pictures––I'm kind of happy to see it seems to be one of the more resonant and/or intriguing of these movies for other people as well.

[Mr Sausage]

In general, Fatal Termination has trouble juggling its characters. Simon Yam and Robin Shou basically disappear after 45 minutes despite being the main characters up 'til then. I'm guessing, too, they didn't know what to do with Moon. One scene she'll be beating the shit out of three guys, the next she's a damsel in distress literally wailing "Save me! I don't want to die!", and then the next she's trying to drown a guy.

[feihong]

In general, Fatal Termination has trouble juggling its characters. Simon Yam and Robin Shou basically disappear after 45 minutes despite being the main characters up 'til then. I'm guessing, too, they didn't know what to do with Moon. One scene she'll be beating the shit out of three guys, the next she's a damsel in distress literally wailing "Save me! I don't want to die!", and then the next she's trying to drown a guy.

That sequence of Moon is just terrible. First she was yelling at Alex Man to save their daughter and don't worry about her, and then in the next scene yelling at Alex Man that she didn't want to die. Not a complete and total contradiction in terms, but how did her priorities shift so staggeringly in the two minutes it took the villains to tie them all up? It does seem like a different character is the main character every 20 minutes or so. Generally a mess. I also get the sense that the filmmakers would rather have made a gun-and-explosion movie, and kept the kung fu out of it––which seems to demand Moon shifts to the background. They seemed to be trying to get Alex Man to do a Chow Yun-Fat role for a while there. A very incoherent production, all around.


I got the German blu ray of Cover Hard II, aka City on Fire. First thing is that the disc doesn't play well on my chipped Sony player, rattling around at a loud level on the tray. As for disc quality, this is a strange one, intermittently with very sharp-looking scenes, but with a lot of shots looking too soft. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to these. A scene in a bowling alley will look sharp as a tack, even in the long shots. Chow's early scene at home with Carrie Ng looks soft. There is none of the artifact smearing you see in motion on an upconvert. You do see pops and scratches throughout. Some scenes appear to have color-timing issues. There's a very visible grain, but it looks a little too uniform, as if the disc has been regrained. I don't have a really educated guess what's happening here, but in general the film looks far better than I've ever seen it, more theatrical, with a richer sense of color and a general sharpness that improves the whole experience. The rainy scene in the cemetery, for instance, has a depth-of-field I've never seen before in the film.

I'm starting to be able to interpret the way these German discs are being represented. Each wave appears with a different company's name on them, but they're obviously the same people handling these different waves. The different discs get promoted on Amazon.de differently. Some are presented as a 2k or 4k restoration or remaster (Tiger on Beat advertises a "full HD remaster"); others, like City on Fire, simply exclude any such language. The ones with the restoration advertised look the best. The others, like City on Fire and Once A Thief, seem to come from unrestored sources, but they have some digital manipulation after the fact. These don't really appear to be upconverts, but the source material looks to be in varied shape, from shot to shot. It's like going to see these films at a theatrical screening at the New Beverly, or someplace, from a print that Quentin Tarantino owns, or something. Altogether, they end up being really good discs––though they're way too pricey for what they offer, if you don't love the films. I love Tiger on Beat, so that one was worth it. But I didn't get the 4k restoration of Yes, Madam!, knowing that it'll be in the 88 Films boxset in March.

And there are more of these German discs coming. Aside from the Tiger Cage movies (who cares; 88 Films beat them to market), and Top Squad (aka The Inspector Wears Skirts)––which is being advertised as "2k-HD-Remastered," in February they're releasing a 2k HD Remastered version of Patrick Tam's The Sword, in March they're releasing a 2k-HD-Remastered and allegedly "uncut" version of Tsui Hark's Swordsman, in June they're releasing Swordsman 2 (no info yet on what kind of release), and July Swordsman 3––all under the beguiling title of "Meister des Schwertes (sounds so cool when you say it)." Roboforce, aka I Love Maria, gets a 2k HD remastered version in April, in case you haven't been able to get the HK version, I guess––and June will see the release of A Better Tomorrow III (also no info yet).

I'm looking forward to Top Squad, Better Tomorrow III, and the first two Swordsman movies, at least––assuming 88 Films or Eureka doesn't announce those between now and July. The original Swordsman is very underrated, so far as I'm concerned. Don't know what they cut from the film in Germany prior to this, but I'm glad they've got that worked out (if I had to guess, I wouldn't be surprised if Cheung Man kills a snake casting a magical, highlander's spell or something). Between these and The Violent Streets, I've got my blu-ray-buying schedule laid out for the year, I think.


Another crazy by-product of this German re-naming system for Hong Kong movies occurs now that I place City on Fire, aka Cover Hard II, on my shelf. My discs are arranged by country of production, then alphabetically by director's last name, then chronologically (I know, this is partially my fault, too––many people have made fun of my organizational system). What this means is that "Cover Hard II" gets placed several spaces before "Cover Hard I (aka Full Contact)."

[Mr Sausage]

Secret Police (Yiu Tin-Hung, 1993)

Once again, I came for Moon Lee and got saddled with Alex Fong. Fong’s a ne’er-do-well with a cop father; Moon Lee is his cop sister. Their father is killed on the job and Lee vows to root out his killer, while Fong gets caught up in gang warfare. The movie loses track of its main characters for such long stretches you forget what movie you’re watching. The action is all over the place: some fight scenes are dynamic and visually alive, while others are flailing, awkwardly shot, and overcranked to absurdity. The gun fights are lame, too. The film also didn’t have a budget for blanks, apparently, because in some scenes the muzzle flashes have been painted in (and in a distracting red at that). The rest of the movie is poorly staged and flatly directed, often just static two shots, or groups of characters awkwardly standing around each other shouting. I see why Moon Lee basically left the industry after this. This is a lame, cheap movie. It does have a couple weird scenes, like two gunmen shooting a writhing set of bed sheets, assuming it’s a triad boss with his mistress underneath, only to discover they just shot up a bed full of geese(!).

[yoloswegmaster]

Good news for people who want to watch Patrick Tam's Love Massacre. Someone was able to find a uncut laserdisc and was able to rip and upload it online. Now you don't want to watch the poorly faded VHS print with burnt-in subs that could be difficult to see at times. Here is an example of the difference between the 2 prints:



DM me if you want a copy of the film.

[Mr Sausage]

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

Surprising how much this rips off The Deer Hunter. Aside from that this is a strong movie, mixing Woo’s sense of melodrama with a more brutal and chaotic context. Like all of Woo’s best movies, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Woo marries the various excesses into a workable whole. This is a darker and less poetic movie than The Killer or the two Better Tomorrows. The tragic fatalism in those movies is replaced by a fatalism run through with horror, brutality, and desperation. Greed, war, politics, even love end up breaking everything. There isn’t the same kind of heroism, even if Woo still explores the nature of brotherhood. Women, as usual, are sidelined in the movie, and yet it's hard to describe the movie as masculine despite all the heroics and camaraderie. The movie is a celebration of male virtues, but in a way that's so floridly emotional the usual western concept of masculinity seems inappropriate. What maybe stops this short of being Woo’s masterpiece is a punishing, fatiguing quality. The movie is often unenjoyable, appropriately so, but at times for such lengths it becomes hard to take. Everything is at such a high pitch for so long that a numbness sets in. Still, to paraphrase Anthony Burgess, it seems ungrateful to complain of too much when so many movies don’t give you enough. While Woo is one of Hong Kong’s most distinctive visual stylists, his skills as an editor go underappreciated. A Better Tomorrow II was edited in two halves, the first by producer Tsui Hark, the second by Woo, and it’s remarkable how better edited Woo’s half is. Woo is sole credited editor of this movie, and he makes clear his gifts for rhythm and storytelling. But probably the film's greatest attribute is Tony Leung. The other actors are fine; mostly they overact in the usual way, giving one-note performances. But Leung anchors the film with the kind of subtle, nuanced performance he’s known for. The movie would’ve seriously faltered if his character had been a caricature like everyone else, but Leung's performance carries the drama. This is one of the highlights of HK cinema.


Once a Thief (John Woo, 1991)

After the exhausting brutalities of Bullet in the Head, who could blame Woo for making a lark like this, an adventure comedy set in Paris with a cast who seem mostly to be having fun. A trio of art thieves, Chow Yun-Fat, Leslie Cheung, and Cherie Chung, try for one last score before retirement, only for betrayal, injury, and a love triangle to come between them. It’s Hong Kong, so the humour is broad and juvenile. The action, while extravagant by any reasonable standard, by Woo’s standard is toned down. What’s really surprising is that the plot is nonsensical. While par for the course with HK, it’s strange for Woo, who usually has a strong grasp of storytelling fundamentals. I’m wondering if this was more improvisatory than his other work. This is minor Woo. It’s a nice break from the intensity of his filmography, but it’s never the quite the fun, cool hangout picture it promises. The humour is wacky and arch without being funny, the heists breezy to the point of being weightless, and the three leads act like children who’ve never grown up. Woo is often a slick stylist, but his style is animated by intense melodrama more than the kind of light melodrama of this film. So the film isn’t as fleet or stylish as you’d expect. Still, there are plenty of fun moments and cool visuals, like a car chase becoming a kind of ballet, or an acrobatic dance scene involving a wheel chair.

[beamish14]

When I saw Woo present Bullet in the Head at the American Cinematheque a few years ago, he said that his aim was to make something on the scale of a David Lean film, and I think he succeeded beautifully. I think it’s probably his most emotionally satisfying and richest work.

A Better Tomorrow II is pure popcorn fun. From the insane twists and the hilarious scenes of Chow Yun-Fat running his restaurant in New York (the infamous “You don’t like my rice?” bit), it’s a manic ride that manages to stick the landing