Hong Kong Cinema

[therewillbeblus]

Going through my kevyip again recently, I found that Woo’s A Better Tomorrow I and II and Bullet in the Head were by far the longest-kept films unseen by me. Not sure what I’m waiting for, but I’ve had these files in my possession since I was in college like 15 years ago, and every time I get close to finally sitting down to watch them I usually just throw on The Killer or Hard Boiled for the nth time. Maybe this prompt will inspire me to get to change that

[feihong]

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.

This was in the tradition of other New Year's comedies, like Tsui Hark's The Chinese Feast, or Stephen Chow vehicles like All's Well, Ends Well. The elements you identify as part of the "minor" complexion of the movie are all part of the genre tropes common to that kind of film. So the comedy is broad because it's meant to reach whole families, attending the picture together, to reach across language and dialect barriers. And in Hong Kong Chow Yun-Fat was valued as much for his off-the-cuff goofy comedy as he was for his dramatic chops––partly because his comedy––unlike Stephen Chow's earlier rhyming Cantonese wordplay––was all behavioral, all made physical and attitudinal. So even if you didn't understand the Cantonese or Mandarin language tracks it might have been screened in, you could get the humor of Chow's attitude through his performance.

I didn't appreciate the film so much myself, until I saw it in a theater. In that context, the values the picture intends to foreground come through far more strongly––the high spirits seem higher; the camaraderie is more palpable; the locations and the special moments in the picture (Leslie & Chow's acrobatics, the car chases, etc.) seemed to really reach out to people in the crowd seeing the film. Most surprising to me, the comedy, I found, suddenly worked very well. The audience I watched it with absolutely loved the scene where Chow and Leslie are doing football signs and pitching plastic explosive balls to each other––and the ending fight was a huge hit––when Chow leaps out of the wheelchair there was a gasp in the theater, followed by a lot of applause. Chow's last-minute capitulation to the others brought a huge laugh, and his undercranked montage as the couple's au pair afterwards brought the house down. I point this out to say that I was surprised––and won over––by the way the film entertained an audience. Other Woo movies better sustain a more private appreciation, but this one is mostly meant to play to the cheap seats, and when it does, the deliberate construction of entertaining spectacle is more obvious, and I found that the film worked far better than I previously imagined it to. Thematically, I think the idea that the characters are children who get to never really grow up is the point, so far as Woo's concerned. I don't think the film wholly earns the point, except that in the last couple of times I've seen it, I really had no objections to the idea. It might be better to say that the kids in the film were robbed of a childhood in order to become cat burglars, and now that they're grown up, they have a chance to have a sort of "adult" childhood together. They take that chance, and Woo seems to have no objections to the arrangement, and no desire to upend it with real-world concerns. All of which is very concordant with the general thrust of other New Year's comedies. And Hong Kong audiences tended to love the goofy and the digressive back then.

[Mr Sausage]

Going through my kevyip again recently, I found that Woo’s A Better Tomorrow I and II and Bullet in the Head were by far the longest-kept films unseen by me. Not sure what I’m waiting for, but I’ve had these files in my possession since I was in college like 15 years ago, and every time I get close to finally sitting down to watch them I usually just throw on The Killer or Hard Boiled for the nth time. Maybe this prompt will inspire me to get to change that

I was in something like the same position. In highschool, when I was big into Woo, I wanted nothing more than to watch the two I wrote up, and yet I had no access. When I finally did have access, in college, I had moved on to other things, Woo wasn’t so urgent, so I put off seeing them, and then just kept putting them off for like 15 years. Funny, considering how important Woo became for me as a movie lover. He was my gateway into foreign and arthouse cinema, and also how I learned about both the auteur theory and the general idea that art expresses meanings and values, and that you can interpret art to find coherent, developed ideas and themes in it. Basic stuff, I know, but revelatory to a 14-year-old who like most kids consumed his media passively. Funny that Woo could be so fundamental, and yet fall so easily by the wayside.

[Mr Sausage]

So the comedy is broad because it's meant to reach whole families, attending the picture together, to reach across language and dialect barriers.

[...]

Thematically, I think the idea that the characters are children who get to never really grow up is the point, so far as Woo's concerned.

Something I didn't touch on in my capsule is the bizarre experience of these things sitting side-by-side with John Woo ultraviolence. For the longest time, the movie is happy-go-lucky with a cast who behave like children in adult bodies...and then the first gunfight hits halfway through, and Chow Yun-Fat and and Leslie Cheung, without pause, start mowing people down in great spurts of blood. It's jarring. And the movie stays like that the rest of the way through, playing the hammy crowd-pleaser in one scene, then showing bad guys executing innocents in cold blood during robberies. Tonal incongruence is the Hong Kong way, sure, but it struck me all the more here since it's A. so delayed in the narrative, and B. John Woo violence.

The audience I watched it with absolutely loved the scene where Chow and Leslie are doing football signs and pitching plastic explosive balls to each other

Oh, that whole sequence in and around the bank vault is amazing, and one of the moments (and there are a few) where the humour hit perfectly in addition to being an ingeniously staged action scene. I guess what I wanted overall was something more To Catch a Thief or The Thomas Crowne Affair, something playful but cool, not clownish.

[therewillbeblus]

I still want to know the story of what 'happened' to MI: 2, which was Woo basically trying to do To Catch a Thief and failing miserably. I feel like there's a buried DC out there that might be watchable

[bad future]

Probably worth mentioning in this thread that I imported the recent Taiwan blu-ray of Mabel Cheung's An Autumn's Tale featuring a new 4k restoration, and I think it looks fantastic. I'd only previously seen it on a download, the source of which I'm honestly unsure of so I don't know if it's representative of all previous releases, but that had a sort of greenish cast to it, while the new transfer is more naturally balanced and warm, with the most autumnal of the outdoor scenes still having a golden quality. No idea which is more faithful to the intended look -- I definitely preferred the new one but could see a case for the green grade enhancing the atmosphere of a grimy, uninviting New York lacking the comforts and community of home. Texture is obviously greatly improved. A quick side by side comparison also showed the new one to have more info in the frame in most shots, on varying sides, but the compositions didn't strike me as obviously wrong or unbalanced on either version.

English subs seemed good to me (as someone who only speaks English anyway) and it's such a heartbreakingly lovely film, loneliness giving way understated romance within a wonderfully textured immigrant's experience of NYC. Could see Criterion or Eureka picking this up, which would definitely be a cheaper option.

[Mr Sausage]

I still want to know the story of what 'happened' to MI: 2, which was Woo basically trying to do To Catch a Thief and failing miserably. I feel like there's a buried DC out there that might be watchable

While the studio meddling on Hard Target, and Woo's dissatisfaction with the whole experience, was well documented, I've never heard anything about trouble on the MI:2 set.

Woo apparently remade Once a Thief as a pilot for Canadian tv, but I don't have the nerve to watch it. And I like Woo's North American period more than most. Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and Face Off, while not a patch on the HK stuff, are still terrific 90s American action films. But I can't bring myself to watch his tv movies.

[beamish14]

M:I-2 was conceived and shot as an R-rated film, which was unpalatable to Paramount. It was in post-production for an inordinately long period of time, as multiple editors stepped in, and the last 45 minutes are an incomprehensible mess. I’m amazed that Woo worked with Paramount again on Paycheck, but perhaps the title is a good hint.

I’d love to see a reconstruction of what Woo intended for
M:I-2 but I’m not holding my breath

[therewillbeblus]

And I like Woo's North American period more than most. Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and Face Off, while not a patch on the HK stuff, are still terrific 90s American action films.

I feel the same way. I didn’t care for Broken Arrow when I was a kid (other than the great final death scene), but I bet I’d appreciate it more now. Face Off, on the other hand, is a classic, face waterfalls and all. I’ve always felt its narrative structure to be underappreciated, particularly the prison infiltration segment.

[Mr Sausage]

Setting a slow motion gunfight to Somewhere Over the Rainbow is some kind of sublime madness.

[feihong]

Probably worth mentioning in this thread that I imported the recent Taiwan blu-ray of Mabel Cheung's An Autumn's Tale featuring a new 4k restoration, and I think it looks fantastic. I'd only previously seen it on a download, the source of which I'm honestly unsure of so I don't know if it's representative of all previous releases, but that had a sort of greenish cast to it, while the new transfer is more naturally balanced and warm, with the most autumnal of the outdoor scenes still having a golden quality. No idea which is more faithful to the intended look -- I definitely preferred the new one but could see a case for the green grade enhancing the atmosphere of a grimy, uninviting New York lacking the comforts and community of home. Texture is obviously greatly improved. A quick side by side comparison also showed the new one to have more info in the frame in most shots, on varying sides, but the compositions didn't strike me as obviously wrong or unbalanced on either version.

English subs seemed good to me (as someone who only speaks English anyway) and it's such a heartbreakingly lovely film, loneliness giving way understated romance within a wonderfully textured immigrant's experience of NYC. Could see Criterion or Eureka picking this up, which would definitely be a cheaper option.

This. Wow. Been looking at different re-releases of An Autumn's Tale on blu ray for years, wondering if any were more than an upconvert.

Thanks for letting us know! I'm getting this one right away.

[Mr Sausage]

On the Run (Alfred Cheung, 1988)

A cop’s soon-to-be-ex-wife is gunned down in a restaurant moments after he’s left it. The cop, Yuen Biao, hunts down the female assassin, an expert marksman, but finds himself on the wrong end of a police conspiracy that forces both him and the assassin to go on the run. An interesting buddy dynamic, a cop and the woman who killed his wife, but it’s underused, the inherently fraught nature of their relationship brushed aside quickly in favour of developing camaraderie. The movie isn’t as pulse-pounding as it ought to be. It never drags; the dramatic scenes, especially between Yuen Biao and Patricia Ha’s assassin, are well-written and often effectively shot. But the film moves in fits and starts, from brief action scene to brief drama scene, so that the tension and excitement flattens between them. It’s still quickly paced, but only rarely is it tense or nail-biting. What it is, however, is coherently told with a consistent and appropriate tone, a rarity for HK thrillers. This is a grim and often gruesome movie, modeling itself on noir but understanding noir mostly as a series of downturns full of shocking violence. This movie might hold the record for most characters shot in the head. The most impressive thing in the film, tho’, is Patricia Ha’s performance as the assassin. She projects steely-eyed intensity better than most action stars, but she modulates it beautifully, sometimes showing psychopathic chill, sometimes a subtle wryness, and in a few scenes a sad gentleness. I wonder why she wasn’t a bigger star. This isn’t an HK classic, but it is an interesting and effective movie with one standout performance.


Raging Fire (Benny Chan, 2021)

Generic police thriller. You know the drill: incorruptible (but thoroughly violent) cop with a pregnant wife pursues a group of criminals with combat and/or police training, and whom we come to find out he has history with. You’ve seen it all before, and you’ve seen it filmed exactly this way, all orange and teal, with hyperactive editing and camera shakes. If it reproduces a boring Hollywood style, it also models its action on the John Wick movies and Michael Mann's work, especially Heat. The action scenes are wonderfully done and extremely exciting, coupling Donnie Yen and co’s excellence in action with the rougher, more brutal and physically exhausting quality the John Wick films have popularized. The final bank robbery is less exciting only because it’s directly ripping off the same scene from Heat, but can’t sustain the comparison. Still, when the action kicks off, the movie’s engrossing; whenever anyone’s talking, it’s on autopilot.

[yoloswegmaster]

Looks like the Hong Kong Rescue site has been taken down. I wonder if the guy running it decided to shut it so that he could actually try and catch up with the orders or if a company forced him to shut it down.

[beamish14]

Looks like the Hong Kong Rescue site has been taken down. I wonder if the guy running it decided to shut it so that he could actually try and catch up with the orders or if a company forced him to shut it down.

Oh, yeah, that asshole still owes me a disc of The Killer I bought over 18 months ago

[MV88]

Oh, yeah, that asshole still owes me a disc of The Killer I bought over 18 months ago

He didn’t send my Hard Boiled disc until I filed a claim to cancel the order and get my money back, so I would try doing that if you haven’t already.