Hong Kong Cinema

[feihong]

I wonder how/if/when HK filmmaking will change now that Hong Kong has been fully subsumed into the PRC, as just another Chinese city subject to censorship and repression. You'd think the kind of Johnny To action films described above would be relatively safe, but a lot of sensitivities and off limit topics in China; they don't take kindly to portrayals of police and other government authorities as corrupt or inept. Not aware if they have started censoring HK films yet, but if not, you can be certain that day will come.

I seem to recall earlier on this thread, maybe, fancifulnorwegian or others mentioning that To had a very hard time getting Drug War past the Chinese censors––and that To is maybe waiting for a more favorable political climate to try and make Election 3. I think To's films often have a lot of subtext, and that seems to be something the film authorities in China right now are on the hunt to stop from going forward. I think it's possible to read a film like Drug War, for instance, as very critical of China's drug policy––would the villains hold their shootout in front of an elementary school if they didn't face a death sentence if they were to be captured? In fact, no one needed to die at the end of the film. And the stalwart cops in the film are pretty human and gullible in the face of Jimmy's endless lies. I don't think most of that would go over in the current climate. And To seems to me to be very sensitive to labor exploitation in his previous films, from Barefooted Kid to Life Without Principle and Office. To's most recent feature, the astoundingly cringe-y Chasing Dream, seems to aspire to offer no conscious subtext at all, nor even a message of any kind––beyond the film's surprising and revolting misogyny.

[Maltic]

Perhaps there's a meta-textual layer to Chasing Dream in having the triad boss' pro-CCP son play the lead.

(I must admit I enjoyed the film though)

[Mr Sausage]

Election (Johnnie To, 2005)

Johnnie To’s Kagemusha, where prolix stratagems, old social structures, and endless violence all depend on some symbol or totem that both carries the weight of everything and yet is nothing in itself. The existence of a whole social and political organism rests entirely on a phantom, lending all that happens a puzzling absurdity. This is a tricky movie underneath the rush and fun. Ostensibly it is about the fight to preserve order and tradition against the upstarts who would defy it, a long-standing conservative trope in gangster cinema. It’s also ostensibly about the attempt to preserve democracy in the face of hostile authoritarian take over. Yet the film is suspicious not just of traditional order and the fairness and justness behind purportedly democratic elections, but even of the basis of democracy itself. Firstly, the so-called election in the movie is no real democracy, since those with the deciding power are all old, conservative traditionalists whom time and retirement have rendered out of touch. Secondly, the power conferred is apparently meaningless without some old wooden figure, even tho’ the outcome has been decided and acknowledged. Basically, the entire process is hamstrung to ludicrous proportions by the oppressive weight of tradition and ceremony. So while the good forces seek to reaffirm the old ceremonies and traditions, the sheer effort they need to expend to do so renders what they'd reaffirm suspect. On top of that, the movie shows these elections that supposedly rest on the weight and authority of long-standing tradition are absurdly fragile. The only thing supporting this putative democracy is everybody agreeing to it. The moment one strong guy dislikes the outcome, the whole thing starts to collapse (an evergreen point given recent American history). It’s a house of cards, with the power, authority, and righteousness of democracy and the democratic process having no firmer a basis than the little wooden figure everyone chases around. They are one and the same, a thing everyone just kinda agrees has authority, up until they don’t. The movie ends with tradition and order reestablished, only for a brilliant coda that double-underlines the emptiness of it all. In the end, the people who pursue power under the umbrella of order and tradition only do so because those things benefit them. And you know what’s crazy about this movie? It wears all of this so lightly. It’s weird for a movie with such conceptual density to carry on like a fun genre exercise. The movie feels like good weightless entertainment, and yet it has all the above going on. Seriously impressive.

Vengeance (Johnnie To, 2009)

Johnnie To just finds so many novel conceits to lay across these crime movies of his. There are so many things here I just haven’t seen before that what happens is I begin to appreciate all the stuff I have seen before just for how it helps throw the original ideas into even greater relief. Not just the wonderful idea of having the revenger slowly lose his memory, but the endless tricks and scenarios the movie comes up with to exploit that unusual scenario (from stickers to jacket sizes to bullet hole positioning—it’s like if Leonard from Memento were in an HK gunfight). But there are plenty of sad and beautiful moments, too, like the camaraderie between these Chinese hitmen and this strange gweilo that seems to come mostly because he touched their humanity. Or unexpected moments, like the very human gestures and cordiality between the two groups of hitmen while they wait for a family party to finish. Or the surprising late reveal of one of the hitmen’s family background on the beach, which turns into a supportive community for Francis. Or the hay bales! Both ingenious and silly. I agree with someone else on the forum who noted that years of plastic surgery had rendered Johnny Hallyday unable to perform those small facial expressions needed to communicate the internalized emotion To always deals with. But To’s stable of regulars does much to balance that out. Another wonderful melange of excitement, playfulness, and sadness. More please.

Spacked Out (Lawrence Ah Mon, 2000)

Youth-gone-wild movies are like prison movies: there’s nothing new to be seen; the triumph is in the energy and style. And boy does this have both to spare. Realist movies about urban despair can often be visually dour, with muted lighting and a limited colour palette. But the filmmakers here opt for colour and speed. The visual palette is designed around the bright neon of Hong Kong’s malls and shopping districts, with the daylight scenes full of blue skies and bright sun and the night scenes aglow with advertisements and fluorescent lights. Hong Kong is both garish and visually alive. So while the hand-held camera work, improvised acting, and location shooting lends realism to the ugly social realities of being an under-privileged teen girl, that realism is not on behalf of a fatalistic or pessimistic view of the world. This is a deeply sad story, but it’s not a movie of endless misery and thudding consequences in which people feel little authentic joy. For all their troubles, the characters hang on to small shreds of hope, seek love and affection, and are often there for each other. Their lives may well be hopeless, but they don’t feel that way, and they continue moving forward with their days and enjoying the moment in front of them. It’s a vibrant and bracing movie, maybe the best teens-gone-wild movie from this era (it certainly bests 13 and Kids). There’s much about it that’s loud and in-your-face, and plenty that’s subtle, gentle, and deeply felt, too. I liked this movie’s stance towards its characters, and I liked those characters, too, and found them interesting even when they were caught up in their flaws. This is a talented group of young actors who mostly seem to’ve disappeared from the film industry soon after.

Wild Search (Ringo Lam, 1989)

The set up is superficially like Witness: a police officer ends up having to care for a child orphaned during a raid and finds himself entangled with the child’s aunt, a country girl. But the similarities end there. There are some small city/country divisions, but nothing like the culture clash in Witness. And neither the child nor her aunt are the target of any criminals. That last part is actually the problem: there’s no motivational through-line for why all the characters, good or bad, are involved with each other. The narrative strands are loose, and require plot contrivances to keep them from trailing apart. The movie is mostly a romantic drama punctuated by the occasional intense bit of action. The set up is melodramatic, the big city cop and the country girl with a husband who develop feelings for each other, but director Lam and leads Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung play the drama with sensitivity and delicacy. The romance is neither intense nor erotically charged, and the emotions are internalized rather than blown up, with longing often communicated through staging and small glances and facial shifts. The reticence is effective and, I think, appropriate for a situation with so many competing interests. Their growing appreciation and fondness for each other is developed with care, far more care than the cops-and-robbers plot. That gentle romance and the acting propelling it are the strongest parts of the movie. The plot is weak, tho’: improperly told and full of genre cliches. I’d call this a mid-tier film for Lam.

The Mission (Johnnie To, 1999)

To gets his stories moving with a minimum of explanation. I don’t think he puts a verbal explanation anywhere. We get a rapid montage of our lead characters, the attempted hit, and then the leads are assembled in a room and, instead of being told what they’re there for, they’re taken to the boss and the plot is off. It’s up to us to infer what’s going on. Which is nice as nothing here is difficult to follow. These To films feel like a lark. Not in a negative sense, but in that Steven Soderbergh way with the brisk style and cool over a lean genre narrative. I’m sure there’s more going on—there’s To’s familiar theme of loyalty and brotherhood, with the motley gang behaving more like siblings than crime associates. But To doesn’t drive at his themes as he does in later movies like Mad Detective or Exiled. But there is a contrast in To’s movies between people loyal to organizations and people, often chance acquaintances at first, who are loyal to other people over organizations. And this often results in a conflict between elaborate and prescribed social codes on the one end, and private, personal beliefs on the other. Exiled is the most extreme example I’ve seen, but this movie hinges on it, too, especially in the final third (which the action packed first two thirds are actually the set-up for rather than the point in themselves). Another terrifically enjoyable Johnnie To movie.

[Michael Kerpan]

According to what I've read, Spacked Out is also essentially a Johnnie To movie. One of several films from this period credited to junior associates but ultimately primarily directed by To himself. Alas, I've never seen most of these -- as they tend not to have gotten subbed releases (or any early DVD-only release disappeared before I managed to track it down).

Glad to see you keep finding more and more To movies to enjoy, Mr. S -- eventually you might run into one of his clinkers -- but luckilu those are comparatively rare.

[feihong]

Do you remember where you read that, Michael? It surprises me, just because Lawrence Lau was already a pretty established director when he made Spacked Out. He'd already directed his breakout film, Gangs, the Leslie Cheung classic, Arrest the Restless, all three films in the Lee Rock trilogy, and Queen of Temple Street before being the named director on Spacked Out. That's not to say he was necessarily there for Spacked Out, or that To didn't take over on set (he increasingly sounds like the same kind of meddlesome producer as Tsui Hark to me). In the early aughts I knew a guy on Sammo Hung's stunt crew, who described how director Gordon Chan walked off the set of the Jackie Chan movie The Medallion on the second day of photography, leaving Sammo to basically direct the film––and then Gordon Chan returned on the last day of principal photography, as Sammo was attempting to get director credit, to reclaim his position. I don't know if that describes director Laurence Lau at the time of Spacked Out, but he always seemed to me to be something more of an auteur with a purpose than a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers. So I guess the suggestion To directed the film just surprises me.

[Michael Kerpan]

feihong -- It is just something I recall reading LONG ago. Maybe I am remembering wrong.

[Mr Sausage]

Spacked Out's style so at odds with Johnnie To's usual manner that I'd never guess he had a hand in it. It's hard to imagine To producing something so uncontrolled and improvisational given how careful, controlled, and precise he usually is with the camera. I can't even remember him doing a handheld shot in his films. You guys who know him better can tell me if he changes things up for his non-gangster work. But if he did shadow direct Spacked out, that'd have to be one of the most drastic changes in personal style in all of auteurdom. Like if David Fincher suddenly adopted the style of Paul Greengrass.

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr S -- Did you watch this via the new-ish bluray (which I had not been aware existed)?

[Mr Sausage]

I did!

[mrb404]

French label Spectrum's UHD release of King Hu's The Valiant Ones is now available for preorder with a release date set to March 8, 2024.
It should be very different from the HK Film Archive one as Spectrum states that it doesn't have forced subtitles and comes from a "much better master".
Unfortunately for most here, only French subtitles.

[Finch]

Probably as good a place as any to share this from Jared A of Mondo Macabro and Neon Eagle for their next Neon release:

This is a totally bonkers 80s Hong Kong martial arts mindmelter making its official worldwide disc debut. It's a bona-fide "cult classic" with tons of bootleg releases but nothing that's ever looked as good as we'll have it on our release. This will be a two disc set in a chipboard hardcase slipcover with booklet featuring super informative liners notes covering an area around which there is a ton of misinformation.

[Mr Sausage]

Game of Death II (Ng See-yuen, 1981)

So this better than the original, then? Ok. Unexpected. Shouldn’t the pointless sequel to a low-rent piece of shit be even worse? That’s what I always assumed. I mean, the sequel has all the same flaws: the awkward, tasteless Brucesploitation (more shots of his body in its coffin? Really?), the incoherent story-telling, the bargain basement filmmaking, and the general sense that this is barely a real movie. But the fights are twice as good, courtesy of talents like Sammo Hung, Corey Yuen, Yuen Woo-Ping, and Yuen Biao. And the film wisely drops the Brucesploitation half way through and almost becomes a real movie. Sure, the thing is impossibly dumb, but so much so the silliness becomes entertaining in its own right. Take Ray Horan’s inexplicable character: he keeps trained Peacocks, drinks deer blood and eats raw venison for breakfast, and is never more than one mild inconvenience away from a temper tantrum. What he’s even doing here, who knows. But it’s one of those bizarre things that at least keep you entertained. A bad movie, no question, but often watchable.

The Blonde Fury (Hoi Mang, 1989)

A rare starring role for Cynthia Rothrock, maybe even her first. Rothrock’s an undercover American agent posing as a photojournalist in Hong Kong. The humour is awful and the story disjointed and poorly told. So, the usual. Thankfully the fights are terrific, full of energetic choreography and creative situations (with the occasional casual murder that doesn’t match the film’s jaunty tone). It has something I’d never seen before, a fight up and down a giant net strung from the ceiling American Gladiator style. It’s incredible. The movie’s not as good as Rothrock’s work with Corey Yuen, but better than most of her American work. My favourite part: Cynthia Rothrock’s hair changing from scene to scene and sometimes in the middle of scenes.

Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)

How nice to see To in a comic and romantic mood. Without plot and character to distract him, To devotes himself entirely to style and conjures up a dazzling series of set pieces only nominally connected. That he filmed the movie piecemeal over the course of years makes sense given the episodic feel of the movie. To is mostly taking great joy in visual conceits: a shared cigarette that aches with eroticism; paired swivelling shots up/down a stairwell that whirl faster and faster as the characters get farther from each other; characters trying to jam themselves around a giant aquarium in an elevator, finished by one looking at us through the bottom; a slow motion climax in the rain that’s so perfectly choreographed it becomes a ballet and ends up being more exciting than the whole of most action movies without having any real violence. I could go on describing the whole movie this way. It’s one wonderful sequence after another capped by a warm and playful tone. Also, if Eve Sedgwick didn’t exist, this movie would have to invent her. This is the most homosocial thing I’ve seen in ages. It’s all groups of men using this one woman as a proxy to engage with each other on an emotional plane otherwise unavailable to them. They dance around her, displaying to each other, challenging, provoking, and displaying themselves and their identities (and, you know, rifling through the hidden parts of each other). The more they do this, the more the woman deflates from a femme fatale to a weepy, mournful doll without agency. It’s all thieves and criminals strutting for each other with some woman nominally structuring the dance. This is not a criticism, although To’s cinema is a masculine one that’s often unsure of what to do with women beyond make them mothers and love objects. But it’s hard not to love such a joyously stylish movie, especially one with such peculiar male bonding rituals. I had the same pleasure here as with To Catch a Thief and Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, graceful movies with luscious tones and an effortless, pleasing visual manner that seem to exist purely to entertain you with their carefree mastery of form and style.

Fulltime Killer (Johnnie To, 2003)

Wasn’t big on this one. It felt like To having a laugh. It’s knowingly ridiculous and over the top. I think if I’d seen it as my first or second To, I’d’ve liked it more. But on the back of brilliant work like Exiled and Election, this one felt strained, like you can see To trying to be playful. Coincidentally, here’s another homosocial story, with two pretty-boy killers romancing each other by playing for the same woman. The movie’s still endlessly stylish, ably performed, and full of lively imagination (tho’ intercutting the previous maid being killed with the current maid having sex was a bit much). Ultimately, tho’, the movie is too manic and ridiculous. Also, I don’t wonder if this was inspired by Wong Kar-Wai. There’re a lot of incidental details that remind me of Chungking Express, what with the lonely Japanese hitman, the silent meetings at cafes, the spunky house cleaner who plays around in the empty apartment, the pop music, just the general mournful tone of connections coming too late and romance being just out of reach. So, yeah, this was a disappointment, but, still, 8 excellent movies in a row was an amazing run. I can’t remember the last director I had such sustained fun with.

[Michael Kerpan]

Fulltime Killer is a rare To film I haven't yet seen. Is there a decent version now available?

Sparrow is pretty great. The Guardian reiew thought it was modelled on Umbrellas of Cherbourg. *FWIW)

[Mr Sausage]

A lot of Letterboxd commenters referenced Demy and musicals. A couple of them even thought Sparrow was a musical without the music ala domino’s analysis of Irma la Douce elsewhere on the forum. I can see what they mean. Sparrow is the most rhythmic and musically oriented film I’ve seen in forever.

I don’t know if Fulltime Killer has a decent release. I saw it the same way I’ve seen all of To’s movies, on old, inadequate DVDs from the library.

[feihong]

I think Fulltime Killer is still only available on the old HK Deltamac DVD?

[yoloswegmaster]

Here's another faulty German disc alert: A release of Yuen Woo-ping's Wing Chun was released recently by Cargo records but someone who received the disc said that it was just an upscale from what I presume to be a DVD and contains many nasty artifacts:

SpoilerShow

It should also be noted that they are releasing Hard Boiled in February. It's got the exact same cover that the HKR release has, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a reissue of that disc.

[tenia]

Have Cargo Records recently released a single HK movie that turned out not to be a bootleg ?

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Fulltime Killer is still only available on the old HK Deltamac DVD?

I seem to recall that this was not supposed to be a very good release. (One of the reasons I didn't get it long ago -- also it seemed like it was probably a lot more violent than the average To film).

[Mr Sausage]

I think Fulltime Killer is still only available on the old HK Deltamac DVD?

I seem to recall that this was not supposed to be a very good release. (One of the reasons I didn't get it long ago -- also it seemed like it was probably a lot more violent than the average To film).

Oh it sucks. For starters, it’s non-anamorphic.

I wouldn’t say the film is all that violent for To. It’s less violent than Exiled and Vengeance for example.

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr. S -- well, if it ever gets a halfway decent release, I'll check it out.

[feihong]

Fulltime Killer was famous at the time for Andy Lau's most unrestrained performance, and it seemed to inaugurate an era where Andy seemed more invested in his movie roles, and more interested in trying new things as an actor. By contrast, I think the attempt to use Takashi Sorimachi as the lead on the film falls terribly flat––he seems as bad to me here as Stephen Lack in Scanners, like he doesn't know what a movie is or what he should be doing when the camera is pointed at him. Simon Yam seems really let down by the screenplay, being forced to deliver awkward lines in English throughout, and it would be a few years before Kelly Lin's short run of really interesting roles in After This Our Exile, Triangle, Blind Detective, and Sparrow (haven't seen Boarding Gate, so I don't know how that slots in with her other movies).

For To, Fulltime Killer seems like a very transitional film, where he abandons a lot of the formalism of the early Milkyway movies (Longest Nite, Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies, Running Out of Time, The Mission) and starts to indulge in more vivid and expressive sequences in his films (PTU, Throwdown, Election, and all the films afterwards). There are a lot of those sort of sequences in Fulltime Killer––Andy's bizarre nicotine murder in the Bill Clinton mask, the sequence in the subway tunnel, the sniper sequence, the homage to "The Professional," the Metal Slug scene––but none of these standout sequences end up contributing to a point in this movie. There's two influences I think help to make a hash of this movie––James Bond (this was right around the height of 007's Brosnan-era looniness) and Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly, which had been successful in Hong Kong about 5 years earlier. Swallowtail featured an international cast, speaking most of their lines phonetically, and there's a similar attempt in Fulltime Killer to make a sort of "international thriller," with a lot of awkward phonetic line readings and a few stars from other regions on hand. While that film gets a pass, in my book, for essentially being about people struggling across language barriers to understand one another, Fulltime Killer wears its polyglot aspirations without much purpose beyond commercial synergy, and it shows. I don't think the film is as violent as the later movies, but it feels a lot more crass than the later, better films (it's similar in that respect to To's contemporaneous rom-com, Needing You––very rangy and try-everything in its style, very messy and unappealing in its storytelling). I think it's PTU where To's new approach becomes really electric. There the set-piece sequences have the formalism of the early Milkyway films, but only during the sequences themselves, and the actors feel much freer to create more vivid performances. But PTU had a much more protracted gestation period than Fulltime Killer, and one of the most famous sequences in that film––where Simon repeatedly slaps the triad kid in the arcade––ended up being re-filmed again and again over several years' time, in order to get the right feel for the picture. That kind of attention to mood and feeling and detail of a scene is a lot of what's missing from Fulltime Killer––though a better script would've been nice, also.

[Orlac]

Probably as good a place as any to share this from Jared A of Mondo Macabro and Neon Eagle for their next Neon release:

This is a totally bonkers 80s Hong Kong martial arts mindmelter making its official worldwide disc debut. It's a bona-fide "cult classic" with tons of bootleg releases but nothing that's ever looked as good as we'll have it on our release. This will be a two disc set in a chipboard hardcase slipcover with booklet featuring super informative liners notes covering an area around which there is a ton of misinformation.

Fantasy Mission Force? (technically its Taiwanese but you never know...)

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Fantasy Mission Force has BD releases in Japan and Germany. The German release could well be unofficial but I would be surprised if that's also the case for the Japanese Blu (from Twin, which is also the main distributor for Fortune Star titles in Japan). The Japanese packaging has a 2003 copyright notice for Golden Sun, a Hong Kong-based company that lists the film in its online catalog. Golden Sun was incidentally founded by the late Lan T'ien-hung, a storied figure in Taiwanese cinema going all the way back to 1950's Happenings in Ali Shan, the first postwar feature made in Taiwan and also Chang Cheh's directorial debut.

[colinr0380]

Fulltime Killer does have a UK DVD edition from Tartan Video that was released coming up to two decades ago in 2004 (that makes me feel old!), so hopefully given the track record of Arrow and other UK boutique labels picking out titles from Tartan's old catalogue to reissue I am keeping my fingers crossed that it gets a Blu-ray upgrade at some point in the future.

(Speaking of Wong Kar-Wai aesthetic influenced, that and the South Korean film Nowhere To Hide are currently my most hoped for Tartan upgrades)

[colinr0380]

Speaking of Taiwanese martial arts films, is there a good edition of Lucky Seven out there? I doubt it could ever live up to that amazing trailer but it would be interesting to see!

(That last shot of that girl throwing herself through a plate glass window and landing on her face on a concrete floor is, um, quite something. Talk about suffering for your art!)