People Tell Me I Look Like Han Solo.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
DVD Review: The Killer
THE MOVIE
The Killer pretty much changed my life.
Not in the sense where it got me through a life-threatening situation or even a particularly difficult time, or radically changed my existential path. But movies are a major part of my life (more so than most normal people, I’d wager), and action movies are probably my single favorite genre. When I saw The Killer for the first time on home video in my teenage video store-rat days, it quite literally changed the way I looked at action films. Every action movie that I’d been blown away by up to that point seemed like weak pabulum in
comparison to John Woo’s masterpiece of violence; my life as an action-movie fan is basically divided into pre- and post-Killer sections. So this is a pretty special day here on the Captivate movie blog, as it’s the first time I’ve gotten an opportunity (excuse?) to review a movie that’s in my own personal hall of fame. Which means I should probably can the preamble and get down to business.
The Killer is Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1989 magnum opus, about a hitman with a heart of gold (Chow Yun-Fat at the absolute pinnacle of his coolness) who accidentally blinds a lounge singer (Sally Yeh) while killing a nightclub full of people. His conscience won’t let him rest, so he re-enters her life as a mysterious paramour, taking one final job (without her knowledge, natch) in order to bankroll the surgery she needs to save her sight. Along the way gets the attention of a driven police detective (Danny Lee) determined to bring him to justice, but the unlikely duo eventually team up after Chow’s employers try to screw him out of his payment, and his life.
The tagline from the VHS box of the version of The Killer that I initially rented (and re-rented many times, until I eventually bought a copy for myself) is one of my favorites of all time: “One vicious hitman. One fierce cop. Ten thousand bullets.” And that’s about as astute a summary of the film as anything I could come up wity. John Woo’s style (lots of slow-motion, everyone firing nearly comical amounts of bullets without reloading) is fairly well-known nowadays, thanks mainly to his breakthrough American film, Face/Off, but it’s The Killer that sees Woo at the height of his powers as an action filmmaker. The gunfights in The Killer are simply awesome, and even more than 20 years later, you can see the movie as the template for hundreds of action movies made all over the world since. Dudes leaping and sliding around in slow motion, firing two guns as the scenery around them explodes with enemy fire, with optional pigeons or doves? That’s John Woo’s legacy, and it doesn’t get much better than The Killer.
The argument could probably be made that Hard Boiled, which re-teamed Woo and Chow in 1992 and is even more over-the-top (and is also available in a sweet two-disc set from Dragon Dynasty), is the purer action-movie experience, but The Killer’s emphasis on plot and emotion and its themes of honor and brotherhood – concepts almost entirely absent from Hard Boiled – overheated though they may be, gives it the edge in my heart. There’s something really endearing about how corny Woo is willing to get in The Killer; it’s the exact sort of thing that, even in 1989, a Hollywood film would replace with groan-inducing one-liners. Whether it’s the romance between Chow and Yeh or the bromance between Chow’s hitman and Lee’s detective, the dramatic beats in The Killer are just as exaggerated as the action sequences, and for me that’s part of the film’s appeal.
As much as I love The Killer (I’ve had a poster of it up in my home somewhere since I was in high school), it’s that very aspect that may not work for some viewers. There’s a completely unironic and totally straight-faced sense of melodrama that pervades the movie, and for some audiences it might veer into out-and-out silly territory. But even if you find the dialogue chuckle-inducing, I guarantee you will be pinned to your seat during the film’s many glorious shootouts. The movie eventually culminates in an utterly insane shootout in a church that’s only topped in action cinema by the 30-plus-minute gunfight in a hospital that caps Hard Boiled (not sure what’s up with Woo’s habit of staging his climactic action sequences in vaguely inappropriate locales, but it somehow adds to the tension and drama).
My feelings about it aside, The Killer is unquestionably one of the best – and most important – action movies made in the last 25 years. This new Dragon Dynasty DVD cleans up the picture beautifully (The Killer, unfortunately, has been available only sporadically in North America since the advent of DVD, and even then it was a fairly poor transfer bereft of features). The sound, however, is another issue; Dragon Dynasty’s recent Hard Boiled two-disc set features a weighty DTS 5.1 audio track (you can practically hear the bullets whizzing past your head), but The Killer only has mono tracks for English and Cantonese, which is unfortunate. What makes it even odder is that I actually already have an overseas DVD of The Killer with a nicely restored picture and a DTS audio track (I have a magic DVD player that plays discs from anywhere in the world), and I’d assumed when I first heard about this new North American release for The Killer that Dragon Dynasty would just repurpose that audio track. But no, as sharp as The Killer looks, the sound doesn’t match that level of quality. It’s a real missed opportunity that does take away from the experience a little, at least for a hardcore John Woo devotee like myself.
Overall, if you’re a fan of action movies, you need to see The Killer. If you only know Chow Yun-Fat from his Hollywood movies, find out why cinema geeks have been worshipping him for decades and watch The Killer. If you only know John Woo from Face/Off or Mission: Impossible II or another of his American films (like Paycheck or the truly atrocious Windtalkers, a movie so bad it’s almost akin to a war crime), then forget those and watch The Killer. More than two decades later, this is still one of the most amazing action films I’ve ever seen. The Killer comes with my highest possible recommendation.
GRADE: A+
THE EXTRAS
This new Killer DVD is a pretty sweet package, but there’s one curious omission in particular, and that’s a commentary track from Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, which is only conspicuous by its absence because Logan does commentary on almost literally every Dragon Dynasty release, including their Hard Boiled set. It’s a minor omission, to be sure, but I’ve gotten so used to Logan’s commentaries (which are always wonderfully entertaining and insightful) that I sort of missed it. But it’s the sort of thing that only a nerd like me will notice; it’s certainly not a big deal.
That said, there’s a pretty good selection of extra features here. There’s a pair of Q&As with John Woo conducted at the American Cinematheque in 2002, one for The Killer and one for Hard Boiled. Both are lengthy and interesting, though the audio is a bit sketchy (particularly the Killer discussion), and coupled with Woo’s thickly accented English, it can make parts of the Q&As (conducted by American Cinematheque program director Dennis Bartok) almost entirely unintelligible.
There’s a separate interview with Woo that was done more recently (he looks considerably older than in the 2002 clips), and it covers quite a bit of ground. Also, it has optional subtitles, which makes it easier to follow. Woo discusses his influences like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, and talks about shooting The Killer largely without a script (he shot a lot of it from his treatment).
Also included is an odd little featurette called ‘The Killer Locations,’ in which a pretty Asian woman takes viewers on a travelogue of the Hong Kong locations where significant sequences were shot. It’s sort of weird, but for hardcore fans like myself who have seen The Killer dozens and dozens of times, it’s pretty cool seeing these locations today. It also works as a sort of a historical/travel piece about Hong Kong, and there’s some interesting tidbits of information included about the movie.
There’s also a collection of deleted scenes (some of which are included in longer international cuts of the film) that are fairly interesting, mostly character moments that presumably slowed the film down too much.
Overall this is a pretty excellent DVD for one of the best action movies of all time. If you’ve never owned The Killer, this is the version to get. If you have a previous release, it’s time for an upgrade. If you love action movies there’s no excuse for this DVD not being in your collection.
The Killer pretty much changed my life.
Not in the sense where it got me through a life-threatening situation or even a particularly difficult time, or radically changed my existential path. But movies are a major part of my life (more so than most normal people, I’d wager), and action movies are probably my single favorite genre. When I saw The Killer for the first time on home video in my teenage video store-rat days, it quite literally changed the way I looked at action films. Every action movie that I’d been blown away by up to that point seemed like weak pabulum in
comparison to John Woo’s masterpiece of violence; my life as an action-movie fan is basically divided into pre- and post-Killer sections. So this is a pretty special day here on the Captivate movie blog, as it’s the first time I’ve gotten an opportunity (excuse?) to review a movie that’s in my own personal hall of fame. Which means I should probably can the preamble and get down to business.The Killer is Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1989 magnum opus, about a hitman with a heart of gold (Chow Yun-Fat at the absolute pinnacle of his coolness) who accidentally blinds a lounge singer (Sally Yeh) while killing a nightclub full of people. His conscience won’t let him rest, so he re-enters her life as a mysterious paramour, taking one final job (without her knowledge, natch) in order to bankroll the surgery she needs to save her sight. Along the way gets the attention of a driven police detective (Danny Lee) determined to bring him to justice, but the unlikely duo eventually team up after Chow’s employers try to screw him out of his payment, and his life.
The tagline from the VHS box of the version of The Killer that I initially rented (and re-rented many times, until I eventually bought a copy for myself) is one of my favorites of all time: “One vicious hitman. One fierce cop. Ten thousand bullets.” And that’s about as astute a summary of the film as anything I could come up wity. John Woo’s style (lots of slow-motion, everyone firing nearly comical amounts of bullets without reloading) is fairly well-known nowadays, thanks mainly to his breakthrough American film, Face/Off, but it’s The Killer that sees Woo at the height of his powers as an action filmmaker. The gunfights in The Killer are simply awesome, and even more than 20 years later, you can see the movie as the template for hundreds of action movies made all over the world since. Dudes leaping and sliding around in slow motion, firing two guns as the scenery around them explodes with enemy fire, with optional pigeons or doves? That’s John Woo’s legacy, and it doesn’t get much better than The Killer.
The argument could probably be made that Hard Boiled, which re-teamed Woo and Chow in 1992 and is even more over-the-top (and is also available in a sweet two-disc set from Dragon Dynasty), is the purer action-movie experience, but The Killer’s emphasis on plot and emotion and its themes of honor and brotherhood – concepts almost entirely absent from Hard Boiled – overheated though they may be, gives it the edge in my heart. There’s something really endearing about how corny Woo is willing to get in The Killer; it’s the exact sort of thing that, even in 1989, a Hollywood film would replace with groan-inducing one-liners. Whether it’s the romance between Chow and Yeh or the bromance between Chow’s hitman and Lee’s detective, the dramatic beats in The Killer are just as exaggerated as the action sequences, and for me that’s part of the film’s appeal.
As much as I love The Killer (I’ve had a poster of it up in my home somewhere since I was in high school), it’s that very aspect that may not work for some viewers. There’s a completely unironic and totally straight-faced sense of melodrama that pervades the movie, and for some audiences it might veer into out-and-out silly territory. But even if you find the dialogue chuckle-inducing, I guarantee you will be pinned to your seat during the film’s many glorious shootouts. The movie eventually culminates in an utterly insane shootout in a church that’s only topped in action cinema by the 30-plus-minute gunfight in a hospital that caps Hard Boiled (not sure what’s up with Woo’s habit of staging his climactic action sequences in vaguely inappropriate locales, but it somehow adds to the tension and drama).
My feelings about it aside, The Killer is unquestionably one of the best – and most important – action movies made in the last 25 years. This new Dragon Dynasty DVD cleans up the picture beautifully (The Killer, unfortunately, has been available only sporadically in North America since the advent of DVD, and even then it was a fairly poor transfer bereft of features). The sound, however, is another issue; Dragon Dynasty’s recent Hard Boiled two-disc set features a weighty DTS 5.1 audio track (you can practically hear the bullets whizzing past your head), but The Killer only has mono tracks for English and Cantonese, which is unfortunate. What makes it even odder is that I actually already have an overseas DVD of The Killer with a nicely restored picture and a DTS audio track (I have a magic DVD player that plays discs from anywhere in the world), and I’d assumed when I first heard about this new North American release for The Killer that Dragon Dynasty would just repurpose that audio track. But no, as sharp as The Killer looks, the sound doesn’t match that level of quality. It’s a real missed opportunity that does take away from the experience a little, at least for a hardcore John Woo devotee like myself.
Overall, if you’re a fan of action movies, you need to see The Killer. If you only know Chow Yun-Fat from his Hollywood movies, find out why cinema geeks have been worshipping him for decades and watch The Killer. If you only know John Woo from Face/Off or Mission: Impossible II or another of his American films (like Paycheck or the truly atrocious Windtalkers, a movie so bad it’s almost akin to a war crime), then forget those and watch The Killer. More than two decades later, this is still one of the most amazing action films I’ve ever seen. The Killer comes with my highest possible recommendation.
GRADE: A+
THE EXTRAS
This new Killer DVD is a pretty sweet package, but there’s one curious omission in particular, and that’s a commentary track from Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, which is only conspicuous by its absence because Logan does commentary on almost literally every Dragon Dynasty release, including their Hard Boiled set. It’s a minor omission, to be sure, but I’ve gotten so used to Logan’s commentaries (which are always wonderfully entertaining and insightful) that I sort of missed it. But it’s the sort of thing that only a nerd like me will notice; it’s certainly not a big deal.
That said, there’s a pretty good selection of extra features here. There’s a pair of Q&As with John Woo conducted at the American Cinematheque in 2002, one for The Killer and one for Hard Boiled. Both are lengthy and interesting, though the audio is a bit sketchy (particularly the Killer discussion), and coupled with Woo’s thickly accented English, it can make parts of the Q&As (conducted by American Cinematheque program director Dennis Bartok) almost entirely unintelligible.
There’s a separate interview with Woo that was done more recently (he looks considerably older than in the 2002 clips), and it covers quite a bit of ground. Also, it has optional subtitles, which makes it easier to follow. Woo discusses his influences like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, and talks about shooting The Killer largely without a script (he shot a lot of it from his treatment).
Also included is an odd little featurette called ‘The Killer Locations,’ in which a pretty Asian woman takes viewers on a travelogue of the Hong Kong locations where significant sequences were shot. It’s sort of weird, but for hardcore fans like myself who have seen The Killer dozens and dozens of times, it’s pretty cool seeing these locations today. It also works as a sort of a historical/travel piece about Hong Kong, and there’s some interesting tidbits of information included about the movie.
There’s also a collection of deleted scenes (some of which are included in longer international cuts of the film) that are fairly interesting, mostly character moments that presumably slowed the film down too much.
Overall this is a pretty excellent DVD for one of the best action movies of all time. If you’ve never owned The Killer, this is the version to get. If you have a previous release, it’s time for an upgrade. If you love action movies there’s no excuse for this DVD not being in your collection.
Labels: Asian cinema, Dragon Dynasty, DVD review
¶ 10:00 AM 1 Comments
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
DVD Review: The 5 Deadly Venoms
THE MOVIE
It’s been too long since I got to review a kung fu movie for the blog, and it’s fitting that my return to
the genre is for one of its bona fide classics. The 5 Deadly Venoms is one of the all-time greats of vintage Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and Dragon Dynasty maintains its stellar run of bringing classic Shaw Brothers (the studio for classic Hong Kong flicks of the ‘60s and ‘70s) movies to Western audiences with top-quality DVDs. Director Chang Cheh was the man at Shaw Bros., having helmed other classics like The One-Armed Swordsman, and in 1978 he released The 5 Deadly Venoms, a modest hit in Hong Kong that grew to become a cult hit in the West. The five actors in the titular roles became commonly known in Hong Kong simply as “The Venoms,” and the film spawned several unofficial sequels with the actors playing similar roles.
Appropriately, The 5 Deadly Venoms is an awesome old-school kung fu movie, easily the best such film I’ve reviewed here. The fights are a lot of fun, but one of the main reasons for the film’s legacy, oddly enough (particularly for this genre), is its story. It opens with the dying master of the Poison Clan giving a mission to his lone remaining student: he must track down five of his former students, whom he now believes are using their unique, individual skills for evil. The young student has been trained in parts of each of their styles – centipede, lizard, scorpion, snake and toad – but his lack of deep knowledge in any one particular style means he’s no match for any of them one-on-one. He’s told to track down one of his master’s old colleagues, who’s hiding a treasure the Venoms are looking for. The Venoms are all living under new identities in the big city, and part of the fun of the early part of the movie is trying to figure out which character is which Venom. (In some cases its remarkably easy, but the identity of the Scorpion is left mysterious basically until the climax.) And not all of the Venoms have turned to evil.
The 5 Deadly Venoms is a bit of an odd beast – not too many kung fu movies are renowned for their stories – but its twisty, surprisingly intricate plot is a lot of the fun, and it’s unquestionably a big part of the movie’s appeal. Having an ensemble cast also means it’s a bit of a change of pace from more traditional “lone hero on a quest for revenge” stories; The 5 Deadly Venoms has no real single protagonist, as the young student initially sent to find the Venoms actually has a fairly small role in the story, serving more as the audience’s entry point in the first act (though he does show up for the climactic battle).
I’d actually only seen The 5 Deadly Venoms once before, back the days I spent copious amounts of time tracking down Hong Kong action movies of the ‘70s through the ‘90s (this was before you could easily find cult foreign movies via small DVD distributors online), and I remember loving it. A lot of that was because the film is basically set up like a kung fu superhero movie; it’s got characters with unique powers who occasionally don themed masks and outfits, and plays with themes of power and responsibility (perhaps Chang was a fan of classic Spider-Man comics). But getting to watch it again to review it was a treat, and I was happy to learn it holds up. The fights are awesome, and the film shows why Chang Cheh was such an important director of that era. He was ahead of his time, using clever camera tricks for Lizard’s wall-walking abilities, including a very cool, proto-Matrix “speed-ramping” technique of subtly switching to slow-motion to create the illusion that he’s calmly walking up the wall. It’s cool stuff for a 1978 movie, and it’s very effective.
The 5 Deadly Venoms is known as a classic piece of martial arts cinema, and it’s deserving of its reputation. Obviously these sorts of movies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re a fan of old-school kung fu movies, this DVD is a must-have. If you’re only casually interested in classic martial arts movies, it’s one of the best the genre has to offer. Highly recommended.
GRADE: A-
THE EXTRAS
The lone extra on the 5 Deadly Venoms DVD is commentary from Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, who provides commentary on just about everything Dragon Dynasty releases. That’s not a complaint, as this guy is a walking encyclopedia of Hong Kong cinema, casually reciting actors’ entire resumes, right up to the present, as they walk through the frame. He does an excellent job of explaining the impact the film had on pop culture, particularly in America (a number of rap groups, most prominently the Wu-Tang Clan, sample dialogue from the movie); if I’m not mistaken, 5 Deadly Venoms was featured in an Entertainment Weekly list of the top cult movies of all time. Logan manages to quote Shakespeare in virtually the same breath as a lyric from semi-obscure rapper LA the Darkman, and discusses everything from the movie’s potential influence on Toad in the first X-Men movie to the reason the dubbing in classic kung fu flicks sounds so weird and similar. As effusive as Logan is in his praise for 5 Deadly Venoms, he also points out that the new remastered Dragon Dynasty DVDs (which really do look quite spectacular, particularly the vintage Shaw Brothers flicks) do no favors to the late-‘70s Hong Kong makeup. The wigs and fake beards are incredibly phony-looking, but for me, that’s just part of the charm.
It’s been too long since I got to review a kung fu movie for the blog, and it’s fitting that my return to
the genre is for one of its bona fide classics. The 5 Deadly Venoms is one of the all-time greats of vintage Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and Dragon Dynasty maintains its stellar run of bringing classic Shaw Brothers (the studio for classic Hong Kong flicks of the ‘60s and ‘70s) movies to Western audiences with top-quality DVDs. Director Chang Cheh was the man at Shaw Bros., having helmed other classics like The One-Armed Swordsman, and in 1978 he released The 5 Deadly Venoms, a modest hit in Hong Kong that grew to become a cult hit in the West. The five actors in the titular roles became commonly known in Hong Kong simply as “The Venoms,” and the film spawned several unofficial sequels with the actors playing similar roles.Appropriately, The 5 Deadly Venoms is an awesome old-school kung fu movie, easily the best such film I’ve reviewed here. The fights are a lot of fun, but one of the main reasons for the film’s legacy, oddly enough (particularly for this genre), is its story. It opens with the dying master of the Poison Clan giving a mission to his lone remaining student: he must track down five of his former students, whom he now believes are using their unique, individual skills for evil. The young student has been trained in parts of each of their styles – centipede, lizard, scorpion, snake and toad – but his lack of deep knowledge in any one particular style means he’s no match for any of them one-on-one. He’s told to track down one of his master’s old colleagues, who’s hiding a treasure the Venoms are looking for. The Venoms are all living under new identities in the big city, and part of the fun of the early part of the movie is trying to figure out which character is which Venom. (In some cases its remarkably easy, but the identity of the Scorpion is left mysterious basically until the climax.) And not all of the Venoms have turned to evil.
The 5 Deadly Venoms is a bit of an odd beast – not too many kung fu movies are renowned for their stories – but its twisty, surprisingly intricate plot is a lot of the fun, and it’s unquestionably a big part of the movie’s appeal. Having an ensemble cast also means it’s a bit of a change of pace from more traditional “lone hero on a quest for revenge” stories; The 5 Deadly Venoms has no real single protagonist, as the young student initially sent to find the Venoms actually has a fairly small role in the story, serving more as the audience’s entry point in the first act (though he does show up for the climactic battle).
I’d actually only seen The 5 Deadly Venoms once before, back the days I spent copious amounts of time tracking down Hong Kong action movies of the ‘70s through the ‘90s (this was before you could easily find cult foreign movies via small DVD distributors online), and I remember loving it. A lot of that was because the film is basically set up like a kung fu superhero movie; it’s got characters with unique powers who occasionally don themed masks and outfits, and plays with themes of power and responsibility (perhaps Chang was a fan of classic Spider-Man comics). But getting to watch it again to review it was a treat, and I was happy to learn it holds up. The fights are awesome, and the film shows why Chang Cheh was such an important director of that era. He was ahead of his time, using clever camera tricks for Lizard’s wall-walking abilities, including a very cool, proto-Matrix “speed-ramping” technique of subtly switching to slow-motion to create the illusion that he’s calmly walking up the wall. It’s cool stuff for a 1978 movie, and it’s very effective.
The 5 Deadly Venoms is known as a classic piece of martial arts cinema, and it’s deserving of its reputation. Obviously these sorts of movies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re a fan of old-school kung fu movies, this DVD is a must-have. If you’re only casually interested in classic martial arts movies, it’s one of the best the genre has to offer. Highly recommended.
GRADE: A-
THE EXTRAS
The lone extra on the 5 Deadly Venoms DVD is commentary from Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, who provides commentary on just about everything Dragon Dynasty releases. That’s not a complaint, as this guy is a walking encyclopedia of Hong Kong cinema, casually reciting actors’ entire resumes, right up to the present, as they walk through the frame. He does an excellent job of explaining the impact the film had on pop culture, particularly in America (a number of rap groups, most prominently the Wu-Tang Clan, sample dialogue from the movie); if I’m not mistaken, 5 Deadly Venoms was featured in an Entertainment Weekly list of the top cult movies of all time. Logan manages to quote Shakespeare in virtually the same breath as a lyric from semi-obscure rapper LA the Darkman, and discusses everything from the movie’s potential influence on Toad in the first X-Men movie to the reason the dubbing in classic kung fu flicks sounds so weird and similar. As effusive as Logan is in his praise for 5 Deadly Venoms, he also points out that the new remastered Dragon Dynasty DVDs (which really do look quite spectacular, particularly the vintage Shaw Brothers flicks) do no favors to the late-‘70s Hong Kong makeup. The wigs and fake beards are incredibly phony-looking, but for me, that’s just part of the charm.
Labels: Dragon Dynasty, martial arts
¶ 10:22 AM 0 Comments
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
DVD Review: Come Drink With Me
THE MOVIE
Come Drink With Me is a classic of martial arts cinema finally available on a proper DVD here in North America thanks to Dragon Dynasty’s Shaw Brothers Classics Collection. Directed by legendary Hong Kong/Taiwan filmmaker King Hu, it marked a huge leap forward in th
e evolution of kung fu movies, and is probably most notable to contemporary audiences as the spiritual ancestor of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
King Hu died at age 65 in 1997 as one of the most revered filmmakers in Hong Kong martial arts movies, though he spent most of his career in Taiwan after banging out several classics of the genre in the ‘60s and ‘70s, beginning with Come Drink With Me in 1966 (he also won a technical prize at Cannes in 1975 for another martial arts film, A Touch of Zen). His films pioneered many conventions of the kung fu subgenre known as wuxia that have since become hallmarks of martial arts movies. (The more fantasy-based wuxia subgenre typically focuses on swordsmen and swordswomen with rigid codes of honour and superhuman powers; think of the difference between fantastic “wire fu” films like Crouching Tiger and Hero and more “realistic” kung fu movies like, say, Bruce Lee's or Jackie Chan's.)
I’d never seen Come Drink With Me before reviewing this new DVD, but I had read about it years ago when I was devouring as many books about Hong Kong cinema that I could find. So when I heard about the movie’s restoration for DVD, I was excited to see it at last to find out what the fuss was all about. The fuss, as it turns out, was well deserved. Come Drink With Me is a pretty remarkable piece of work, particularly considering its age. The story is nothing special – a government official is kidnapped by bandits demanding the release of their own captured comrades, and the official’s sister, dubbed Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), is sent to get him back – but the action is where this film shines.
The first thing I noticed was that Come Drink With Me doesn’t feature the typically stilted martial arts choreography I’ve come to associate with older kung fu movies, but rather a far more stylized, almost dance-like grace to it. (Hu was a big fan of traditional Peking Opera, and it influenced his martial arts movies in a big way.) Many of the fights are clearly influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, with fighters striking dramatic poses and squaring off for several tense seconds before either combatant strikes. This technique allows Hu to really ramp up the tension in several scenes, especially in the brilliant fight in the inn near the beginning.
The other thing that really struck me about the film as just how much of an influence it was on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I knew Ang Lee was a huge fan of King Hu and the wuxia genre (going so far as to cast Cheng Pei-pei as the villainous Jade Fox 30-plus years later), but two of Crouching Tiger’s most memorable sequences are direct homages to this film: the aforementioned inn fight where Che
ng faces off against several opponents (echoed by Zhang Ziyi’s character kicking the asses of an entire inn full of fighters – she even does so disguised as a man, as Pei-pei does in Come Drink With Me), and a chase across rooftops at night, one of Crouching Tiger’s most famous scenes. Ang Lee’s film, made decades later, obviously benefits from technical advances (particularly the rooftop chase scene; the Crouching Tiger version rightly blew many a mind when the film came out), but King Hu manages to impress with traditional camera tricks instead of wires and CGI.
The film is also just beautiful to look at; King Hu (a former set decorator) lovingly shoots all the sets and locales with a clear eye for composition and detail, and the new DVD features some incredible restoration. If you didn’t know you were watching a 42-year old film, you’d hardly guess it to look at it. One thing I did notice about the DVD’s audio tracks was that the English-dubbed track (in 5.1 surround) seems to have not only cheesier dialogue, but cheesier music as well, filled with over-the-top flourishes clearly intended for grindhouse audiences. The music on the Cantonese track (available only in mono) is much more atmospheric and more evocative of Peking Opera and Kurosawa samurai movies than the ‘70s-style exploitation vibe on the English track.
Overall I was quite impressed with Come Drink With Me. Fans of martial arts movies will be delighted to see a true classic finally available on DVD, and more casual fans can get a look at where the genre took a great leap forward.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
As with all the Dragon Dynasty DVDs, Come Drink With Me comes with a nice bunch of extras. First is the commentary on the film with Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan and star Cheng Pei-pei. As usual, Logan is a font of knowledge about virtually every aspect of the film and its legacy, and though Cheng’s English isn’t perfect, they have a nice rapport and he gets some cool little details out of her.
There’s also an interview with Hong Kong director Tsui Hark called ‘The King an
d I’ in which Tsui, a longtime King Hu fan who collaborated with him on one of his last films, 1990’s Swordsman (a disappointing effort meant to be Hu’s triumphant return to Hong Kong movies), in which the filmmaker recalls the impact Come Drink With Me made on its release as well as his personal stories of time spent with his late mentor. Tsui’s actually one of my favourite Hong King directors (despite having made some really bad movies, like the 1998 Jean-Claude Van Damme mess Knock Off, which followed the insanely ridiculous – and entertaining – Double Team, which teams JCVD with former NBA star Dennis Rodman; I could probably write a whole goddamn book about that movie, but I’m digressing here big time), so I really enjoyed watching him talk about the splash King Hu’s first martial arts movie made back in the day. He talks about how even back in ’66 he and his friends knew they were watching a paradigm shift in HK action movies, and I also got the impression he was something of a starstruck fanboy around King Hu himself, at least initially.
‘Come Speak With Me’ is an interview with star Cheng Pei-pei that runs a little over 15 minutes, where she explains that she had no martial arts training before filming Come Drink With Me, but was rather a dancer (a legacy taken up by other dancers-turned-asskickers Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Zi-yi). There’s also an interview with Come Drink With Me’s leading man, Yueh Hua, who plays Golden Swallow’s perpetually-soused kung fu master. Like the Pei-pei interview, it’s pretty basic stuff, but at one point he pulls out the original Come Drink With Me script, which was sort of cool.
Also included is an interview with Bey Logan where he discusses Come Drink With Me in particular and King Hu’s legacy in general. It’s interesting stuff for genre fans like me, as Logan is essentially a walking encyclopedia of HK film knowledge, and he does an excellent job of putting the film in a historical context.
It’s great to see Come Drink With Me on DVD at last, and the fact that it’s on a gorgeously restored disc packed with extras only makes it better. Fans of kung fu films need to check this DVD out.
Come Drink With Me is a classic of martial arts cinema finally available on a proper DVD here in North America thanks to Dragon Dynasty’s Shaw Brothers Classics Collection. Directed by legendary Hong Kong/Taiwan filmmaker King Hu, it marked a huge leap forward in th
e evolution of kung fu movies, and is probably most notable to contemporary audiences as the spiritual ancestor of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.King Hu died at age 65 in 1997 as one of the most revered filmmakers in Hong Kong martial arts movies, though he spent most of his career in Taiwan after banging out several classics of the genre in the ‘60s and ‘70s, beginning with Come Drink With Me in 1966 (he also won a technical prize at Cannes in 1975 for another martial arts film, A Touch of Zen). His films pioneered many conventions of the kung fu subgenre known as wuxia that have since become hallmarks of martial arts movies. (The more fantasy-based wuxia subgenre typically focuses on swordsmen and swordswomen with rigid codes of honour and superhuman powers; think of the difference between fantastic “wire fu” films like Crouching Tiger and Hero and more “realistic” kung fu movies like, say, Bruce Lee's or Jackie Chan's.)
I’d never seen Come Drink With Me before reviewing this new DVD, but I had read about it years ago when I was devouring as many books about Hong Kong cinema that I could find. So when I heard about the movie’s restoration for DVD, I was excited to see it at last to find out what the fuss was all about. The fuss, as it turns out, was well deserved. Come Drink With Me is a pretty remarkable piece of work, particularly considering its age. The story is nothing special – a government official is kidnapped by bandits demanding the release of their own captured comrades, and the official’s sister, dubbed Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), is sent to get him back – but the action is where this film shines.
The first thing I noticed was that Come Drink With Me doesn’t feature the typically stilted martial arts choreography I’ve come to associate with older kung fu movies, but rather a far more stylized, almost dance-like grace to it. (Hu was a big fan of traditional Peking Opera, and it influenced his martial arts movies in a big way.) Many of the fights are clearly influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, with fighters striking dramatic poses and squaring off for several tense seconds before either combatant strikes. This technique allows Hu to really ramp up the tension in several scenes, especially in the brilliant fight in the inn near the beginning.
The other thing that really struck me about the film as just how much of an influence it was on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I knew Ang Lee was a huge fan of King Hu and the wuxia genre (going so far as to cast Cheng Pei-pei as the villainous Jade Fox 30-plus years later), but two of Crouching Tiger’s most memorable sequences are direct homages to this film: the aforementioned inn fight where Che
ng faces off against several opponents (echoed by Zhang Ziyi’s character kicking the asses of an entire inn full of fighters – she even does so disguised as a man, as Pei-pei does in Come Drink With Me), and a chase across rooftops at night, one of Crouching Tiger’s most famous scenes. Ang Lee’s film, made decades later, obviously benefits from technical advances (particularly the rooftop chase scene; the Crouching Tiger version rightly blew many a mind when the film came out), but King Hu manages to impress with traditional camera tricks instead of wires and CGI.The film is also just beautiful to look at; King Hu (a former set decorator) lovingly shoots all the sets and locales with a clear eye for composition and detail, and the new DVD features some incredible restoration. If you didn’t know you were watching a 42-year old film, you’d hardly guess it to look at it. One thing I did notice about the DVD’s audio tracks was that the English-dubbed track (in 5.1 surround) seems to have not only cheesier dialogue, but cheesier music as well, filled with over-the-top flourishes clearly intended for grindhouse audiences. The music on the Cantonese track (available only in mono) is much more atmospheric and more evocative of Peking Opera and Kurosawa samurai movies than the ‘70s-style exploitation vibe on the English track.
Overall I was quite impressed with Come Drink With Me. Fans of martial arts movies will be delighted to see a true classic finally available on DVD, and more casual fans can get a look at where the genre took a great leap forward.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
As with all the Dragon Dynasty DVDs, Come Drink With Me comes with a nice bunch of extras. First is the commentary on the film with Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan and star Cheng Pei-pei. As usual, Logan is a font of knowledge about virtually every aspect of the film and its legacy, and though Cheng’s English isn’t perfect, they have a nice rapport and he gets some cool little details out of her.
There’s also an interview with Hong Kong director Tsui Hark called ‘The King an
d I’ in which Tsui, a longtime King Hu fan who collaborated with him on one of his last films, 1990’s Swordsman (a disappointing effort meant to be Hu’s triumphant return to Hong Kong movies), in which the filmmaker recalls the impact Come Drink With Me made on its release as well as his personal stories of time spent with his late mentor. Tsui’s actually one of my favourite Hong King directors (despite having made some really bad movies, like the 1998 Jean-Claude Van Damme mess Knock Off, which followed the insanely ridiculous – and entertaining – Double Team, which teams JCVD with former NBA star Dennis Rodman; I could probably write a whole goddamn book about that movie, but I’m digressing here big time), so I really enjoyed watching him talk about the splash King Hu’s first martial arts movie made back in the day. He talks about how even back in ’66 he and his friends knew they were watching a paradigm shift in HK action movies, and I also got the impression he was something of a starstruck fanboy around King Hu himself, at least initially.‘Come Speak With Me’ is an interview with star Cheng Pei-pei that runs a little over 15 minutes, where she explains that she had no martial arts training before filming Come Drink With Me, but was rather a dancer (a legacy taken up by other dancers-turned-asskickers Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Zi-yi). There’s also an interview with Come Drink With Me’s leading man, Yueh Hua, who plays Golden Swallow’s perpetually-soused kung fu master. Like the Pei-pei interview, it’s pretty basic stuff, but at one point he pulls out the original Come Drink With Me script, which was sort of cool.
Also included is an interview with Bey Logan where he discusses Come Drink With Me in particular and King Hu’s legacy in general. It’s interesting stuff for genre fans like me, as Logan is essentially a walking encyclopedia of HK film knowledge, and he does an excellent job of putting the film in a historical context.
It’s great to see Come Drink With Me on DVD at last, and the fact that it’s on a gorgeously restored disc packed with extras only makes it better. Fans of kung fu films need to check this DVD out.
Labels: Asian cinema, Dragon Dynasty, DVD review, JCVD, martial arts
¶ 12:22 PM 0 Comments
Friday, June 20, 2008
DVD Review: Fatal Contact
THE MOVIE
Fatal Contact is a starring vehicle for rising Hong Kong martial arts star Jacky Wu Jing, who made an impact on a lot of fans with his breakout role as the right hand man of gang boss Sammo Hung in S.P.L. (aka Kill Zone). He barely has any lines in that film (but it's a kung fu movie after all, so that hardly matters), but his fight scenes in that film, particularly his dustup with Donnie Yen near the end, immediately got him attention, including the inevitable "next Jet Li" mantle that’s been worn by many would-be martial arts stars since, well, Jet Li. As much as calling anyone "the next" anything is automatically cliché (and almost always dooms that person to never live up to that standard), Jing is damn impressive. He's as fast as almost anyone I've seen in a martial arts movie (though in Hong Kong they often speed them up in postproduction, so really, what do I know), and insanely athletic. Fatal Contact is a great showcase for
his considerable abilities, but as a movie – even a kung fu movie – the story is weak and doesn't really hold water.
Wu Jing plays a mainland Chinese martial artist in a travelling Beijing Opera troupe passing through Hong Kong. A crew of gangsters take in a performance one night, and afterwards offer him a handful of cash to participate in an underground fight. Being a fresh-faced country rube, Jing refuses. Naturally, that's not the end of things (a look at the box cover will tell you that), as after a female friend he seems to kinda-sorta have a crush on (though she seems to like money a bit more than him) basically tells him to stop being so naïve and take the payday, he shows up and annihilates his first opponent. Before long, Jing's country boy has been sucked into the seedy world of underground boxing, demolishing just about anyone the gangsters put him in the ring with. Naturally it doesn't take long before Jing learns about the dark side of his new livelihood (turns out the fights aren't always fair…crazy, I know).
The story in Fatal Contact is nothing special; as I explained in my Flash Point review, the plot of a martial arts movie is largely beside the point (though a good one, as in the case of Flash Point, certainly helps). Indeed, Fatal Contact is also a nice little throwback to old-school '80s kung fu movies that, before S.P.L., Hong Kong didn't seem to make anymore. Just about every plot development here can be seen by anyone who's seen a movie before coming a mile away, but that's not really the problem. When Jing's character falls in with a penny-pinching would-be con artist assigned to keep an eye on him by the gangsters (Ronald Cheng, who apparently is a comic actor with no martial arts training, but he had me fooled) and then realizes he’s a kung fu master himself, it recalls the old kung fu movie archetype of the sleazy drunken kung fu master, a beloved trope of the genre.
The fights in Fatal Contact are lots of fun, and there are plenty of them (in the extras Jing estimates he has 10 fights in the film). Wu Jing is an absolute blast to watch when it's time to do his thing, leaping off walls, spinning and kicking people two or three times in the time it takes you or I to blink. The problem is the story. Wu Jing's character only gets involved in the underground fighting circuit because his ladyfriend (I'd call her his girlfriend but I don't think they so much as kiss) tells him he should. When he starts to realize he's maybe getting in over his head, there's nothing actually keeping him there other than the fact that she keeps telling him she likes guys with money. This establishes that 1) she's a selfish, money-grubbing con artist who looks at him as a meal ticket and 2) for a badass fighter, he's pretty much spineless. I get the feeling director Dennis Law was going for some moral ambiguity with her character, but instead she’s just fundamentally unlikeable. (She also talks her best friend – a sweet girl who at the beginning of the film urges Jing not to get into underground fighting – into prostitution.) All this undermines the romance that's clearly meant to drive the plot, and because Jing's character is basically only doing the underground fighting thing because she told him it would be swell if he did, the central conflict of the film feels manufactured and false. Which, again, for a martial arts movie is not the worst thing, but the story requires Jing's character to give a shit about what's happening to her long after we’ve been shown that she’s ready to screw him over at the drop of a hat, and her “redemption” is supposed to be that she starts to feel bad for using him. Worst of all, the ending (which I won't spoil) is needlessly depressing, so dark that it sticks out like the proverbial sore. Its grimness is totally unearned, and really left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
Fatal Contact has some excellent fight sequences and is a great little diversion for fans of martial arts movies, but anyone looking for a more complete action movie experience should check out Flash Point or Kill Zone for contemporary kung fu done right.
GRADE: C+
THE EXTRAS
It’s been a while since I've encountered a “two-disc ultimate edition” DVD that was so undeserving of a second disc. The only somewhat interesting extra is the commentary track, with director Dennis Law and Dragon Dynasty regular Bey Logan. Law’s English isn’t great, but he and Logan have a friendly tone that helps the commentary flow nicely. He even jokingly gives Logan hard time for his repeated mentions of other Dragon Dynasty releases (“this is like a commercial!”) It’s really only of interest to fans of Hong Kong cinema, but there are some interesting nuggets of information in there.
The rest of the extras are mostly fluffy promotional stuff. There’s an interview with Wu Jing that runs just over 20 minutes in which he talks about researching his role, training, kicking a stuntman in the neck by accident and knocking him out during filming, and being knocked out himself in a different take (“It was a wonderful feeling" . . . gotta admire his commitment to his craft).
Aside from that, there’s nothing particularly fascinating here. There’s also a 30-minute interview with the director, in which he describes the origins of the film (it started off as a story about a hooker who falls for her pimp, then he falls for her and has pangs of guilt about using her; he just swapped the characters’ genders and made it about underground boxing instead of prostitution and bang, instant kung fu movie). He also was consciously trying to evoke the feeling of old-school fighting video games, particularly the Street Fighter II (classic!), which isn’t the kind of thing I’m used to directors admitting to, but I appreciated the reference.
Beyond that there are short interviews with the two female co-stars, and as they’re both pop starlets first (in the same nine-piece girl group, no less; turns out the band’s manager also manages Wu Jing) and actresses second, their interviews almost put me to sleep. Finally there’s something called ‘Life Is A Contact Sport: Behind The Scenes of Fatal Contact,’ which I took to be a making-of featurette, but it’s just 30 minutes of Wu Jing training. Pretty underwhelming.
Overall this is a pretty weak DVD package for a decent kung fu movie. I appreciate Dragon Dynasty piling on the extras, but Fatal Contact is a movie that doesn’t really warrant them.
Fatal Contact is a starring vehicle for rising Hong Kong martial arts star Jacky Wu Jing, who made an impact on a lot of fans with his breakout role as the right hand man of gang boss Sammo Hung in S.P.L. (aka Kill Zone). He barely has any lines in that film (but it's a kung fu movie after all, so that hardly matters), but his fight scenes in that film, particularly his dustup with Donnie Yen near the end, immediately got him attention, including the inevitable "next Jet Li" mantle that’s been worn by many would-be martial arts stars since, well, Jet Li. As much as calling anyone "the next" anything is automatically cliché (and almost always dooms that person to never live up to that standard), Jing is damn impressive. He's as fast as almost anyone I've seen in a martial arts movie (though in Hong Kong they often speed them up in postproduction, so really, what do I know), and insanely athletic. Fatal Contact is a great showcase for
his considerable abilities, but as a movie – even a kung fu movie – the story is weak and doesn't really hold water.Wu Jing plays a mainland Chinese martial artist in a travelling Beijing Opera troupe passing through Hong Kong. A crew of gangsters take in a performance one night, and afterwards offer him a handful of cash to participate in an underground fight. Being a fresh-faced country rube, Jing refuses. Naturally, that's not the end of things (a look at the box cover will tell you that), as after a female friend he seems to kinda-sorta have a crush on (though she seems to like money a bit more than him) basically tells him to stop being so naïve and take the payday, he shows up and annihilates his first opponent. Before long, Jing's country boy has been sucked into the seedy world of underground boxing, demolishing just about anyone the gangsters put him in the ring with. Naturally it doesn't take long before Jing learns about the dark side of his new livelihood (turns out the fights aren't always fair…crazy, I know).
The story in Fatal Contact is nothing special; as I explained in my Flash Point review, the plot of a martial arts movie is largely beside the point (though a good one, as in the case of Flash Point, certainly helps). Indeed, Fatal Contact is also a nice little throwback to old-school '80s kung fu movies that, before S.P.L., Hong Kong didn't seem to make anymore. Just about every plot development here can be seen by anyone who's seen a movie before coming a mile away, but that's not really the problem. When Jing's character falls in with a penny-pinching would-be con artist assigned to keep an eye on him by the gangsters (Ronald Cheng, who apparently is a comic actor with no martial arts training, but he had me fooled) and then realizes he’s a kung fu master himself, it recalls the old kung fu movie archetype of the sleazy drunken kung fu master, a beloved trope of the genre.
The fights in Fatal Contact are lots of fun, and there are plenty of them (in the extras Jing estimates he has 10 fights in the film). Wu Jing is an absolute blast to watch when it's time to do his thing, leaping off walls, spinning and kicking people two or three times in the time it takes you or I to blink. The problem is the story. Wu Jing's character only gets involved in the underground fighting circuit because his ladyfriend (I'd call her his girlfriend but I don't think they so much as kiss) tells him he should. When he starts to realize he's maybe getting in over his head, there's nothing actually keeping him there other than the fact that she keeps telling him she likes guys with money. This establishes that 1) she's a selfish, money-grubbing con artist who looks at him as a meal ticket and 2) for a badass fighter, he's pretty much spineless. I get the feeling director Dennis Law was going for some moral ambiguity with her character, but instead she’s just fundamentally unlikeable. (She also talks her best friend – a sweet girl who at the beginning of the film urges Jing not to get into underground fighting – into prostitution.) All this undermines the romance that's clearly meant to drive the plot, and because Jing's character is basically only doing the underground fighting thing because she told him it would be swell if he did, the central conflict of the film feels manufactured and false. Which, again, for a martial arts movie is not the worst thing, but the story requires Jing's character to give a shit about what's happening to her long after we’ve been shown that she’s ready to screw him over at the drop of a hat, and her “redemption” is supposed to be that she starts to feel bad for using him. Worst of all, the ending (which I won't spoil) is needlessly depressing, so dark that it sticks out like the proverbial sore. Its grimness is totally unearned, and really left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
Fatal Contact has some excellent fight sequences and is a great little diversion for fans of martial arts movies, but anyone looking for a more complete action movie experience should check out Flash Point or Kill Zone for contemporary kung fu done right.
GRADE: C+
THE EXTRAS
It’s been a while since I've encountered a “two-disc ultimate edition” DVD that was so undeserving of a second disc. The only somewhat interesting extra is the commentary track, with director Dennis Law and Dragon Dynasty regular Bey Logan. Law’s English isn’t great, but he and Logan have a friendly tone that helps the commentary flow nicely. He even jokingly gives Logan hard time for his repeated mentions of other Dragon Dynasty releases (“this is like a commercial!”) It’s really only of interest to fans of Hong Kong cinema, but there are some interesting nuggets of information in there.
The rest of the extras are mostly fluffy promotional stuff. There’s an interview with Wu Jing that runs just over 20 minutes in which he talks about researching his role, training, kicking a stuntman in the neck by accident and knocking him out during filming, and being knocked out himself in a different take (“It was a wonderful feeling" . . . gotta admire his commitment to his craft).
Aside from that, there’s nothing particularly fascinating here. There’s also a 30-minute interview with the director, in which he describes the origins of the film (it started off as a story about a hooker who falls for her pimp, then he falls for her and has pangs of guilt about using her; he just swapped the characters’ genders and made it about underground boxing instead of prostitution and bang, instant kung fu movie). He also was consciously trying to evoke the feeling of old-school fighting video games, particularly the Street Fighter II (classic!), which isn’t the kind of thing I’m used to directors admitting to, but I appreciated the reference.
Beyond that there are short interviews with the two female co-stars, and as they’re both pop starlets first (in the same nine-piece girl group, no less; turns out the band’s manager also manages Wu Jing) and actresses second, their interviews almost put me to sleep. Finally there’s something called ‘Life Is A Contact Sport: Behind The Scenes of Fatal Contact,’ which I took to be a making-of featurette, but it’s just 30 minutes of Wu Jing training. Pretty underwhelming.
Overall this is a pretty weak DVD package for a decent kung fu movie. I appreciate Dragon Dynasty piling on the extras, but Fatal Contact is a movie that doesn’t really warrant them.
Labels: Asian cinema, Dragon Dynasty, DVD review, martial arts
¶ 1:19 PM 0 Comments
Friday, June 13, 2008
DVD Review: Flash Point
THE MOVIE
Before I get into it, a bit of a disclaimer: I'm about to go on (and on) about kung fu movies, so if that's not your thing, you may find this review a bit ridiculous. You have been warned.
Now that that's over, on to Flash Point. Actually, before I get to that, as many of you have probably come to expect, a little bit of background. See, I love kung fu movies, and I have for a long time (read: since before The Matrix came out). A few years ago I heard about this Hong Kong action movie called S.P.L. (an acronym for something to do with Chinese astrology; it's one of the best examples of a cultural reference that just does not transfer over to English)
that was apparently just the greatest thing since sliced bread, the best HK martial arts movie in a decade. I tracked down a copy of the official Chinese DVD (thank you Internet!) and my shit was promptly flipped.
S.P.L. (re-titled Kill Zone for the eventual North American DVD release) is a gritty cop movie for the first hour or so, then at the end turns into one of the most balls-out insane kung fu movies I've ever seen. It stars veteran HK action star/director/fight choreographer Donnie Yen (he turns up in the odd American movie, playing a samurai-sword-wielding vampire in Blade 2, where he also choreographed some of the fights, and I think he's in a Highlander movie too), Simon Yam and kung fu cinema legend Sammo Hung (remember Martial Law? It was like Walker, Texas Ranger but with an actual Asian guy. The show was ridiculous, but Sammo is an icon of martial arts movies, take my word for it). One of the reasons it kicks so much ass is that it's one of the rare martial arts movies that actually works as a movie. Don't get me wrong, it's not Oscar material, but director Wilson Yip is a hell of a craftsman; he makes everything look great, and the first 60 or so minutes really do work as a straight-ahead cop thriller. The collaboration is what makes it special, as the action sequences are all choreographed and directed by Yen (a director in his own right), so they absolutely crackle with energy. It's one of the only martial arts movies I've seen that doesn't feel flat and boring when people aren't kicking and punching each other, and I highly recommend it.
The Yip-Yen team reunited with 2006's Dragon Tiger Gate, an adaptation of a Chinese martial arts comic. It's the complete opposite of Kill Zone's brutal action and dark story, a candy-coloured comic come to life, about guys with ridiculous (RIDICULOUS) hair named Dragon and Turbo kicking dudes through walls. It's lots of fun, and Yip manages to capture the feeling and tone of a comic for a budget that was probably smaller than a week's worth of catering on the Iron Man set.
With Flash Point (see? I TOLD you I'd get to it), Yip and Yen collaborate for a third time on a film much more in the vein of SPL/Kill Zone. It's another gritty cop thriller set in pre-handover Hong Kong (as a co-production between Hong Kong and China, they had to set it before China took over the territory as a way of justifying the rampant criminal activity seen in the film; the idea is that now, this sort of thing could never happen). Yen stars as basically his character from Kill Zone, a good cop who gets in trouble with his superiors for using his incredible fighting skills a bit too freely against suspects. His partner (Louis Koo, star of Johnnie To's Election movies; I will never miss a chance to pimp them) is undercover with a trio of Vietnamese brothers tearing up the Hong Kong underworld, pissing off basically everybody as they try to establish themselves as the baddest guys around. Archer (Lui Leung Wai), the eldest, is the boss; Tony, the middle brother, is the "cool" one (Collin Chou, best known as Seraph in the Matrix sequels – he's the guy Keanu Reeves fights in the teahouse); and the youngest, Tiger (Xing Yu), a thuggish man-child with a quick temper.
Yen says himself in the commentary that the story is nothing the audience hasn't seen a dozen times, but the key to making a great genre movie is to take the tropes of the genre and do something different with them. In the case of Flash Point, that means taking kung fu sequences to levels never before seen by human eyes.
As with any good kung fu flick, Flash Point lives and dies by the quality of its fights, and sweet fancy Moses do they impress. Yen is one of the best action directors working today, and the thing that sets him apart from his peers is that he's constantly evolving and trying new things. In Flash Point, Yen builds on the hints of mixed martial arts influences glimpsed in S.P.L./Kill Zone and goes all out. Over the past few years, Yen has fallen in love with MMA, and his goal in Flash Point is to incorporate grappling and groundfighting into the more traditionally flashy kung fu and lightning-quick boxing moves that are the genre’s standards. It sounds like a strange idea, but Yen pulls it off with gusto, flowing effortlessly from flying kicks to armbars and leglocks. (Putting grappling into a martial arts movie isn't actually a new idea; Jean-Claude Van Damme and HK director Ringo Lam tried it – less than successfully – in 1996's Maximum Risk, but the less said about that movie the better.)
Not since Ong Bak has a martial arts movie made me shout "holy SHIT!" and wince in sympathetic pain so many times. Normally I'm loathe to regurgitate the hyperbole from DVD boxes (I'm quite capable of hyperbole myself, thanks), but the back of Flash Point boasts a "bone-crunching 16-minute showdown" at the end, and that's underselling it. Yen and Chou throw themselves at each other during the climax with blinding speed and palpable intensity, and both actors say on the DVD it was the toughest fight of their careers. I've seen this movie about six times now, and even watching it most recently with the commentary, my mouth was hanging open for most of the fights.
As with Kill Zone, one of the secrets of Flash Point's awesomeness is that it actually holds your attention in what Yen calls the "drama scenes" (i.e. the ones where guys aren't fighting) with a compelling, if not groundbreaking, story and solid performances from the cast. The film is structured similarly to S.P.L. in that it starts off relatively slow, action-wise, before things go totally fucking nuts about an hour in.
Flash Point is like mana from kung fu heaven, the work of two collaborating filmmakers at the top of their respective games. Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip are carrying the torch of Hong Kong action cinema into the 21st century, and fans of martial arts movies owe it to themselves to follow them.
GRADE: A-
THE EXTRAS
As with previous Dragon Dynasty DVDs, Flash Point is packed with extras. I guess Harvey Weinstein took complaints about his treatment of Asian movies when he was at Miramax to heart, because all of the Dragon Dynasty DVDs I've seen are excellent. The picture here is razor-sharp, and the DTS audio track lets you feel it in your bones when these guys try to break each other’s.
Most of the bonus features on this two-disc set seem to be ported over from the movie's Chinese DVD (which I own, and I recognized them from it, though it was nice to be able to actually understand them), and because it was a pretty high-profile release in Asia, a lot of it is promotional material from the film's pre-release hype. There's an 18-minute featurette called 'The Making of Flash Point,' a typical making-of promo, as well the 28-minute 'Flash Point Explored,’ which focuses more on the characters and plot. It's kind of interesting for serious fans, but neither is anything mind-blowing. The MMA angle is covered pretty heavily, so I guess that was a big part of the movie's marketing in Asia (where MMA is more of an unknown quantity). There's also handful of shorter featurettes on the fights and Yen's team of stuntmen and fighters, but a lot of it is kind of bland and there's a lot of information overlap between them all, making big chunks of each segment redundant.
The real gem is 'On Deadly Ground,' a 30-minute interview (in English, done for the North American DVD) with Donnie Yen. It's great stuff, at least for kung fu geeks like me, with Yen talking candidly about the differences between Hong Kong and Hollywood, his collaboration with Wilson Yip and the process of action direction. It ends with Yen not-so-humbly calling Flash Point a spiritual successor to Bruce Lee's early films, which put a smile on my face.
The other highlight of the extras is the audio commentary with Yen and Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan (I think he works for Dragon Dynasty, as he does commentary on almost all their DVDs). Yen and Logan know each other, and the tone of the commentary is friendly and conversational. There's lots of interesting bits of trivia (Logan's specialty, though Yen pitches in too), and they even take a moment to make fun of co-star Louis Koo's George Hamilton-esque tan.
There are also a handful of deleted scenes, but as with most deleted scenes, they don't really add much and I can see why they were cut. And I'm only mentioning the trailers because of the TV spot where an announcer breathlessly describes it as "a breakthrough in Chinese cinema!" I'm not so sure about that, but Flash Point is a solid DVD package for a great action movie.
Before I get into it, a bit of a disclaimer: I'm about to go on (and on) about kung fu movies, so if that's not your thing, you may find this review a bit ridiculous. You have been warned.
Now that that's over, on to Flash Point. Actually, before I get to that, as many of you have probably come to expect, a little bit of background. See, I love kung fu movies, and I have for a long time (read: since before The Matrix came out). A few years ago I heard about this Hong Kong action movie called S.P.L. (an acronym for something to do with Chinese astrology; it's one of the best examples of a cultural reference that just does not transfer over to English)
that was apparently just the greatest thing since sliced bread, the best HK martial arts movie in a decade. I tracked down a copy of the official Chinese DVD (thank you Internet!) and my shit was promptly flipped.S.P.L. (re-titled Kill Zone for the eventual North American DVD release) is a gritty cop movie for the first hour or so, then at the end turns into one of the most balls-out insane kung fu movies I've ever seen. It stars veteran HK action star/director/fight choreographer Donnie Yen (he turns up in the odd American movie, playing a samurai-sword-wielding vampire in Blade 2, where he also choreographed some of the fights, and I think he's in a Highlander movie too), Simon Yam and kung fu cinema legend Sammo Hung (remember Martial Law? It was like Walker, Texas Ranger but with an actual Asian guy. The show was ridiculous, but Sammo is an icon of martial arts movies, take my word for it). One of the reasons it kicks so much ass is that it's one of the rare martial arts movies that actually works as a movie. Don't get me wrong, it's not Oscar material, but director Wilson Yip is a hell of a craftsman; he makes everything look great, and the first 60 or so minutes really do work as a straight-ahead cop thriller. The collaboration is what makes it special, as the action sequences are all choreographed and directed by Yen (a director in his own right), so they absolutely crackle with energy. It's one of the only martial arts movies I've seen that doesn't feel flat and boring when people aren't kicking and punching each other, and I highly recommend it.
The Yip-Yen team reunited with 2006's Dragon Tiger Gate, an adaptation of a Chinese martial arts comic. It's the complete opposite of Kill Zone's brutal action and dark story, a candy-coloured comic come to life, about guys with ridiculous (RIDICULOUS) hair named Dragon and Turbo kicking dudes through walls. It's lots of fun, and Yip manages to capture the feeling and tone of a comic for a budget that was probably smaller than a week's worth of catering on the Iron Man set.
With Flash Point (see? I TOLD you I'd get to it), Yip and Yen collaborate for a third time on a film much more in the vein of SPL/Kill Zone. It's another gritty cop thriller set in pre-handover Hong Kong (as a co-production between Hong Kong and China, they had to set it before China took over the territory as a way of justifying the rampant criminal activity seen in the film; the idea is that now, this sort of thing could never happen). Yen stars as basically his character from Kill Zone, a good cop who gets in trouble with his superiors for using his incredible fighting skills a bit too freely against suspects. His partner (Louis Koo, star of Johnnie To's Election movies; I will never miss a chance to pimp them) is undercover with a trio of Vietnamese brothers tearing up the Hong Kong underworld, pissing off basically everybody as they try to establish themselves as the baddest guys around. Archer (Lui Leung Wai), the eldest, is the boss; Tony, the middle brother, is the "cool" one (Collin Chou, best known as Seraph in the Matrix sequels – he's the guy Keanu Reeves fights in the teahouse); and the youngest, Tiger (Xing Yu), a thuggish man-child with a quick temper.
Yen says himself in the commentary that the story is nothing the audience hasn't seen a dozen times, but the key to making a great genre movie is to take the tropes of the genre and do something different with them. In the case of Flash Point, that means taking kung fu sequences to levels never before seen by human eyes.
As with any good kung fu flick, Flash Point lives and dies by the quality of its fights, and sweet fancy Moses do they impress. Yen is one of the best action directors working today, and the thing that sets him apart from his peers is that he's constantly evolving and trying new things. In Flash Point, Yen builds on the hints of mixed martial arts influences glimpsed in S.P.L./Kill Zone and goes all out. Over the past few years, Yen has fallen in love with MMA, and his goal in Flash Point is to incorporate grappling and groundfighting into the more traditionally flashy kung fu and lightning-quick boxing moves that are the genre’s standards. It sounds like a strange idea, but Yen pulls it off with gusto, flowing effortlessly from flying kicks to armbars and leglocks. (Putting grappling into a martial arts movie isn't actually a new idea; Jean-Claude Van Damme and HK director Ringo Lam tried it – less than successfully – in 1996's Maximum Risk, but the less said about that movie the better.)
Not since Ong Bak has a martial arts movie made me shout "holy SHIT!" and wince in sympathetic pain so many times. Normally I'm loathe to regurgitate the hyperbole from DVD boxes (I'm quite capable of hyperbole myself, thanks), but the back of Flash Point boasts a "bone-crunching 16-minute showdown" at the end, and that's underselling it. Yen and Chou throw themselves at each other during the climax with blinding speed and palpable intensity, and both actors say on the DVD it was the toughest fight of their careers. I've seen this movie about six times now, and even watching it most recently with the commentary, my mouth was hanging open for most of the fights.
As with Kill Zone, one of the secrets of Flash Point's awesomeness is that it actually holds your attention in what Yen calls the "drama scenes" (i.e. the ones where guys aren't fighting) with a compelling, if not groundbreaking, story and solid performances from the cast. The film is structured similarly to S.P.L. in that it starts off relatively slow, action-wise, before things go totally fucking nuts about an hour in.
Flash Point is like mana from kung fu heaven, the work of two collaborating filmmakers at the top of their respective games. Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip are carrying the torch of Hong Kong action cinema into the 21st century, and fans of martial arts movies owe it to themselves to follow them.
GRADE: A-
THE EXTRAS
As with previous Dragon Dynasty DVDs, Flash Point is packed with extras. I guess Harvey Weinstein took complaints about his treatment of Asian movies when he was at Miramax to heart, because all of the Dragon Dynasty DVDs I've seen are excellent. The picture here is razor-sharp, and the DTS audio track lets you feel it in your bones when these guys try to break each other’s.
Most of the bonus features on this two-disc set seem to be ported over from the movie's Chinese DVD (which I own, and I recognized them from it, though it was nice to be able to actually understand them), and because it was a pretty high-profile release in Asia, a lot of it is promotional material from the film's pre-release hype. There's an 18-minute featurette called 'The Making of Flash Point,' a typical making-of promo, as well the 28-minute 'Flash Point Explored,’ which focuses more on the characters and plot. It's kind of interesting for serious fans, but neither is anything mind-blowing. The MMA angle is covered pretty heavily, so I guess that was a big part of the movie's marketing in Asia (where MMA is more of an unknown quantity). There's also handful of shorter featurettes on the fights and Yen's team of stuntmen and fighters, but a lot of it is kind of bland and there's a lot of information overlap between them all, making big chunks of each segment redundant.
The real gem is 'On Deadly Ground,' a 30-minute interview (in English, done for the North American DVD) with Donnie Yen. It's great stuff, at least for kung fu geeks like me, with Yen talking candidly about the differences between Hong Kong and Hollywood, his collaboration with Wilson Yip and the process of action direction. It ends with Yen not-so-humbly calling Flash Point a spiritual successor to Bruce Lee's early films, which put a smile on my face.
The other highlight of the extras is the audio commentary with Yen and Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan (I think he works for Dragon Dynasty, as he does commentary on almost all their DVDs). Yen and Logan know each other, and the tone of the commentary is friendly and conversational. There's lots of interesting bits of trivia (Logan's specialty, though Yen pitches in too), and they even take a moment to make fun of co-star Louis Koo's George Hamilton-esque tan.
There are also a handful of deleted scenes, but as with most deleted scenes, they don't really add much and I can see why they were cut. And I'm only mentioning the trailers because of the TV spot where an announcer breathlessly describes it as "a breakthrough in Chinese cinema!" I'm not so sure about that, but Flash Point is a solid DVD package for a great action movie.
Labels: Asian cinema, Bruce Lee, Dragon Dynasty, DVD review, Johnnie To, martial arts
¶ 9:35 AM 0 Comments
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
DVD Review: PTU - Police Tactical Unit
The Movie
Released through The Weinstein Company’s Dragon Dynasty label, which specializes in Asian cinema, PTU is an urban crime thriller from director Johnnie To, one of the most exciting and prolific directors working in Hong Kong today. He seems to release about a half-dozen films every year (I may be exaggerating), with the standouts being, for me, his recent shoot-‘em-up action flick Exiled and the darkly brilliant gangster thrillers Election and Election 2. PTU was released a few years before those films, in 2003, after being shot piecemeal over a three-year period (and apparently without a finished script).
The story is kind of a riff on Akira Kurosawa’s classic Stray Dog, about a police officer who loses his gun. Here, a bumbling, vaguely shady cop (the great character actor and Johnnie To regular Lam Suet) loses his piece while chasing down some punks, and it falls to the head of the Police Tactical Unit (Hong Kong cinema icon Simon Yam, another of To’s regular players) to find it before their superiors find out, and the whole film is set over the course of one night.
The result is a dark – and sometimes darkly funny – jaunt through Hong Kong’s
mean streets. Yam and the rest of his unit’s dogged determination to track down the missing gun by any means necessary sets off a gradually escalating cycle of violence that culminates in a Reservoir Dogs-esque standoff, but To ups the ante by involving about a dozen characters instead of four. Virtually from the start, PTU establishes Yam’s unit leader as a cop who’s not just willing to venture into the grey areas of law enforcement, he goes considerably further, slapping suspects around to get answers, and watching calmly as one of his men beats an informant with his boot until he requires CPR to be revived.
To call PTU morally ambiguous would be an understatement; I was a full hour into the film’s 85-minute running time when it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea who I was supposed to be rooting for. The obnoxious, seemingly dull-witted cop who started all this by losing his gun? The PTU leader who’s all too ready to terrorize informants to get information? The ball-busting ice-queen CID agent following the other two around? None could be described as likeable, but all three are interesting characters. Not that I need to like characters in order to like a film; some of my favourite movies feature misanthropes of various stripes as protagonists, including other Johnnie To movies. But with PTU, as much as it’s engaging to watch the characters do their respective things, I could never quite figure out why I was supposed to care about this cop getting his gun back. It serves as a nice fulcrum for the plot, sure, but I wasn’t able to connect in any real way with any of the characters, which could be accounted for by the lack of a proper screenplay.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything to recommend about PTU; quite the contrary. Johnnie To is a brilliant craftsman, easily head and shoulders above anyone else in Hong Kong right now, visually and stylistically. Like many of To’s gangster movies, there are several sequences in PTU with no dialogue, and he proves that actors’ facial expressions, body language, lighting and shot-framing can do just as much, if not more, than dialogue to convey emotion. There are several long, single-shot takes in which To seems to be riffing on American masters like Scorcese, Tarantino and P.T. Anderson, but he never rubs his cleverness in the viewer’s face.
The proceedings in PTU can get quite violent at times, and as with many of the great gangster filmmakers, To skilfully juxtaposes flashes of humour to offset the sometimes alarming brutality. The climactic shootout gets pretty bloody, not quite reaching Wild Bunch levels, but the Peckinpah influence is hard to ignore. And it’s followed by a minor twist ending that’ll either be seen as clever or frustrating, depending on one’s view (I went with the former).
Overall, PTU is a solid cops-and-robbers flick, not Johnnie To’s best – I’d recommend the aforementioned “three E” movies, Election, Election 2 and Exiled for top-shelf To – but it’s still one of the most interesting films of its kind I’ve seen since The Departed.
Grade: B
The Extras
Commentary with Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan, who does commentary on many of the Dragon Dynasty movies. Logan unspools lots of fun facts, though he also has an unfortunate tendency to just explain what’s happening onscreen (breaking Rule No. 1 for audio commentaries). But he definitely knows his stuff, giving insane amounts of biographical information about just about every actor who passes through the frame, as well as trivia about many of the locations. Overall it’s a fun, informative track from a guy who’s forgotten more
about HK cinema than most people will ever know, but it may be a little too inside-baseball for more casual viewers.
There are also interviews with actors Simon Yam and Maggie Siu, as well as director Johnnie To. The Yam interview runs about 20 minutes, the Siu and To interviews about 13 apiece. It’s pretty standard interview fare, and like the commentary track, is probably geared more towards HK cinema fans – I personally enjoyed the Simon Yam interview because I’ve been a fan of his (a Yam fan?) for years, and I dug the Johnnie To segment because I don’t think I’d ever seen so much as a picture of the guy before watching it.
Rounding out the extras is a trailer gallery with ads for other Dragon Dynasty titles.
Released through The Weinstein Company’s Dragon Dynasty label, which specializes in Asian cinema, PTU is an urban crime thriller from director Johnnie To, one of the most exciting and prolific directors working in Hong Kong today. He seems to release about a half-dozen films every year (I may be exaggerating), with the standouts being, for me, his recent shoot-‘em-up action flick Exiled and the darkly brilliant gangster thrillers Election and Election 2. PTU was released a few years before those films, in 2003, after being shot piecemeal over a three-year period (and apparently without a finished script).
The story is kind of a riff on Akira Kurosawa’s classic Stray Dog, about a police officer who loses his gun. Here, a bumbling, vaguely shady cop (the great character actor and Johnnie To regular Lam Suet) loses his piece while chasing down some punks, and it falls to the head of the Police Tactical Unit (Hong Kong cinema icon Simon Yam, another of To’s regular players) to find it before their superiors find out, and the whole film is set over the course of one night.
The result is a dark – and sometimes darkly funny – jaunt through Hong Kong’s
mean streets. Yam and the rest of his unit’s dogged determination to track down the missing gun by any means necessary sets off a gradually escalating cycle of violence that culminates in a Reservoir Dogs-esque standoff, but To ups the ante by involving about a dozen characters instead of four. Virtually from the start, PTU establishes Yam’s unit leader as a cop who’s not just willing to venture into the grey areas of law enforcement, he goes considerably further, slapping suspects around to get answers, and watching calmly as one of his men beats an informant with his boot until he requires CPR to be revived.To call PTU morally ambiguous would be an understatement; I was a full hour into the film’s 85-minute running time when it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea who I was supposed to be rooting for. The obnoxious, seemingly dull-witted cop who started all this by losing his gun? The PTU leader who’s all too ready to terrorize informants to get information? The ball-busting ice-queen CID agent following the other two around? None could be described as likeable, but all three are interesting characters. Not that I need to like characters in order to like a film; some of my favourite movies feature misanthropes of various stripes as protagonists, including other Johnnie To movies. But with PTU, as much as it’s engaging to watch the characters do their respective things, I could never quite figure out why I was supposed to care about this cop getting his gun back. It serves as a nice fulcrum for the plot, sure, but I wasn’t able to connect in any real way with any of the characters, which could be accounted for by the lack of a proper screenplay.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything to recommend about PTU; quite the contrary. Johnnie To is a brilliant craftsman, easily head and shoulders above anyone else in Hong Kong right now, visually and stylistically. Like many of To’s gangster movies, there are several sequences in PTU with no dialogue, and he proves that actors’ facial expressions, body language, lighting and shot-framing can do just as much, if not more, than dialogue to convey emotion. There are several long, single-shot takes in which To seems to be riffing on American masters like Scorcese, Tarantino and P.T. Anderson, but he never rubs his cleverness in the viewer’s face.
The proceedings in PTU can get quite violent at times, and as with many of the great gangster filmmakers, To skilfully juxtaposes flashes of humour to offset the sometimes alarming brutality. The climactic shootout gets pretty bloody, not quite reaching Wild Bunch levels, but the Peckinpah influence is hard to ignore. And it’s followed by a minor twist ending that’ll either be seen as clever or frustrating, depending on one’s view (I went with the former).
Overall, PTU is a solid cops-and-robbers flick, not Johnnie To’s best – I’d recommend the aforementioned “three E” movies, Election, Election 2 and Exiled for top-shelf To – but it’s still one of the most interesting films of its kind I’ve seen since The Departed.
Grade: B
The Extras
Commentary with Hong Kong film expert Bey Logan, who does commentary on many of the Dragon Dynasty movies. Logan unspools lots of fun facts, though he also has an unfortunate tendency to just explain what’s happening onscreen (breaking Rule No. 1 for audio commentaries). But he definitely knows his stuff, giving insane amounts of biographical information about just about every actor who passes through the frame, as well as trivia about many of the locations. Overall it’s a fun, informative track from a guy who’s forgotten more
about HK cinema than most people will ever know, but it may be a little too inside-baseball for more casual viewers.There are also interviews with actors Simon Yam and Maggie Siu, as well as director Johnnie To. The Yam interview runs about 20 minutes, the Siu and To interviews about 13 apiece. It’s pretty standard interview fare, and like the commentary track, is probably geared more towards HK cinema fans – I personally enjoyed the Simon Yam interview because I’ve been a fan of his (a Yam fan?) for years, and I dug the Johnnie To segment because I don’t think I’d ever seen so much as a picture of the guy before watching it.
Rounding out the extras is a trailer gallery with ads for other Dragon Dynasty titles.
Labels: Asian cinema, Dragon Dynasty, DVD review, Johnnie To
¶ 7:31 AM 0 Comments
