BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

Discuss releases by Eureka and Masters of Cinema and the films on them.
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Apperson
Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2016 3:47 pm
Location: Oxfordshire, UK

BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#1 Post by Apperson » Thu Jul 02, 2020 10:07 am

Made in Hong Kong

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Released to critical acclaim in 1997, the year of the Hong Kong handover, Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong was praised as an anarchic masterpiece, a powerful distillation of urban alienation and youthful despair.

Moon (Sam Lee) is a small-time triad, stuck in an endless cycle of pointless violence with no hope of escape. After he and his friends witness the suicide of a young girl, they embark on a journey to deliver two letters she had on her when she died.

Produced on a shoestring budget, with non-professional actors and using discarded film reels for stock, the film was rescued from obscurity and fully restored in 4K in time for its 20th anniversary in 2017, thanks to the Far East Film Festival, in collaboration with Andy Lau's Hong Kong production company, Focus Film.

BLU-RAY EDITION SPECIAL FEATURES:
  • LIMITED EDITION O-CARD SLIPCASE (2000 Copies Only)
  • 1080p presentation on Blu-ray from a 4K digital restoration
  • Uncompressed LPCM 2.0 audio
  • Optional English subtitles
  • New interview with director Fruit Chan
  • New interview with producer Doris Yang
  • New interview with producer Daniel Yu
  • New interview with Marco Muller, former director of the Locarno Film Festival
  • A collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; Fruit Chan’s director’s statement from the film’s original 1997 press release; and an interview with director Fruit Chan from 2017, after the film’s restoration
Last edited by Apperson on Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Drucker
Your Future our Drucker
Joined: Wed May 18, 2011 9:37 am

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#2 Post by Drucker » Thu Jul 02, 2020 10:13 am

Well I know we have a good time making fun of the way some of these descriptions are written, but this one has my interest piqued. Yesterday when it was posted as forthcoming I had no interest, but an anarchic masterpiece of youthful despair is 100% up my alley. Looking forward to it!

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Apperson
Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2016 3:47 pm
Location: Oxfordshire, UK

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#3 Post by Apperson » Thu Jul 02, 2020 10:24 am

It was maybe this winter when Eureka licensed this and Throw Down together, and having never heard of it beforehand I became incredibly interested after reading up on it.

I'm glad that Eureka was able to get interviews with the creators and festival head as I know they can't always do that.

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The Elegant Dandy Fop
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 3:25 am
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#4 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Thu Jul 02, 2020 12:31 pm

I remember Fruit Chan being associated with the east Asian cult cinema boom of the early-2000s, but I actually have never seen any of his films. The closest I’ve gotten was watching Sammo Hung’s Dragons Forever, where Fruit Chan (who’s a credited AD), directs a few uncredited scenes. I’ve been curious about this for sometime and will definetely be picking this up.

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#5 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jul 02, 2020 12:39 pm

He is most famous for this film and then the horror film Dumplings, which was initially a segment of the Three...Extremes anthology film (in the company of other segments directed by Takashi Miike and Park Chan-wook) that got expanded out into feature length.

His latest film, The Abortionist looks quite interesting.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:24 pm
Location: Teegeeack

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#6 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Thu Jul 02, 2020 10:40 pm

Chan is an interesting example of a director who embarked on an idiosyncratic independent career after starting out in Hong Kong's commercial sector, but unlike, say, Hu or Wong or To, Chan hadn't managed to establish himself before doing so—his formal directorial debut (Finale in Blood) was shelved for years by Golden Harvest before being dumped in theaters, and his follow-up (Five Lonely Hearts) apparently never got a theatrical release at all. So Chan couldn't draw on decent budgets or big names (though Andy Lau exec-produced Made in Hong Kong) and his early work has a rough-hewn look very different from the more polished Doyle-lensed Dumplings. The late '90s films are shotgun weddings of that style (born of both choice and necessity—the aesthetic of Made in Hong Kong was partially dictated by the use of leftover short ends from other productions, on different film stocks) and Chan's long apprenticeship in HK commercial cinema, producing skewed takes on mainstream genres and motifs. This one is kind of a Triad movie, perhaps taking some inspiration from the Young and Dangerous series, but shown through the eyes of a desperate and frankly pathetic entry-level thug who's never going to amount to anything more than that; the soldiers-turned-bank robbers in Chan's next film The Longest Summer don't cut any more of an impressive figure. Little Cheung and especially Durian Durian are more staid, and the latter suggests Chan was watching a lot of Sixth Generation work at the time. But Hollywood Hong Kong and Public Toilet swung hard to the opposite extreme, with an unapologetic grubbiness (early-aughts DV crap-o-vision was rarely more apt than in Public Toilet) that coveys the glee of someone who thinks they're getting away with something, while adding some of the arty grace notes of Chan's earlier work to the mix of vulgarity and sentimentality that characterizes a lot more mainstream Hong Kong comedy.

I don't think as much of Chan's later work; Kill Time (his attempt at a mainstream, mainland-targeted feature) is ugly in a bland, mid-budget-TV-drama way, occasionally incoherent, and badly miscast (sorry, Angelababy, but no). It deserves brownie points for attempting a ghost story that also incorporates the Cultural Revolution, two things that on their own are usually red flags for the censors and probably contributed to the sense that whatever Chan was going for didn't survive the edit. He also did a mainstream martial-arts movie with Max Zhang (The Grandmaster, Ip Man 3) that was an across-the-board flop but sounds like it has guilty pleasure potential. After that he did another sharp right turn: Three Husbands self-consciously revisits the themes and style of his turn-of-the-century work, but it's so insistent on the national-allegory aspect that Chan was formerly content to leave as subtext that it descends into blunt-force grotesqueries with the thin justification of metaphor, andwithout room for the deft juggling of styles and moods he was able to pull off back then. The Midnight After has a similarly in-your-face state-of-the-city metaphor, but manages the balancing act better and has an almost poignantly self-effacing quality to it, like it knows it doesn't matter, but we're all stuck here so may as well do it anyway. Looking around today, I'm not sure that wasn't prophetic. But his best recent work is probably My City, a documentary about Hong Kong "grassroots" author Xi Xi that uses her and her stories as a jumping-off point for a social portrai that emphasizes resilience and renewal over nostalgia and lament.

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Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#7 Post by Adam X » Tue Jul 07, 2020 2:56 am

This will finally, maybe, help settle a memory of have of seeing a Fruit Chan film featuring a guy with
SpoilerShow
a hole in his cheek (that I think the camera films through at one point) that is later revealed to've come from a gunshot wound.
Local TV station, SBS, showed 2 or 3 of his films in the late '90's/early 2000's, and I've got them all mixed up in my memory. I'm guessing the others were The Longest Summer & Durian Durian. Would love to see more of his films released. He's a really interesting director, who seems to've somewhat gotten lost amongst the John Woo's & Wong Kar-Wai's.
Last edited by Adam X on Tue Jul 07, 2020 4:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Location: Teegeeack

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#8 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Jul 07, 2020 3:17 am

Adam Grikepelis wrote:
Tue Jul 07, 2020 2:56 am
This will finally, maybe, help settle a memory of have of seeing a Fruit Chan film featuring a guy with
SpoilerShow
a hole in his cheek (that I think the camera films through at one point) that is later revealed to've come from a gunshot wound.
SpoilerShow
This is The Longest Summer.

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Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#9 Post by Adam X » Tue Jul 07, 2020 4:55 am

I thought it might be. Thanks, mystery solved!

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Finch
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:09 pm
Location: Edinburgh, UK

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#10 Post by Finch » Fri Sep 18, 2020 8:45 pm


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Aunt Peg
Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:30 am

Re: BD 238 Made in Hong Kong

#11 Post by Aunt Peg » Sun Sep 20, 2020 4:56 am

I'm blind buying this based totally on the strength of Fruit Chan's masterwork Dumplings.

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