Hong Kong Cinema

[Michael Kerpan]

TWBB -- JT and Ann Hui are my top HK directors (and it isn't even close).

Throw Down is great -- but I haven' seen Sparrow seen it was new and need to visit it.

[therewillbeblus]

Throw Down was my first To and the one I’d say most approaches greatness. Thoughts from the MoC thread:

I've never seen a To film before, but this was a surprisingly stunning mood piece. To creates a distinct world compared to other martial arts films but where the air the characters breathe is fighting as a way to actualize their identities and participate in the world. The drama is felt with all the intense cinematic devices (is that Lion King's score?), yet there is an ethereal quality to it all despite the content and extreme uses of non-diegetic sound and flashy camerawork. All the characters really have their moments of stewing in emotion, but fighting, and in particular sensorimotor stimuli- often visual- is critical to their confidence, which is allotted so much more value than most films give it, and To isn't afraid to suggest how important self-gratification is to people. colin's spoiler highlights the importance for a particular character to hang on to all he can, however it's important to note how this isn't about selfish confidence like many martial arts films. Fighting is a tool, a language, to engage with others. There is so much pleasure in two men fighting that even if one loses (pride and money!) they rejoice in respect of the encounter. It's a philosophy and a form of self-expression, and honestly reminded me more of a musical than a martial arts or dramatic action film. I'm not sure if that's been mentioned before, or if this is an outlier in his filmography, but I'm sold on checking out more.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Reminder guys that voting ends today at 11:59 EST so if you want to submit a ballot, please do so before the deadline tonight because so I can submit the results around Christmas time.

[Lowry_Sam]

TWBB -- JT and Ann Hui are my top HK directors (and it isn't even close).

AH & WKW are my favorites, though I haven't seen any of Hui's action films (could be an interesting box for a boutique perhaps) and don't care much for what I've seen from Kar-Wai after 2046.

[Michael Kerpan]

Hui's Romance of Book and Sword (a two-parter) shows signs here and there of being made on a tiny budget -- but it is one of my favorite wuxia films (and maybe the only one with a significant female perspective). Alas, no modern subbed release. There was a DVD release 20 or so years ago that was already out of print by the time I tried to buy it -- so I had to be satisfied (as much as possible) with the VCD version. Very disappointing that neither this nor most of her work is currently available.

[Lowry_Sam]

Very disappointing that neither this nor most of her work is currently available.

Particularly from Criterion. They released Boat People and then nothing else. Meanwhile since that release they've been raising the profile of female directors and HK film both on disc & on the channel....and still no more Hui, a significant portion of which has never been released in Region 1/A. Hui has even travelled to the US (I saw her in a Q&A at the San Jose Film Festival several years ago) as she has a sister in California, so it's not like she's completely inaccessible.

[TechnicolorAcid]

The ‘Made in China’ List



The List Proper:
1. Raise the Red Lantern - 142
2. The Killer - 133
3. In the Mood for Love - 127
4. Yi Yi - 103
5. Chungking Express - 96
6. Farewell, My Concubine - 94
7. Boat People - 93
8. Fallen Angels - 92
9. The Hole - 89
10. To Live - 82
11. (Tie) The Goddess - 81
The Story of Qiu Ju - 81
13. Happy Together - 80
14. Hero - 72
15. (Tie) Exiled - 69
Temptress Moon - 69
17. City of Sadness - 68
18. Yellow Earth - 67
19. Goodbye, Dragon Inn - 66
20. The World - 64
21. What Time Is It There? - 58
22. The Wayward Cloud - 55
23. The Blue Kite - 51
24. Blind Shaft - 50
25. Springtime in a Small Town - 47
26. City on Fire - 45
27. Three Times - 31

Orphans:
Peking Opera Blues - 50
King of the Children - 50
Flowers of Shanghai - 50
The Legend of Tianyun Mountain - 50
Comrades: Almost a Love Story - 49
Raining in the Mountain - 49
Black Coal, Thin Ice - 48
The Big Road - 48
The Sword - 48
Spring Fever - 47
Along the Sungari River - 46
Center Stage - 46
My Heart Is That Eternal Rose - 46
School on Fire - 45
Moses on the Plain - 45
Eighteen Springs - 44
The Wedding Banquet - 44
Made in Hong Kong - 44
Not One Less - 44
That Day, on the Beach - 43
Song of the Exile - 43
Blind Massage - 42
Rouge - 42
Swordsman 2 - 42
Ash Is the Purest White - 41
The One-Armed Swordsman - 41
Still Life - 41
Spacked Out - 41
Help Me Eros - 40
An Autumn’s Tale - 40
Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind - 40
The Wild Goose Lake - 39
Internal Affairs - 39
The Wild, Wild Rose - 39
When the Bough Breaks - 38
Street Angel - 38
Days of Being Wild - 37
Beijing Bicycle - 37
Suzhou River - 37
8 Diagram Pole Fighter - 37
Goodbye South Goodbye - 36
July Rhapsody - 36
The Miracle Fighters - 36
As Tears Go By - 35
Days - 35
Summer Palace - 35
Day Is Done - 34
Tharlo - 34
Cannot Live Without You - 33
Spring in Autumn - 32
Kung Fu Hustle - 32
Ju Dou - 31
Dying to Survive - 30
Postmen in the Mountain - 30
House of Flying Daggers - 30
Only the River Flows - 29
Red Cherry - 29
Limbo - 28
24 City - 28
Girls Always Happy - 27
Swordsmen in Double Flag Town - 27
Lan Yu - 27
Mr. Six - 26
Not One Less - 26
Dying to Survive - 26
Aftershock - 25
Platform - 25
A Brighter Summer Day - 25
The River - 24
Mystery - 24
Plastic Summer - 24
Beautiful Duckling - 23
Up the Yangtze - 23
Sacrificed Youth - 22
Crossing the Mountain - 22
Millennium Mambo - 22
Red Sorghum - 21
The Promise - 21
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan - 20
A Simple Life - 20
Blue Gate Crossing - 19
The Arch - 19
Terrorizers - 18
Riding Alone for 1000 Liu - 17
Still Life - 17
All Tomorrow’s Parties - 16
Shanghai Blues - 16
Saturday Fiction - 15
Come Drink with Me - 15
2046 - 14
The Winter - 14
An Orphan on the Streets - 13
Ashes of Time - 12
The Story of a Discharged Prisoner - 12
The Horse Thief - 11
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin - 11
A Sun - 10
Five Fingers of Death - 9
Story of Mother - 8
Hill of No Return - 5
Eat Drink Man Woman - 3
The Herdsman - 2
The Spring River Flows East - 1

[Finch]

I rewatched Fearless again after many years and I was actually quite disappointed in it. I don't think the Director's Cut really fixes my main issue with the film which is the piousness that also drags down Fist of Legend but that film is better paced and put together by Gordon Chan than Ronny Yu's handling of this material. Outside of the honorable Japanese fighter, all opponents, especially the Western ones, are broad stereotypes. The middle section of the film where Li withdraws from the province and is humbled and rejuvenated by village life is too long and idealistic in its portrayal of the farmers. The film's best scene is the set piece that closes the first act where Li and the other Master fight each other first with swords than in hand to hand combat and it's fairly vicious. I would probably go with Unleashed/Danny the Dog as the last genuinely good film Li made even if in itself it's not in the same class as the first Once Upon A Time In China and Fong Sai-Yuk films and Tai Chi Master.

[thirtyframesasecond]

The #1 was my #1 - shame there was no love for Stanley Kwan. I voted for Center Stage and Rouge.

[TechnicolorAcid]

The #1 was my #1 - shame there was no love for Stanley Kwan. I voted for Center Stage and Rouge.

I think that’s probably just because there was an embarrassingly low number of voters who pitched in although perhaps if enough people spoke about wanting to submit their own lists than I reopen voting for an extra week.

[therewillbeblus]

I didn't participate, but would've voted for the following orphans:

Peking Opera Blues
My Heart Is That Eternal Rose
That Day, on the Beach
Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind
A Brighter Summer Day
Terrorizers
Shanghai Blues

And if there was room,

Raining in the Mountain
The Wild Goose Lake
Come Drink with Me
2046

[Mr Sausage]

Huh. I didn't realize the results had been posted. Didn't come up in Unread Posts for some reason.

Here's my list, nearly all of them orphans:

1. Peking Opera Blues
2. Raining in the Mountain
3. The Sword
4. The Killer
5. My Heart is that Eternal Rose
6. School on Fire
7. Made in Hong Kong
8. Song of the Exile
9. Swordsman 2
10. Spacked Out
11. Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind
12. City on Fire
13. Exiled
14. 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
15. The Miracle Fighters

[thirtyframesasecond]

The #1 was my #1 - shame there was no love for Stanley Kwan. I voted for Center Stage and Rouge.

I think that’s probably just because there was an embarrassingly low number of voters who pitched in although perhaps if enough people spoke about wanting to submit their own lists than I reopen voting for an extra week.

Thanks for organising the poll. My full list was made up of a small number of directors, unfortunately.

1. Raise the Red Lantern
2. Temptress Moon
3. In the Mood for Love
4. Farewell, My Concubine
5. Center Stage / Actress
6. Goddess
7. Yellow Earth
8. The Hole
9. Rouge
10. Still Life
11. Springtime in a Small Town
12. The Killer
13. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
14. Suzhou River
15. City of Sadness
16. Summer Palace
17. Yi Yi
18. The World
19. Chungking Express
20. Hero
21. House of Flying Daggers
22. The Wayward Cloud
23. 24 City
24. Three Times
25. Not One Less

[Mr Sausage]

I've merged the Made-In-China List thread with this one, so discussion isn't split up around the forum.

[Maltic]

I saw the announcement that the poll would go ahead and then missed out on the thread entirely (perhaps I'm still not at home in the new forum skin).

Anyway, I would have voted:

1 Bullet in the Head
2 Chungking Express
3 The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
4 Wheels on Meals
5 Shanghai Blues
6 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
7 A Touch of Zen
8 Crippled Avengers
9 Nomad
10 PTU

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I didn't see the original list thread—I assume it was in the Lists subforum, which I almost never see since I mostly lurk and my browsers never keep me logged in. Dunno what the parameters were so I just made a top 30, though anything beyond the top four shouldn't be treated as a terribly solid ranking. Hong Kong cinema isn't my thing so it isn't much represented, and pre-1980s Chinese cinema is still a huge blind spot of mine (but The Goddess, Scenes of City Life, and Stage Sisters wouldn't be too far outside the top 30).

1. Platform (Jia Zhangke)
2. Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. King of the Children (Chen Kaige)
4. Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Wu Wenguang)
5. South of the Clouds (Zhu Wen)
6. Le Moulin (Huang Ya-li)
7. A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong)
8. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
9. Karamay (Xu Xin)
10. Life (Wu Tianming)
11. The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang)
12. China Behind (Tang Shu-shuen)
13. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke)
14. Man in Black (Wang Bing)
15. Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai)
16. A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang)
17. Dead Souls (Wang Bing)
18. The Black Cannon Incident (Huang Jianxin)
19. The Grandmaster [130-minute version] (Wong Kar-wai)
20. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
21. Mr. Zhang Believes [short version] (Qiu Jiongjiong)
22. Troubled Laughter (Yang Yanjin and Deng Yimin)
23. The The [166-minute version] (Li Hongqi)
24. Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts (Rong Guang Rong)
25. Mr. No Problem (Mei Feng)
26. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu)
27. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)
28. Nomad (Patrick Tam)
29. Decameron (Rita Hui Nga Shu)
30. Emperor Visits the Hell (Luo Li)

[Mr Sausage]

Red Dust (Yim Ho, 1990)

A sprawling three-hour historical epic, told at double speed, where sexual and artistic desires intermix with historical and political realities in the lives of characters whose inwardness is hard to penetrate. The speed and bravura of wuxia-style storytelling applied to the historical epic, with all that implies for the energy and coherence of the movie (it's 180 minutes compressed to 90). Despite the muscular storytelling across scenes, the style within scenes is delicate and sophisticated, conveying domestic realities and the subtleties of personal interactions in a way that reminded me of Ann Hui, especially Love in a Fallen City. I don’t think this is actually an Eileen Chang adaptation, but it seems diffusely inspired by her life and her fiction, and follows Hui’s film in contrasting the self-absorption of a passionate couple with the turmoil raging around them. Hui, sadly, had a firmer grasp of her material, as Yim’s movie is often overheated enough to count as melodrama. Hong Kong films will often set artistic ambitions alongside crude populism, but the result here, given the weight and realism of the historical material, is a lingering sense of inauthenticity. The central lovers, Brigitte Lin and Ronald Chin, are in a relationship with its own dubious authenticity. She’s a writer who’s only ever half present, often investing her immediate surroundings with intricate dream scenarios (shown without transition so that Lin’s artistic and social worlds are difficult to extricate); he’s a Japanese collaborator during the occupation who sees no contradiction in helping individual Chinese citizens during the turmoil while selling out his countrymen more widely. He and Lin have a torrid affair in which neither seems especially concerned with the other’s dual nature nor the ethical quagmire of their affair. They carry on as tho’ the occupation and insurgency are inconveniences. When Lin’s friend, Maggie Cheung, arrives to visit, she’s the only one appalled and terrified at the situation, and her reaction throws the couple’s obliviousness into relief. Given this mixture of history and self-absorption, the film needs to hold some kind of distance towards its material to work, and earnest melodrama is inappropriate for that. In using melodrama to invest the audience in its central pair, the movie participates in the self-absorption it purports to examine, setting its very real historical moments uncomfortably next to contrivance and fakery. It makes it difficult to assess Lin’s artistry, too, as it presents her as a great writer and often mixes the world with her imagination—and yet so much of the film’s own storytelling mood has a conventional lack of believably. Is this fakeness Lin’s or the movie’s? That the question doesn’t feel important speaks to the film’s lack of balance. So there’s a lot here that’s not successful or satisfying, but the filmmaking is strong enough to offer many fine scenes. Lin and Cheung are terrific: Lin is dreamy, internalized, and abstract, while Cheung is boisterous and engaged, but with an undercurrent of naivety. Indeed their relationship in the movie is so intense it dwarfs the central romantic coupling (partly because Cheung is a vastly more charismatic performer than Ronald Chin), and suggests the filmmakers have submerged queer intentions for the pair. Cheung’s final scene in the movie is its best, a beautiful, otherworldly exit that’s very unlike what you tend to see in movies like this, deftly handling an ambiguous mood somewhere between imaginative intuition and metaphysical sensitivity. The whole scene beguiled me. The film’s use of light surrealist or fantasist moods is its best element, which is odd considering I’ve been criticizing the movie for its artificiality; but I think this artificiality has distance baked into it, while the over-egged melodrama collapses audience/character distance when those characters cannot (should not) be identified with. The film is not in control of its tone or storytelling enough to become the kind of thing it wants to be, but fascinates nonetheless.


An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty (Eddie Fong, 1984)

An unusual Shaw Brothers movie: an erotic historical drama about a Tang woman, a writer and high society bon vivant, who pursues her pleasures in a time of war and strife. While this is a very erotic film, and contains a lot of material that would seem like cheap thrills if merely described, the thing is erotic in a serious manner, using eroticism and other boundary-pushing material to explore ideas of freedom and engage in social criticism. An unrestrained exploration of queer sexualities, gender bending, and female liberation/equality. Yu Yuan-Gi (Pat Ha) seduces men and women, wears male and female clothes, indulges in feminine activities like flower gathering and male pursuits like sports, experiences the delicacies of court life and the roughness of war, indulges in pleasure and purifies herself in asceticism, triumphs in her individualism and throws herself into charity, and ultimately gives herself to freedom so unrestrainedly that she won’t let people freely choose conventionality. She inhabits contraries. Her hedonism, like her literary pursuits, is inextricable from her need for self determination. This need can’t find expression in social institutions, like the taoist temple she repeatedly joins and leaves, and the movie represents this formally by refusing to give shape to her life with a conventional story. We move abruptly between scenes, each one connected by theme and repetition rather than narrative teleology. The result is a continuous present rather than a progressive development across time, a portrait of a character born anew with each shift in desire, sloughing off the past in an instant to embrace a new lifestyle and a new selfhood. That she meets a lover with the same abrupt mutability and can’t appreciate it is one of the movie’s several ironies. Despite the abrupt elliptical editing between scenes, this is a medium-paced film, without the flying heedlessness of HK filmmaking in this period. Even more unusually for a Shaw Brothers movie, the fights are sparing, and lack the intricate choreography that was Shaw’s house style, going instead for something more chaotic and animalistic. These spurts of animalistic violence are odd counterpoints to the sumptuous beauty of the production design, costuming, and photography, and to the careful, controlled direction. Their intrusions form an expressive recapitulation of the heroine’s changeable nature. This really is a singular movie in Shaw’s repertoire. The only thing I can compare it to is Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, which also explored queer sexualities with an openness that was sophisticated and adult, tho’ it fit that within a more conventional plot. The ending of Amorous Woman does veer into conventional moralism, the indulgence producing corruption and death, but finds an end worthy of its unconventional heroine, with an audacious final flourish. An unusual, convention-defying movie like this is worth celebrating.


Out of the Dark (Jeffrey Lau, 1995)

It tickles me that after he stopped working with him, Jeff Lau spent basically the entire rest of his career making fun of his friend Wong Kar-Wai. This crazed supernatural splatter comedy is, among other things, an extended parody of Chungkung Express in specific and Wong’s style in general. It’s also for some reason a parody of Luc Besson’s The Professional. Stephen Chow is a mental patient specializing in ghost removal who helps the residents of a haunted highrise. I say ‘help’, but really he makes everything ten times worse. It’s Jeff Lau, so the film fairly hurtles, and the absurdity pushes past all boundaries, but it’s painfully unfunny (and depends for its humour on an astonishing amount of physical cruelty). Terrible, but...also worth witnessing?


A Moment of Romance (Benny Chan, 1990)

Forget Fenell’s "Wuthering Heights"--this is the ultimate teenage girl’s vision of romance, a wild, overblown love story between a getaway driver and the girl he takes hostage to escape the police, set in rain-soaked neon and scored with dreamy synth pop like some violent urban fairy tale. Schoolgirls whisked off on motorcycles by the local collar popping, cigarette smoking bad boy, sharing slow motion embraces in front of billowing orange flames. Passion and sexiness, danger and blocking figures, but no adult sexuality intruding on the fairy tale. The irresponsible dream of an immature and energetic psyche, and I mean that as praise. A movie that’s nothing but style, cool, and emotional excess. The story is by Ringo Lam, who produced alongside Johnnie To. Did To ghost direct any of this?


He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (Peter Chan, 1994)

Twelfth Night in 90s Hong Kong. A woman (Anita Yuen) obsessed with a big pop star (Carina Lau) tries to meet her idol at an open audition while disguised as a man and ends up being signed by the pop star’s producer/boyfriend (Leslie Cheung), where they begin to fall in love to Cheung's endless gay panic. I watched this mainly because Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen had such chemistry in A Chinese Feast, hoping for more of the same. A gentler and more progressive queer-coded comedy than you’d expect from 90s Hong Kong. I mean, yes, the closeted man finds out his queer crush is secretly a girl after all, so the ‘I don’t care what gender you are I just love you!’ is toothless, and conventional morality gets satisfied. But knowing Leslie Cheung would himself come out a few years after this gives a weight and charm to his character’s uncertain sexuality.


Peacock King (Lam Nai-Choi, 1988)

An effects driven creature feature from the director of the Cat III gore fests Riki-Oh and The Seventh Curse (with, of all people, Takashi Miike as assistant director). This one’s more pitched at a general audience, so less gore and sleaze, but still plenty of gonzo magic and creature work. It often has an old school Ray Harryhausen, 7th Voyage of Sindbad feel to it, mainly from all the stop motion and process shots of small people fighting giant creatures. The plot is over complicated and over simple at the same time. There’s this vast context of spirits, demons, and the men who fight them that gets the briefest of explanations despite so much depending on it, yet the plot itself is only about two evil demons trying to open the five portals to hell across Asia (mainly Japan and HK) while Yuen Biao and co. fight them. There are five credited screenwriters, including the writer of the original manga series, and none of them were able to bring any coherence to the movie. Stuff just kinda happens. It’s an SFX extravaganza—you watch it for the set pieces. They get pretty wild, especially when demons are turning into bizarre monstrosities with bifurcated faces and extend-o claws. Oh, and Ken Ogata is in this! Between that and Tatsuya Nakadai in Wicked City...well, what is it with legendary Japanese stars showing up in bizarre Hong Kong monster movies? Is it like all those old school Hollywood stars in Italian giallos and gore films?

[Mr Sausage]

License to Steal (Billy Chan, 1990)

A frenetic cops and robbers action movie whose plot is best described as mush. I wrote a precis of the premise and it took 100 words. There are four separate heroes from three separate plots, but at least there’s only a single villain. All you need to know: Joyce Godenzi, Collin Chou, and Yuen Biao are fronting the action, Richard Ng is bringing the comedy, and the thing moves at a good clip. Like She Shoots Straight, this was a Sammo Hung production meant to show the skills of his future wife, Godenzi, only this time directed by one of his stunt team members instead of fellow Seven Little Fortune member Corey Yuen (who cameos here). It’s less set piece focused than She Shoots Straight, preferring a stream of action; but if the action scenes come more frequently, they never reach the brilliance of that earlier movie. A fun bout of second-string action nonsense.


The Bodyguard (Sammo Hung, 2016)

Hung’s first directorial effort since 1997’s Once Upon a Time in China and America. It’s about age, failure, and redemption. Hung’s movies never centred his fatness, except as a surprise for how fleet he was. This is the first time his obesity is a point of weakness, along with stiff joints and a failing memory. Hung is old, and if you’ve been watching him since childhood, it’s moving to see him hobble past the camera. He’s a former Red Army officer and bodyguard who lost his granddaughter at some point in the past while he was supposed to be watching her. Now in retirement, he develops a friendship with the young daughter of his hoodlum neighbour. When she’s kidnapped, he goes into action one more time. Because of Hung’s limited mobility, he’s forced to use aikido joint locks and short wing chun movements. There are plenty of cliches and a certain amount of sentimental cheese, but it’s the sadness that Hung brings to the story that lingers and which helps carry it along. Unlike a typical Hollywood rendition of this basic story, there is no sense of recovered masculinity, nor a conservative nostalgia for an older generation coming out of senescence to show the youngsters how it’s done. Hung’s character doesn’t seek grandeur; at most what’s available is redemption for the failures of an unhappy life, tho’ Hung’s sure he doesn’t deserve it, and otherwise carries himself as someone just muddling through. His triumphant last battle leaves him so hobbled and exhausted he can’t actually succeed at his mission the way he needs to, and the plot technically makes his involvement in the climax unnecessary on a couple of levels. Looking back, whatever redemption Hung achieves--and it is a very qualified redemption--is the result of his kindness during the first two thirds, not the violence the film has been building towards. For an outwardly happy movie, this is also a deeply sad, even tragic one. The movie has many of the same good qualities that would make Logan so successful a year later—an old hero crippled and degraded by age, but still capable of something, even if it ultimately isn’t quite enough. This is a much richer movie than its sentimental story would suggest. There are a number of quick cameos from old compatriots: fellow Seven Little Fortunes Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah as a police officer and a mailman, respectively, and former Cinema City bigwigs Tsui Hark, Karl Maka, and Dean Shek as three old men on a bench.


Kung Fu Jungle (Teddy Chan Tak-Sum, 2014)

A martial arts serial killer is targeting champion fighters, and the police turn to Donnie Yen, imprisoned for beating a man to death, to be their Hannibal Lecter. The plot is ludicrous, something the serious tone, as tho’ it intends to be a genuine Thomas Harris-esque thriller, does nothing to hide. Like most Donnie Yen films from this period, the action is intricate, visceral, and bone crunching. I was mostly tired with the story, but endlessly thrilled by the action. Typical late Donnie Yen. The movie also has an extensive list of cameos from old timers and notable actors that get their own special “dedicated to” credits before the main credits proper, and in general the film pays homage to the HK kung fu film tradition (plenty of old posters and film clips are scattered throughout the movie). No idea why--the plot, themes, and style have nothing really to do with old school kung fu beyond being in the same overall genre. You’d think this was meant to be a homage or something.


The Victim (Sammo Hung, 1980)

Another Sammo Hung film to use rape as a plot point. Leung Kar-Yan’s elder brother tries to rape his bride on their wedding night, he flees with his wife, and his brother’s thugs pursue him across the country. What elevates the movie, what brings that Sammo difference, is that this serious traditional Kung Fu plot is intruded on by the Sammo character, like he bumbles into a Shaw Brothers plot or something. He’s a goof with amazing kung fu on the lookout for a man better than him to be his master. He bumbles into Leung Kar-Yan, is defeated, then spends the movie trying to convince the harried, irascible fugitive to be his master. Hung’s a destabilizing but vivifying element, and he brings out the comedy and invention, turning what should’ve been only a mean-spirited action flick into something more joyous. That said, a series of last minute twists takes the movie into shockingly dark territory (shades of Pedicab Driver in the wild tonal swings). This is pre-Project A, so it’s a traditional basher without the elaborate stunt work mixed in, but the fight scenes are astonishing in their complexity and their humour. The film is a showcase for Leung Kar-Yan’s incredible fighting skills, and of course Sammo plays the fat man who shouldn’t be so athletic. I still think Enter the Fat Dragon is my favourite early Sammo (maybe my favourite Sammo period), but this is close behind it. A great example of how the early new wave was both perfecting and playing with traditional forms.


Portrait in Crystal (Hua Shan, 1983)

Late period Shaw wizard madness. There’s a certain kind of crystal, so rare and pure, that if you bleed on it while carving it’ll become imbued with a spirit. A master sculptor goes all Pygmalion on his latest work, and from that point on nothing in this movie makes a lick of sense. A parade of insanity growing from a plot both prolix and under-explained, capped by an astonishing amount of creative gore and violence. There is no way to predict what’ll happen from moment to moment. Call it cocaine storytelling: manic, incomprehensible energy; everything done twice as fast as it should be, without pause or motive. Movement for the sake of movement. Glorious.


The Lady Assassin (Tony Lou Chun-Ku, 1983)

A complicated story of love, power, loyalty, succession, conspiracy, and murder. The fourth prince schemes to become emperor when it appears the fourteenth prince will become heir. He hires a great fighter, leagues himself with Han resistance fighters, and plots his ascension. Meanwhile, the fourteenth prince’s elite bodyguard falls in love with the daughter of the Han resistance leader. Weirdly, the villain ends up as the main character just by virtue of the movie having too many heroes with separate plots for any of them to get comparable focus. You spend so much time exploring the villain's desires and motivations that you often forget he's a real bastard. I enjoyed the movements of its extravagant plot and its furious action. This isn’t a wild, incoherent fantasy wuxia like Lou’s Holy Flame of the Martial World from the same year, more a tale of court intrigue among powerful fighters in the Qing dynasty, done with remarkable speed and economy (and just a bit of anti-Japanese racism). And its climax builds to one of the most frenzied, astonishing things I’ve seen in action cinema, comparable to the climax of Duel to the Death.