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camwynAll right, folks, we've done the list of HK movies for the person who's only ever seen Bulletproof Monk. The ones on that list were mostly chosen because they were. . . how do I put this? . . . deal-breakers. If you can't deal with the sparklypinkmonkeycrackitude of Shaolin Soccer, then you shouldn't be watching anything from Stephen Chiau, and you probably won't like a lot of the humorous stuff to come out of HK. If you don't like the over-the-top effects and exaggerated characters of The Storm Riders, then you definitely aren't ready for HK's take on fantasy. And if you don't like Iron Monkey, then I can never talk to you. Okay, that's an exaggeration; if you don't like Iron Monkey then you probably shouldn't trust my recommendations, because our tastes are too fundamentally different for anything I say to be worth your time and effort. (Although you may want to come back when I start reviewing things like serious period dramas, since you might well be the kind to appreciate Atanarjuat, Ashoka, and other movies of that nature.) If you don't go for Legend of Drunken Master, then I very much doubt anything Jackie Chan made, EVER, will appeal to you. You get the idea. . .
On the other hand, once you've watched some of these movies, you'll probably want to see what else there is available. Here's a few of Hong Kong's other movies I can safely recommend as Just Plain Cool.
1. The Killer. An awful lot of people know Chow Yun-Fat from movies like this. The movie's tagline is 'One Vicious Hitman. One Fierce Cop. Ten Thousand Bullets.' Nothing Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone has ever made even comes close to this. We're talking ten-minute firefight scenes in which every stuntman resident on the island of Hong Kong gets killed. Twice. Little to nothing in the way of martial arts, but some of the better character depictions I've seen in gunplay movies, and none of this 'bwahaha, I'm an Evil Terrorist who's out to blow up Nakatomi Tower' crap. Keep your eye on Danny Lee, the cop who's on Chow Yun-Fat's tail; he's played so many policemen in HK movies that actual cops call him 'Officer Lee'. This movie pretty much characterizes the 'heroic bloodshed' subgenre.
Available at Blockbuster in subtitled DVD format. There are people who would suggest you watch Hard Boiled instead of The Killer for your intro to heroic bloodshed, but I've never seen it. Apparently Hard Boiled is out of print, so get your $5 together and mosey on down to the rental place.
2. Once Upon A Time In China. I mentioned this one last time, so it's only fair I mention it now. Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung in the movie that more or less defines the 1850's juncture in Feng Shui. Native Chinese culture - specifically, Cantonese - vs. the rising tide of Westernization, personified in 'Aunt Yee' - the female lead of the movie, who seems to have come back from time abroad having been totally absorbed by the foreigners' culture. For me, at least, the most memorable line of the movie is 'you can't fight bullets with kung fu' - but that's not to say Wong Fei-hung doesn't try! Plenty of fight sequences, wonderful fight sequences mind you, and a few comedy touches, but this is not the face of Wong Fei-hung you get from Jackie Chan. Jet Li's depiction lends the man an amazing dignity (well, by comparison with Jackie, anyway) even when the movie gets painful to watch.
Worth mentioning: there are something like five or six movies in this series, plus an unrelated Wong Fei-hung movie called Deadly China Hero which also stars Jet Li. I've never seen the other Once Upon a Time in China movies, but I have seen Deadly China Hero. Don't bother with it. Not worth your time, not worth your money. This one, however, is fantastic. Also worth mentioning is the running joke of the movie - no one seems to be able to get a picture of Wong Fei-hung - and the Aunt Yee thing. No one can get Jet's picture in this movie, by photographic means or otherwise, because there are no real-world pictures of Wong Fei-hung still extant. Aside from a few descriptions, no one really knows what he looked like. . . The 'Aunt Yee thing' is that they start building this awfully young 'aunt' up as a possible romantic interest. I'm told that in the third movie in the series we find out that she's more of an aunt-in-law - the sister of Fei-hung's stepmother or something - so it's not as squicky as it might be. Just saying. You can get this, and most of the other OUATIC movies, at Blockbuster with no problems at all.
3. Magnificent Butcher. This is another Wong Fei-hung movie - sort of. He's a secondary character in this movie. Sammo Hung plays the main character, one of his students. To borrow a phrase from Superman, you will believe a fat man can fight. Very much an old-school kung fu movie, but without quite as much pervasive cheesiness as you see in some of the Shaw Brothers stuff. I myself appreciate a really fine cheese, but I know that for many people that's a deal killer; I can recommend this without reservation. Sammo's school gets into a fight with their longtime rival kung fu school, and Sammo gets framed for some fairly nasty things, and there's a revenge plot, and. . . oh, it basically boils down to an awful lot of well-done fighting, but with a pretty well handled storyline if you ask me. Sammo's not the only one who gets screen time fighting, mind you - there's some stuff with the guy who plays his brother (who he hasn't seen in ten years) and a really neat scene where the heads of the two kung fu schools fight. The bit of Bulletproof Monk where Chow Yun-Fat keeps hold of his Cocoa Puffs while whapping the honky around a bit has nothing on this scene - try doing Chinese calligraphy and beating up a kung fu master at the same time.
You won't find this one at Blockbuster. Try your local Chinatown, or eBay. Might be able to rent it in a Chinatown video store, but I've never tried, I bought my copy.
4. Mr. Vampire. Years and years before Kevin Williamson came along and made Scream, Hong Kong was doing horror and comedy in the same movie. This is an absolutely shining example. I found this movie through reviews at places with names like Stomp Tokyo and Dr. Freex's Bad Movie Report, but the fact is that it's too much fun to be genuinely bad. Let me put it like this: I had more fun watching this movie than I did watching Army of Darkness, and I really liked Army of Darkness. Mr. Vampire is a movie you will simply never, ever see on these shores. Not as a mainstream theatrical release, not as an art theatre release, not as a remake. Can't be done. You might see it in movie theatres in Chinatown somewhere, but nowhere else. This movie, like its star Lam Ching Ying, is too Chinese to make into something vast swathes of America will like.
I've seen this movie called 'everything you ever wanted to know about the Chinese undead but were afraid to ask', and that's really not all that far off. A badly buried corpse (bad as in buried in a spot with really awful feng shui, not bad as in 'eck, that's Dad's arm sticking out there') turns out to have failed to decompose despite being dead for twenty years. The corpse gets put under the care of the local Taoist asskicker priest, Lam Ching Ying's character Master Gau. Unfortunately the asskicker priest's apprentices are given the job of warding the coffin, and they forget to properly ward the bottom - so the corpse escapes and becomes a hopping vampire, a form of undead distinctly different from Western conceptions of vampires. The short, comedic apprentice gets infected by the vampire and spends a lot of the movie desperately trying not to develop the characteristics of the undead; the tall, handsome one somehow attracts a gorgeous female ghost who could very well cost him his life. Master Gau spends much of the movie trying to protect and cure his apprentices while tracking down the vampire to put the damn thing to rest. I thought it was hilarious, but keep your eyes on Master Gau. Lam Ching Ying, like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, is a graduate of the Chinese opera - from a different school, true, but he learned the same kinds of things they did. The man is a supremely competent asskicker as well as a pretty darned solid actor, and if he hadn't died of liver cancer in 1997 I'd put him in a crossover Western/Asian horror movie with Bruce Campbell any day of the week.
Definitely not available at Blockbuster. This is . . . oh, gosh, the third DVD I ever purchased, and the first HK movie I ever bought on my own. And, my friends, it was worth the price Amazon asked. Worth the price and then some.
5. Fist of Legend. This is a remake of Bruce Lee's 'The Chinese Connection' (aka Fist of Fury), which I have never seen. Moreover, this is an English dub of that remake. I rented this puppy from Blockbuster after seeing a preview for it on another DVD, and was quite pleased with the result. I now own the subtitled version, but haven't had the time to watch it yet. . . Basic idea here is that Jet's character's been at school in Japan in 1937 and comes home to a Japanese-occupied Shanghai. His martial arts school is in disarray following the master's death at the hands of the Japanese, and there's quite a stink being put up over who his successor should be. Complicating matters is the fact that Jet's come home with a girlfriend - and she's Japanese. . .
There's a facial expression Jet Li has that I’m not sure I've ever seen on any other actor. It's best described as 'two seconds after this shot was taken, he got up and beat the crap out of everyone else in the scene'. He does that a lot in this movie. The most notable time that I remember is towards the end, when his character goes to confront the extremely nasty Japanese guy responsible for the death of his master and encounters a classroom full of Japanese men with swords. I don't think he does it before the other really good fight sequence, though. That one has Jet one-on-one versus an honorable Japanese fighter - I think he's the girlfriend's uncle, trying to sound out Jet's skills before any kind of clash with the nasty guy. It's been a while, but I still remember the part where they agreed to fight each other blindfolded. Very impressive. This one's pretty much straight up martial arts action, unlike a lot of the other stuff on my recommendation lists.
Ooo-er. . .I'm sorry, guys, I've got a hell of a headache right now. I'll come up with more recommendations later, when I’m at home and my DVD rack is behind me to look over.
On the other hand, once you've watched some of these movies, you'll probably want to see what else there is available. Here's a few of Hong Kong's other movies I can safely recommend as Just Plain Cool.
1. The Killer. An awful lot of people know Chow Yun-Fat from movies like this. The movie's tagline is 'One Vicious Hitman. One Fierce Cop. Ten Thousand Bullets.' Nothing Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone has ever made even comes close to this. We're talking ten-minute firefight scenes in which every stuntman resident on the island of Hong Kong gets killed. Twice. Little to nothing in the way of martial arts, but some of the better character depictions I've seen in gunplay movies, and none of this 'bwahaha, I'm an Evil Terrorist who's out to blow up Nakatomi Tower' crap. Keep your eye on Danny Lee, the cop who's on Chow Yun-Fat's tail; he's played so many policemen in HK movies that actual cops call him 'Officer Lee'. This movie pretty much characterizes the 'heroic bloodshed' subgenre.
Available at Blockbuster in subtitled DVD format. There are people who would suggest you watch Hard Boiled instead of The Killer for your intro to heroic bloodshed, but I've never seen it. Apparently Hard Boiled is out of print, so get your $5 together and mosey on down to the rental place.
2. Once Upon A Time In China. I mentioned this one last time, so it's only fair I mention it now. Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung in the movie that more or less defines the 1850's juncture in Feng Shui. Native Chinese culture - specifically, Cantonese - vs. the rising tide of Westernization, personified in 'Aunt Yee' - the female lead of the movie, who seems to have come back from time abroad having been totally absorbed by the foreigners' culture. For me, at least, the most memorable line of the movie is 'you can't fight bullets with kung fu' - but that's not to say Wong Fei-hung doesn't try! Plenty of fight sequences, wonderful fight sequences mind you, and a few comedy touches, but this is not the face of Wong Fei-hung you get from Jackie Chan. Jet Li's depiction lends the man an amazing dignity (well, by comparison with Jackie, anyway) even when the movie gets painful to watch.
Worth mentioning: there are something like five or six movies in this series, plus an unrelated Wong Fei-hung movie called Deadly China Hero which also stars Jet Li. I've never seen the other Once Upon a Time in China movies, but I have seen Deadly China Hero. Don't bother with it. Not worth your time, not worth your money. This one, however, is fantastic. Also worth mentioning is the running joke of the movie - no one seems to be able to get a picture of Wong Fei-hung - and the Aunt Yee thing. No one can get Jet's picture in this movie, by photographic means or otherwise, because there are no real-world pictures of Wong Fei-hung still extant. Aside from a few descriptions, no one really knows what he looked like. . . The 'Aunt Yee thing' is that they start building this awfully young 'aunt' up as a possible romantic interest. I'm told that in the third movie in the series we find out that she's more of an aunt-in-law - the sister of Fei-hung's stepmother or something - so it's not as squicky as it might be. Just saying. You can get this, and most of the other OUATIC movies, at Blockbuster with no problems at all.
3. Magnificent Butcher. This is another Wong Fei-hung movie - sort of. He's a secondary character in this movie. Sammo Hung plays the main character, one of his students. To borrow a phrase from Superman, you will believe a fat man can fight. Very much an old-school kung fu movie, but without quite as much pervasive cheesiness as you see in some of the Shaw Brothers stuff. I myself appreciate a really fine cheese, but I know that for many people that's a deal killer; I can recommend this without reservation. Sammo's school gets into a fight with their longtime rival kung fu school, and Sammo gets framed for some fairly nasty things, and there's a revenge plot, and. . . oh, it basically boils down to an awful lot of well-done fighting, but with a pretty well handled storyline if you ask me. Sammo's not the only one who gets screen time fighting, mind you - there's some stuff with the guy who plays his brother (who he hasn't seen in ten years) and a really neat scene where the heads of the two kung fu schools fight. The bit of Bulletproof Monk where Chow Yun-Fat keeps hold of his Cocoa Puffs while whapping the honky around a bit has nothing on this scene - try doing Chinese calligraphy and beating up a kung fu master at the same time.
You won't find this one at Blockbuster. Try your local Chinatown, or eBay. Might be able to rent it in a Chinatown video store, but I've never tried, I bought my copy.
4. Mr. Vampire. Years and years before Kevin Williamson came along and made Scream, Hong Kong was doing horror and comedy in the same movie. This is an absolutely shining example. I found this movie through reviews at places with names like Stomp Tokyo and Dr. Freex's Bad Movie Report, but the fact is that it's too much fun to be genuinely bad. Let me put it like this: I had more fun watching this movie than I did watching Army of Darkness, and I really liked Army of Darkness. Mr. Vampire is a movie you will simply never, ever see on these shores. Not as a mainstream theatrical release, not as an art theatre release, not as a remake. Can't be done. You might see it in movie theatres in Chinatown somewhere, but nowhere else. This movie, like its star Lam Ching Ying, is too Chinese to make into something vast swathes of America will like.
I've seen this movie called 'everything you ever wanted to know about the Chinese undead but were afraid to ask', and that's really not all that far off. A badly buried corpse (bad as in buried in a spot with really awful feng shui, not bad as in 'eck, that's Dad's arm sticking out there') turns out to have failed to decompose despite being dead for twenty years. The corpse gets put under the care of the local Taoist asskicker priest, Lam Ching Ying's character Master Gau. Unfortunately the asskicker priest's apprentices are given the job of warding the coffin, and they forget to properly ward the bottom - so the corpse escapes and becomes a hopping vampire, a form of undead distinctly different from Western conceptions of vampires. The short, comedic apprentice gets infected by the vampire and spends a lot of the movie desperately trying not to develop the characteristics of the undead; the tall, handsome one somehow attracts a gorgeous female ghost who could very well cost him his life. Master Gau spends much of the movie trying to protect and cure his apprentices while tracking down the vampire to put the damn thing to rest. I thought it was hilarious, but keep your eyes on Master Gau. Lam Ching Ying, like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, is a graduate of the Chinese opera - from a different school, true, but he learned the same kinds of things they did. The man is a supremely competent asskicker as well as a pretty darned solid actor, and if he hadn't died of liver cancer in 1997 I'd put him in a crossover Western/Asian horror movie with Bruce Campbell any day of the week.
Definitely not available at Blockbuster. This is . . . oh, gosh, the third DVD I ever purchased, and the first HK movie I ever bought on my own. And, my friends, it was worth the price Amazon asked. Worth the price and then some.
5. Fist of Legend. This is a remake of Bruce Lee's 'The Chinese Connection' (aka Fist of Fury), which I have never seen. Moreover, this is an English dub of that remake. I rented this puppy from Blockbuster after seeing a preview for it on another DVD, and was quite pleased with the result. I now own the subtitled version, but haven't had the time to watch it yet. . . Basic idea here is that Jet's character's been at school in Japan in 1937 and comes home to a Japanese-occupied Shanghai. His martial arts school is in disarray following the master's death at the hands of the Japanese, and there's quite a stink being put up over who his successor should be. Complicating matters is the fact that Jet's come home with a girlfriend - and she's Japanese. . .
There's a facial expression Jet Li has that I’m not sure I've ever seen on any other actor. It's best described as 'two seconds after this shot was taken, he got up and beat the crap out of everyone else in the scene'. He does that a lot in this movie. The most notable time that I remember is towards the end, when his character goes to confront the extremely nasty Japanese guy responsible for the death of his master and encounters a classroom full of Japanese men with swords. I don't think he does it before the other really good fight sequence, though. That one has Jet one-on-one versus an honorable Japanese fighter - I think he's the girlfriend's uncle, trying to sound out Jet's skills before any kind of clash with the nasty guy. It's been a while, but I still remember the part where they agreed to fight each other blindfolded. Very impressive. This one's pretty much straight up martial arts action, unlike a lot of the other stuff on my recommendation lists.
Ooo-er. . .I'm sorry, guys, I've got a hell of a headache right now. I'll come up with more recommendations later, when I’m at home and my DVD rack is behind me to look over.
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Date: 2003-04-28 01:59 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-04-28 02:15 pm (UTC)Haven't seen Bullet in the Head, either.