The Odd One Dies The Aces Go Places Series (1982-1989) Aces Go Places (Eric Tsang, 1982) — November 20, 2013 The first of the smash hit action/comedy series that was one of the first big successes of the Cinema City studio that dominated 80s Hong Kong. Pioneering Cantopop star Sam Hui plays a master jewel thief who helps a bumbling
Johnnie To Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012) From the beginning, it explains that this is not your typical heroic bloodshed Triad film, concerned more with codes of honor and brotherhood and the mirroring of good and evil than anything else. No, instead this is going to be a straight police procedural, with no metaphysical mumbo jumbo: “You’
Tsui Hark Working Class (Tsui Hark, 1985) A Cinema City film in all but name, as Tsui Hark directs for his own production company, Film Workshop, this comedy with pop star Sam Hui (of the Hui Brothers and the Aces Go Places series) and rock star Teddy Robin Kwan. Tsui himself rounds out the trio of workers
Johnnie To Seven Years Itch (Johnnie To, 1987) After finding success in his return to filmmaking with 1986’s Happy Ghost III, Johnnie To re-teamed with actor-writer-producer-Cinema City studio head Raymond Wong for a more conventional romantic comedy, loosely inspired by Billy Wilder’s popular 1955 Marilyn Monroe vehicle The Seven-Year Itch. Wilder’s film is an adaptation
Ringo Lam Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987) A conventional yet effective prison drama from director Ringo Lam, who appears to have cornered the market on “On Fire” movies with this and City on Fire, also from 1987, along with the next year’s School on Fire. All three were made at the Cinema City studio, where Lam
Johnnie To The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko & Johnnie To, 1984-1986) After the failure of his debut film, The Enigmatic Case, Johnnie To went back to television for several years (where he directed, among other things, an acclaimed adaptation of Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes), not returning to film until 1986, when Raymond Wong hired him to direct
Tsui Hark Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986) A great movie, perhaps the best melding of director Tsui Hark’s twin impulses toward subversion and entertainment. The setup follows two plotlines that will come together and intertwine with a third, each focused on a female protagonist. Brigitte Lin plays the daughter of a local warlord. She dresses like
John Woo A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987) After its formation in 1980 by actors Dean Shek, Karl Maka, and Raymond Wong, the first film released by Hong Kong studio Cinema City & Films Co. was 1981’s Laughing Times, a comedy starring Shek as “the Chinese Charlie Chaplin” that is a kind of mashup of The Kid
Johnnie To The Enigmatic Case (Johnnie To, 1980) After getting his start working in television at Hong Kong’s TVB studio in the mid-1970s, Johnnie To made his feature debut in 1980 with a dark, stylish martial arts film made on the cheap for a small, leftist studio. Though quite similar in tone and style to the debut
Tsui Hark Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993) Tsui Hark merges the punk outrage of his early films with the lavish, effects-driven wuxia of his later much more financially successful works in this pointed denunciation of the hypocrisies both sexual and racial in China’s religious traditions, the backward superstitional blindness of Taoism and the calcification of Buddhism
Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab Yumen (JP Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao & Huang Xiang, 2013) The Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab is apparently bent on domination of the documentary world, or at least its cutting edge. While Lucien Castaing-Taylor has taken the film world by storm with his Sweetgrass and now Leviathan (co-directed with Verena Paravel), films about sheep-herding and fishing, respectively, that have become minor
Tsai Ming-liang Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) The latest film from Tsai Ming-liang finds his hero, played as always by the axiomatic Lee Kang-sheng, in precarious circumstances. When last we saw him (not counting last VIFF’s terrific short Walker, in which Lee was a slow-moving monk just trying to get a McMuffin) was in Visage, where
Chai Chunya Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (Chai Chunya, 2013) In the early 20th century, a number of intrepid researchers delved deep into rural America, looking to record the last vestiges of our-preindustrial past — folk songs, Scotch-Irish ballads, itinerant blues musicians, backwoods gospel preachers and singers. One collection of these recordings, compiled by Harry Smith and released in 1952, The
Flora Lau Bends (Flora Lau, 2013) Veteran Hong Kong actress Carina Lau in a starring role (she’s outstanding in supporting performances in movie like Days of Being Wild or He’s a Woman, She’s a Man) was the main reason I chose to see this film, and on that front at least, it did
Johnnie To Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 2013) The big draw in Blind Detective is the reunion of Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. Pop stars and cultural icons, it was the series of romantic comedies they made with To in the early 2000s that essentially saved his Milkyway Image company from collapse. The first few years of the
Hong Sangsoo Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Hong Sangsoo, 2013) Continuing a recent trend, one that denotes a sharp break with his pre-2008 work, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon focuses on a female protagonist, though one who isn’t any more heroic than Hong’s usual cast of drunken, lecherous filmmaker/professors. Haewon is a pretty girl who is constantly told
Ann Hui Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982) Revolution is war is hell. Something in the air with the Hong Kong New Wave and Japanese leftists in 1982. Patrick Tam’s Nomad envisions the United Red Army as psychotic dead-enders while Ann Hui here depicts an idealistic photojournalist who sees past the Potemkin images provided for him by
Patrick Tam My Heart is that Eternal Rose (Patrick Tam, 1989) A Triad love story movie that stars Kenny Bee, Joey Wong, Tony Leung, Gordon Liu, and Ng Man-tat. Directed by Patrick Tam and (partially) shot by Christopher Doyle and produced by John Sham (one of Sammo Hung's Lucky Stars). If only one of Chang Cheh’s stars like
Ang Lee Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) I still think this is a pretty great movie, almost 15 years after it proved to be a surprise hit, thanks in no small part to Sony Pictures releasing it uncut in its intended form (ahem, Harvey Weinstein). That it lost Best Picture to Gladiator is one of the underrated
Wong Kar-wai Ashes of Time (Redux) (Wong Kar-wai, 1994) As with My Blueberry Nights and 2046, a person trying to escape their own past romantic disappointments becomes witness to the stories of other people, and thus learns to cope with their own issues. Like Chow Mo-wan in In the Mood for Love, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) has lost the
Patrick Tam Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982) This Patrick Tam film defies easy genre labeling. For much of its run, its feels like a slice of life teenage film, not unlike American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused or Metropolitan, but more in the style of later Taiwanese directors like Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien (though without their
Wong Kar-wai Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990) Wong Kar-wai’s second feature is, I think, one of the great films about the post-war generation and the lingering effects the war had on their psyches and their visions of the world. Set in 1960, the main characters would have all been born in the mid to late 30s,
Chang Cheh The Heroic Ones (Chang Cheh, 1970) A lavish Chang Cheh fable set in the Tang Dynasty (in the late 9th Century) and based more or less on actual historical events. The Empire is in turmoil as an upstart general has rebelled and captured the imperial capital at Chang’an. The Emperor and his advisors call on
Chang Cheh Vengeance! (Chang Cheh, 1970) This Chang Cheh thriller provided star-making performances for Ti Lung and David Chiang, actors who had played small supporting roles in some prior Chang films (you can spot them clearly in 1969’s Return of the One-Armed Swordsman) but who Chang gave a big push to in 1970, where Chiang
Chang Cheh Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1969) Chang Cheh’s sequel to his hit 1967 superhero movie finds Jimmy Wang Yu’s hero happily retired to a farm life when he’s asked to join a competition. It seems the top eight local bandits have gathered under one leader and are holding a contest to see who
