Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves.

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5. Tie: Christopher Walken/Robert De Niro

Best Supporting Actor: The Deer Hunter (1979 — Walken), The Godfather, Part II (1974 — De Niro)

Best Actor: Raging Bull (1981 — De Niro)

Insufferable Affectations: unblinking eyes (i.e., The Innsmouth Look), mouth hanging agape and licking lips like a parched salamander, creepy monotone dialogue delivery (Walken); incessant squinting, head cocking, aimless glancing around between lines (De Niro).

When every comedian is doing impressions of you and when Saturday Night Live builds entire skits out of mocking your instantly recognizable mannerisms and vocal intonations, you’ve perhaps become a bit too ossified in your acting range and delivery.

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4. Philip Seymour Hoffman

Best Actor: Capote (2005)

Insufferable Affectations: eternally constipated facial smile/grimace, slothful dialogue delivery, labored mouth-breathing.

Easily my least-favorite actor of the modern age, a sort of monstrous antithesis of everything that once made Hollywood classy, glamorous, and great. Whether mouth-kissing Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights (1997), rutting naked with poor Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), or channeling stomach-churning depression and illness in the incomprehensible and excruciatingly pretentious Synecdoche, New York (2008), he always seems to be hammering us in the solar plexus with premeditated attempts at disgust, ennui, and despair, levied against us for our own good in the name of Art. His winning an Oscar for Capote seemed a fitting capstone to arguably the single worst-ever year for the Academy Awards.

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3. Jack Nicholson

Best Actor: As Good As It Gets (1997), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1976)

Best Supporting Actor: Terms of Endearment (1984)

Insufferable Affectations: Cheshire cat crap-eating grin, arched eyebrows, overblown temper tantrums.

When a young Christian Slater effortlessly channels you in a movie like Heathers, you know the shtick is worn out. And that was way back in 1989. Like most hams, his later career has been a steady stream of mostly forgettable movies, with few coming close to the fine pictures of his early days.

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2. Al Pacino

Best Actor: Scent of a Woman (1992)

Insufferable Affectations: flamboyant yelling, whiskey-soaked drawl, throwing arms and hands wide open when making points in ego-driven monologues.

I still remember the promo trailer in the theater for Carlito’s Way, where the studio started with a greatest-actor-of-all-time type audio medley of Pacino’s past performances. “Aaaaaaaaticaaaa! Aaaaaaaaaaaticaaaaa! . . . .I’d take a flaaaaaaaamethrower to this plaaaaace!” et cetera. What happened to the actor who made Michael Corleone such a measured, quiet, emotionally believable person in the first two Godfathers?

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1. Meryl Streep

Best Actress: Kramer vs. Kramer (1980), Sophie’s Choice (1983)

Insufferable Affectations: ostentatious accents, reading every line as I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T.

There isn’t a more soullessly mannered and technique-driven actor working today. Every syllable, every movement is so calculated and consciously performed and projected that it feels more like an impression of the character than the character itself. Far from losing herself in a role, she always glows as bright as possible, ever shooting for that next acting accolade. I can’t think of a single movie where her presence seems calibrated to the story, where she’s an organic part of the movie’s tapestry. Like a diva on stage or a star basketball player hogging the ball, she always demands the spotlight. As a result, she has many individual awards but few if any enduring and beloved classics to her name.

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The following movies, each containing not one but two Top 5 hams in them, should be packaged in DVD cases made out of rye bread:

Doubt (2008 — Streep and Hoffman), Angels in America (2003 — Streep and Pacino), Ironweed (1987 — Streep and Nicholson), Heartburn (1986 — Streep and Nicholson), Heat (1995 — Pacino and De Niro), The Godfather Part II (1974 — Pacino and De Niro, mitigated by the fact that they don’t appear together on screen and both are still in their pre-ham prime), Righteous Kill (2008 — Pacino and De Niro), Scent of a Woman (1992 — Pacino and Hoffman), Gigli (2003 — Pacino and Walken).

And there’s one movie sporting the unholy intersection of an astonishing three members from this list, which must make it the cataclysmic thermonuclear ham movie of all time: The Deer Hunter (Streep, De Niro, Walken).

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way:

I had been working in Hong Kong so many years, and creatively I felt limited and needed to grow and change. It was an extremely commercial place. All the movies were commercial and entertaining. Action movies and comedies were mainstream, and it was hard to do anything else. Artistic films did not have an audience, and political topics you could not touch.

Given his affinity for American movies and Western sensibilities, Woo found much to like in his newly adopted home. “I felt comfortable right away. When we came to Hollywood I found the people in this country were very kind, polite and respectful. It is a very open country. They are all reaching out their hands to the new talent no matter where you are from. They wanted me to bring my style to their Western movies.” Woo loved the Hollywood crew on his first movie here, Hard Target, and they returned his admiration. However, the demands of both the studio and that lord among thespians, Jean-Claude Van Damme, drove him to despair:

I never knew that the star had so much control over the script, over the co-star. . . Sam [Raimi] and Jim [Jacks] wanted me to make the film in my style, but somebody else wanted me to make Hard Target an action movie, and somebody else wanted me to tone down the violence. People told me than an American hero is not supposed to have flaws and he never cries in a film. He’s a perfect guy. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of boring.

With Hard Boiled in Hong Kong, Woo had crowned his reputation with a movie that, to this very day, remains arguably the most blistering action movie of all time. But with Hard Target in the States — made only a year later! — the MPAA’s passel of clueless, tin-pot bureaucrats forced him to cut his picture seven times just to get an R rating. Chow Yun-fat remembers Woo’s frustration: “They told him that, if he shoots five people in this scene, then he can only shoot two people in the next scene. He cannot kill seven people in one scene and then another seven people right afterward!”

In other words, the American studios courted the singular talent of John Woo — and then refused to allow him to make a John Woo movie.

Fools.

It’s not that he hasn’t been successful in Hollywood. Hard Target made $33 million, Broken Arrow $70 million, and Face/Off — where he finally had director’s cut — earned an impressive $112 million at the domestic box office. But the growing artistic malaise was palpable. By the time his Mission: Impossible 2 raked in $215 million in 2000, Woo’s films had become, to my mind at least, virtually indistinguishable from the work of the average American music-video director. The world-weary gravitas of Chow Yun-fat had been replaced by the empty-headed pseudo-machismo of pampered and coiffed metro-sexual pretty boys like Christian Slater, John Travolta, and (most egregious of all) Tom Cruise, while Woo’s ever-present themes — familial, moral, spiritual — faded under the glare of the Tinseltown klieg lights until they shrunk down to mere stylistic affectations, as moving and genuine as, say, Madonna sporting a crucifix with her concert dominatrix outfits. Most of his later output — a list that includes Windtalkers (2002), Paycheck (2003), and some TV stuff — is a pale shadow of the things that brought me to Woo in the first place.

Thankfully, we live at a time when foreign films are more accessible than ever before, giving us ample opportunity to look at old movies and remind ourselves how brightly those old Hong Kong gems still glow. “If some people see only the action,” Woo once said about his Heroic Bloodshed movies, “I say, fine. But I think if they look, they’ll see more. . . it’s also about me, about what I believe.” There was a time — as an ideologically lonely student in an intellectually stimulating but virulently leftist film school — when I cared deeply about what exactly a movie like Hard Boiled revealed John Woo to believe. It was the kind of movie that I could sense was buttressing my own worldview, even if I didn’t have the words to express why or how.

So what does Woo truly believe, anyway? In his interview with Woo that closes Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, author Michael Bliss leads us to an answer:

Do you think that the traditional values that you cherish — such as honor, devotion, religion, family — aren’t very popular anymore?

“Yes. It seems that many people have lost them. I think it is my duty to bring all of these things back, these things that people have lost.”

With that in mind, would it be fair to say that more than anything else, you’re a religious director?

“Yes. I’d agree with that.”

The traditional values championed so energetically by John Woo should be of intense interest to conservative film lovers. Hard Boiled and its brethren stand virtually alone in modern times as cinematic defenders of what might loosely be described as Christian warriors — flawed heroes (and, in many cases, villains) who eschew cynicism and nihilism for moral codes based on ancient Bible-derived notions of righteousness and chivalry. Michael Bliss makes a wonderfully perceptive remark about Hard Boiled in his book when he mentions Woo’s cameo in the film (italics mine): “Woo plays a former cop, Mr. Woo, who runs the jazz bar, which functions as a haven of aesthetics in the midst of this brutal cops and criminals universe. In this church-like sanctuary, Woo acts as a secular priest.” That’s a revelation that hit me right between the eyes, and something that even Woo himself probably didn’t realize he was doing.

“I’m most influenced by the values of Jesus Christ,” Woo maintains in interviews. “Loving one’s neighbor, forgiveness, patience, kindness, charity.” That statement might seem laughable in light of the incredible amount of raw mayhem that drenches pictures like Hard Boiled blood-red, but Woo is adamant: “I am a Christian. I am strongly influenced by my religion. The church really means a lot to me.” In this Tarantino/Rodriguez-dominated age of treating every symbol and idea as just more grist for their pop-culture mishmash films, it’s refreshing to see Woo daring us to take his explosive action movies seriously. He’s unabashedly inviting a rigorous analysis of the Christian ethics on display in his pictures.

Consider what a film like Hard Boiled asks the viewer. What happens to those peaceful Christian values when they come face-to-face with a thoroughly evil, heartless, murderous, and implacable enemy? What part of that noble and beautiful moral structure gives way, and what replaces it? Is the result still Christian, or only a perilously perverted doppelganger? These are the kinds of questions that continually arise in thoughtful conservative minds whenever one watches A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.

“I believe the good people always win,” says Woo. “At the same time, we have to understand each other and know the good and bad in all of us. I think that came from my Christian education.” Woo forces his protagonists to navigate their way through spiritual minefields, in a quest to achieve some semblance of morality in a world seemingly bereft of it. “In my movies,” explains Woo, “the hero must conquer his own inner battle between good and evil before he can win the outward battle with the ‘real’ enemy.” That he manages to bring brutal gangsters, self-assured assassins, and trigger-happy rogue cops (each with prodigious amounts of blood on their hands) through hails of bullets and piles of corpses to that spiritual place (and in stories filled with such mesmerizing imagery and visual poetry) is remarkable.

Hard Boiled has more death and destruction in it than any number of American action films, but strangely enough it manages to remain far more morally defensible and intriguing. The issues it raises aren’t just cheap plot points — Woo’s unflinching depiction of the eternal battle between good and evil gives his spiritual themes real teeth. For example, Hard Boiled sports a triad godfather who can’t bring himself to keep up with the demented younger generation of crooks, most of whom long ago abandoned the old code of mafia ethics he grew up with — and he pays for his conscience with his life.

Woo allows another likable villain — the crowd favorite, no less, the cool-as-hell Boba Fett of the movie — to come to an abrupt end at the hands of his merciless boss after refusing to gun down a crowd of innocents. And not only does this deliciously audience-pleasing character die, so do the innocents. On the surface, this seems quite cruel of Woo, almost an expression of anti-heroism: the deaths of the defenseless bystanders seem to render the villain’s noble sacrifice meaningless. We lament that Woo doesn’t even leave anyone behind to respect or memorialize the heroic action we witnessed, until we realize that it is we who are meant to know and remember what happened, that it is our own sense of decency and values that’s been awakened along with the martyred villain’s.

Like I said, Woo delivers spiritual themes with real teeth.

Meanwhile, both heroes in the film are faced with their own demons, accidentally killing people on their own side and realistically dealing with the mental consequences. “Sometimes,” says Woo, “when you feel a person is bad, there is good in there as well. This is a truth about human beings and a theme in all of my movies. I have always believed that good and evil are not black and white. They co-exist in people.” All of the thrills in Hard Boiled are over the top, of course — in real life any one of the action scenes would have resulted in the army being brought in to quell matters. But it’s meaningful, carrying powerful consequences both in the character’s lives and in the audience’s psyche.

“John Woo is a man of contradictions,” concludes Michael Bliss. “He’s a romantic Christian idealist who loves guns and explosions, he’s a man of peace who choreographs death and destruction better than anyone working in movies today. . . Woo is a difficult fit because he blends Western humanism with Asian attitudes. And like Kurosawa, he’s a man that knows that often, violence and justice cannot be separated.” Judging from the state of the world, our inner war between Old Testament justice and New Testament forgiveness and redemption aren’t going away anytime soon. Which makes me all the more thankful that, over two decades ago, a devout Christian director named John Woo chose for a few short years to explore those themes in such a startling and heartfelt fashion. The Hollywood technicians can mimic the camerawork and the style, sure. But for this bedrock faith in Christianity as a powerful, elevating and ennobling force, you still have to go back to the original.

This concludes our analysis of the potent, Christian-laced action extravaganza Hard Boiled. Come back next Saturday for the beginning of an all-new For Conservative Movie Lovers series, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There have been more than a few versions of Hard Boiled available on DVD over the years, and which one is best remains a debatable matter. The best image by far can be found in the French edition (but alas, no English subtitles). The sound is fairly comparable across all editions (some have a 5:1 DTS remix, but many claim the original mono mix sounds better). Most of the editions use bastardized subtitles that fail to capture the nuances of the original Cantonese dialogue. There’s even a Taiwanese “uncut” version available that adds about five minutes to the final hospital shootout, but the original Cantonese dialogue is dubbed in Mandarin and there’s a different musical score.

For Americans, your best bet is probably the $11.49 Dragon Dynasty edition, which has decent picture, very good sound, and a host of supplements (including a full commentary by Bey Logan, one of the authors used to research this FCML series). UK readers might try the Region 2 disc available from Tartan Asia Extreme, which purportedly has the nicest image transfer aside from the French version.

If you’re one of those people who has never tried a Hong Kong movie, and who isn’t keen on spending an evening watching a twenty-year-old foreign film with subtitles, I’m hoping you reconsider, especially if you are an action movie fan. Every die-hard fan of Hong Kong movies started out as a wary newbie dragged by their friends to see something that they thought would be boring or hard to understand. It’s only after giving it a try that they realized just how much fresh energy, passion, color, and humor is to be found in those pictures. And if you’re the type of person who just can’t abide listening to a foreign language for that long while looking down to read the subtitled translations, you can always click over to the English-dubbed audio track and turn the subtitles off. That’s a purist’s nightmare, but in my opinion a far better option than not seeing Hard Boiled at all.

Part of a good film education is selectively trying out new genres you’ve always avoided. In some cases, the viewing will simply confirm your long-held suspicions, and that’s fair enough. But often you’ll end up discovering some thoroughly entertaining corner of cinema that you’ll wish you had found long before. Hard Boiled is revered as a great gateway drug into the world of Hong Kong movies, a hard-hitting action picture in the Rambo/Dirty Harry/Die Hard mold. If you like those sorts of films, do give it a try.

The visual style of the show is familiar from Bruckheimer’s many other policiers, such as the CSI series. It has the same tendency toward dingy, low-level lighting, moving camera shots, eccentric framing, and the like, though in The Forgotten it’s not as frenetic and flashy as in most of Bruckheimer’s shows. That’s a good thing.

The stories and performances reflect the earnestness of Bruckheimer’s TV productions, while avoiding the sensationalism the other shows tend to indulge in. Christian Slater is Alex, an ex-cop who leads the Forgotten Network, a team of private citizens in Chicago who investigate cases in which the police have run out of leads and can’t afford to devote additional resources.

Avoiding both cynicism and romanticism, the program makes a point of showing how many people around the nation are willing to volunteer their help. It also shows people who refuse to help, thus making each such instance a test of a person’s character.

Alex’s daughter was the victim of a crime and is gone; each member of the team has experienced such a victimization or some past relationship with a criminal. These experiences give each of them a superpower, as they jokingly call it, such as a special ability to spot lies.

Thus instead of being crippled by their personal trials and tragedies, they overcome them and use their hard-won wisdom to help others in trouble.

Slater is very effective in his role as the group’s leader—it’s easily the best role he’s had in years, even better than his dual role in NBC’ short-lived series My Own Worst Enemy. And he makes the most of it, infusing the character with a surprising amount of charisma. Just watching his character listen to people is interesting, as Slater conveys the character’s judgments and reactions entirely through subtle cues in his posture and facial expressions.

Also refreshing is the openly judgmental nature of the show’s protagonist. Alex is no moral relativist–he has no hesitation about rebuking people who do wrong, yet he never seems priggish or smug. On the contrary, his concern is always directed toward the team’s mission, not any personal, ego-driven agendas.

A gimmick the show uses effectively is to have the dead person talk in voice-over occasionally throughout each episode, explaining things about their former life, especially as they bear on what might have led to their death. These voice-over narration passages also make clear why these persons’ lives had meaning and they should not be forgotten. They also lead to some rather tender, moving moments at an episode’s climax.

The back story that led up to the murder at the center of each episode is explained by various characters who may have been involved. That’s rather standard for mysteries, but what The Forgotten does particularly well is show interesting relationships among the suspects which afford some nice insights into the choices they make and why.

Also important is the fact that the murders aren’t committed by investment bankers, fashion magnates, and the like, who of course almost never commit murder in real life. Instead, the murders in The Forgotten are typically committed by people of lower social status and economic means, as is the case in the real world.

That’s another thing that makes The Forgotten at least a little bit more than just a formula mystery. It’s not Tolstoy, of course, or even Agatha Christie, but it’s a serious attempt at meaningful storytelling, and that can make for memorable television.

For my actor friends, though, there was a bit more trepidation.  After all, they were the actual celebrities on this celebrity tour, the ones people would want to meet.  I doubt they are alone.  In fact, I suspect that a big reason why more actors in Hollywood don’t volunteer their time with the USO is that they simply don’t know what the experience will be like.  Sure they’ve seen video of Bob Hope out entertaining crowds of troops, but as an actor, you don’t carry your show on the road.  Will the troops even care that you are there?  What will you have to offer them?  Is it uncomfortable?  Is it political?  Fortunately for me, the actors in my party decided to give it a try in spite of these questions.  Here is what we learned.

For the actor, the USO offers an alternative to its live music and comedy shows.  It is the Hollywood Handshake Tour, and it’s just what it sounds like.  Actors meet the troops, eat with them, take pictures with them, sign autographs for them, and thank them for their service to Uncle Sam.  Oh, and they shake their hands.  If we were worried that this would seem insignificant compared to a live performance show, that worry was quickly dispelled.  The troops simply could not have been more gracious and welcoming.  None of the actors wanted to seem pretentious (they were there to show their gratitude to the troops, not to posture or promote anything), but to our surprise, the lines at each event were hundreds of people deep.  People literally gave up part of their day to wait for the chance to shake hands with the actors, and get this, to thank them for coming.  That people sacrificing so much for us would turn around and thank us for the simple “sacrifice” of getting to be in their company left us all speechless, but then, these soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are just the finest, most decent people on earth.

As far as the comfort level, when we arrived at the airport, we were greeted by our USO tour manager, whose job was to make sure we had everything we needed and were always where we needed to be.  All of the international travel was business class on civilian planes, although some of the inner-theater travel is military.  In our case, that meant getting to fly out to sea on a COD and actually LAND ON THE DECK OF A FREAKING AIRCRAFT CARRIER!  Again, speechless…

In Bahrain, we were put up in a beautiful, high-end hotel, and in addition to our tour manager, both a local guide and a military liaison met us.  Add to that our USO supplied photographer and we were really left to want for nothing.  In Djibouti, our accommodations were less ornate, but still extremely comfortable.  Our liaison, Karen, picked us up from the airport and took us to our private lodgings on the base.  We stayed in a variant of the same CLUs (Containerized Living Units), basically large shipping containers partitioned into two-bedroom, air-conditioned apartments that the troops stay in.  The food was all great, the AC was always cold, and a man sleeps soundly knowing that the United States Army is guarding the gates.

It is also worth noting that you never feel your time is being squandered, other than perhaps when you are waiting for flights at international airports.  When we weren’t participating in the scheduled events with the troops, we were dropping in on parts of the base we weren’t scheduled to see.  A trip to the medical facility, or the base fire department, a quick tour of the flight-line and a chance to sit in a C-130…  The days are full and meaningful.  Plus, the MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) teams always want you to experience some of the culture that the troops experience as well, which in our case meant a trip to the Grand Mosque in Bahrain, an audience with a village chief in Africa, and a brief time volunteering at an orphanage where our service members devote so much of their free time to the children that the nuns who oversee the facility literally can’t accommodate all of them.

Finally, let me address the question of politics.  Several actors may have questions like, “What if I support the troops, but not the war they are fighting?”  My answer is simple– keep your opinions to yourself.  The troops do.  In fact, not one person, from the civilian cooks, to the enlisted men and women, the officers, or even the Admiral we met made a single unsolicited political comment.  Americans in uniform serve the National Command Authority.  When they get their orders, they perform with a level of skill and professionalism that is without equal.  In short, no matter what the politics of the individual soldier, they are professionals.  You may or may not agree with their orders, they may or may not agree with them, but they aren’t there to philosophize, and we weren’t either.  One of the actors in our group recently quit his job on a hit television show to go to work for the Obama administration, and I may or may not have voted George W. Bush as a write-in candidate in the last election, but there were no heated debates, no strange agendas or conflict.  Just like the soldiers are there for one purpose, to execute the orders of the President, we were there for one purpose, to thank those troops for that service.  It couldn’t have been a more neutral, positive experience.

One request we did hear again and again from the troops was to simply tell their story, and what a story it is.  A story of bravery, hardship, camaraderie, and sacrifice… But there is something else, something I had never realized before.  Time and time again the people doing these difficult jobs told us how much they actually like it.  To a selfish man like me, that prospect had never entered my mind.  I assumed the people who join the military were taking one on the chin out of a sense of duty, and to be sure, that is part of it, but there is a beauty in what they do that isn’t a labor at all.  When a sailor on the Eisenhower wakes up every morning, he knows his place in the world.  He has a specific function, and is highly trained and very, very good at his job.  And he lives in dedicated service to no less worthy a cause than the defense of his home and his family.  There is a peace and a confidence in that sort of life that I think a lot of us would be very lucky indeed to find in our own.  These are not mindless cogs in the military machine.  These are free men and women living rich, full lives in service of a noble calling.  They deserve our support and our thanks, yes, but they may deserve something of our envy as well.

In the end, the whole experience was just spectacular.  All of the actors felt the same, and we all look forward to our next outing with this great organization.   It would be a glorious day if the USO had to turn people away because they were simply overwhelmed with volunteers wanting to thank our troops, and I think that if more entertainers knew what a fantastic experience it is, that day would be now.  I got on the plane this first time because Gary Sinise, who gives more of his time in tribute to our Armed Forces than just about anyone, speaks so highly of his travels with the USO.  I will do it again because of what a remarkable time it was, and what remarkable group of people the men and women of the United States Military actually are.   I hope others give it a try as well.