Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.” (more…)

You would think at this point it would be impossible for anyone (especially me) to be stunned or outraged by anything the news media tries to pull when it comes to Sarah Palin. After all, once you have been exposed to a year-long brutal beating, one tends to become numb to a simple low blow. However, the news coverage of her Hong Kong speech still managed to spark the senses on several levels. 

First, it must be noted that it is rather incredible that this speech got as much play as it did. Remember, this is a private citizen from Alaska who was a “failed” vice-presidential candidate, who has given no official indication she is ever going to run for anything ever again. The speech was a private affair in a foreign country and contained no real “news” whatsoever. The news media was barred and were forced to cobble together bits and pieces of what was said from the paying customers who attended. And yet, nearly every major publication gave the event heavy play and links to FOUR of those articles were displayed prominently on the Drudge Report all day long.  (more…)