HERE COMES DISH:  NETFLIX FLUBS ENTICE COMPETITION

Here we go:

At a press conference scheduled for Friday, Dish Network is expected to announce its entry into the streaming-video market via a Blockbuster-branded service that could emerge as a rival to the recently troubled Netflix.

Variety reports that the title for the press event, “A Stream Come True,” suggests such an announcement. Per the trade, the invitation promises the introduction of “the most comprehensive home entertainment package ever.”

Meanwhile, Netflix’ stock was off around 10% on Tuesday.

And guess who has Dish? *points to self with both thumbs*

‘FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS,’ ‘SMURFS’ WILL BE SONY’S FIRST ULTRAVIOLET TITLES

If you recall, “UltraViolet” is also known as The Cloud, a service that stores your purchased films online so you can access them from anywhere. It’s also known as the service that will save the flailing home video market.

Why would we purchase not-very-good movies online for what is likely to be a price of around $15 to $20 when we can stream all we want for month for $10?

Hollywood is desperate to get us purchasing again but I don’t see it happening. They’re just not making the kind of movies people want to own anymore — no one will talk about that, but it’s a bigger factor than anyone wants to admit.

‘PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3′ ARRIVES OCTOBER 21

Making a truly frightening film is probably the most difficult thing to do when it comes to crafting a successful film. This is why so few horror movies ever pull it off and those that do are rarely forgotten.

The first two “Paranormals” scared the bejeezus out of me. Bring on the third (though I am almost completely out of bejeezus).

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINK-TACULAR

CHRISTIAN TOTO WONDERS, ‘WHERE DID BRIDGET FONDA GO?’

STEVE MARTIN’S UNSOLICITED OSCAR-HOSTING ADVICE TO EDDIE MURPHY

‘CAPTAIN AMERICA’ BLU-RAY TRAILER INCLUDES ‘AVENGERS’ & S.H.I.E.L.D. PEEK

DISNEY AND JAMES CAMERON TO COLLABORATE ON AVATAR-THEMED LAND AT DISNEYWORLD

JEREMY RENNER TO STAR IN BANK ROBBERY FILM ‘KING OF HEISTS‘

ABC BUYS FBI AND CIA DRAMAS

 IS BARRY LEVINSON TAKING ‘DINER’ TO BROADWAY?

JON TURTELTAUB TO DIRECT ‘THE HANGOVER’ FOR SENIORS

10 THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT BATMAN

‘JUNO’ SCREENWRITER DIABLO CODY RESPONDS TO BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT’S CRITICISMS

DECONSTRUCTING THE OPENING TITLE SEQUENCE OF ‘MAD MEN‘

MOMMY: CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF ‘BLUE VELVET’

COOL BLOG: THE SUITS OF JAMES BOND

A LOOK AT FRANK DARABONT’S UNFILMED DRAFT OF ‘FAHRENHEIT 451′

TWO MORE TERMINATOR FILMS PLANNED

WILLIAM SHATNER TRASHES ‘STAR WARS’

JACKIE CHAN GOES BACK TO ‘1911′ CHINA FOR AN EPIC WAR DRAMA

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

Finished “The Closer” Season One. What a fabulous show, especially in showing how Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda wins the respect and trust of her team. The relationship development is not only believable but ultimately quite touching.

The politics are also complicated — which I like. Some of what I see I agree with, some I disagree with. You know, like real life. In other words: not a problem.

Looking forward to more.

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CLASSIC PICK FOR THURSDAY, SEPT 22

TCM:

6pm EST: White Heat (1949) –  A government agent infiltrates a gang run by a mother-fixated psychotic. Dir: Raoul Walsh Cast:  James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien. BW-114 mins, TV-PG, CC.

At nearly 50 years old, The Mighty James Cagney commands the screen as a menacing, psychotic gangster twisted by his demented mother in one of the greatest gangster pics ever made. Edmond O’Brien might be over-shadowed by Cagney’s notorious scene-stealing, but he’s every bit as good as the undercover agent who infiltrates the gang. Another star of the film is the superb on-location, black and white photography which grounds the story in reality and adds something close to a docu-drama feel.   

Great story, great plot twists, superb editing. The perfect bookend to the film that made Cagney’s a star, 1931’s “Public Enemy.”

--Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age.  Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered…

…a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. . . .

I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago.

That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy — Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.

By the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades.

Keaton saw the core difference between Chaplin’s artistry and his own as a moral one. “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy,” he wrote. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest.” During The Cameraman, for instance, we see Buster’s character celebrating America’s favorite pastime, working hard to get ahead, courting his girl in a decent way, and continually acting honorably whenever a moral choice presents itself. By the picture’s conclusion, he’s become more than the butt of jokes, more than a thinly veiled political message, and more than a pouting beggar soliciting other people’s pity. He’s become a hero, by virtue of his actions being grounded in the same basic morality of the country in which he grew up and found fame. This came easy and natural for Keaton, with no guru or faddish ideology necessary — after all, he spent decades entertaining average Americans sitting a few feet away from the stage, and he served honorably with our troops in France during World War I.

If Buster Keaton has a single artistic disciple in modern times, it’s the Hong Kong martial artist Jackie Chan (another guy we’ll be studying in more detail later on in FCML). Like the elder comedian, Chan found himself entertaining on the stage from a young age as an acrobat, and later parlayed the skills gained in that endeavor into the most inventive and astounding physical comedy of his era. Eschewing the herd of stars attempting to ape Bruce Lee, he chose instead to embrace the style of the American silent comedians of old, particularly Keaton. It’s a perfect example of someone in our day taking an art form declared dead for fifty years and finding a way to make it relevant again.

It’s no mistake that, like Keaton before him, Jackie Chan became one of the most popular movie stars of his time. Like James Agee wrote those many years ago, we haven’t lost or outgrown our craving for “laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall,” the kind that only true physical comedy induces. Even in this age of special effects and CGI fight scenes, when geniuses like Jackie Chan bring it alive again au naturel, audiences respond.

I think it’s a tragedy that Buster Keaton died of cancer at the age of seventy in 1966, and hence didn’t live long enough to view movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985). If he did, he would have seen in Jackie Chan a true kindred spirit rekindling fires that seemingly died out for good with The Cameraman in 1928. When asked about his influences, Chan routinely puts Keaton at the top of the list, going so far as to say, “I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.”

If The Great Stone Face were still with us, even he would have to crack a smile upon hearing that.

This concludes our look at silent comedy great Buster Keaton and his final masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928).

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

As we learned in Part 1 of this series, we’re lucky in that over just the past few decades enough film has been discovered in various places to piece together a pretty fine quality copy of The Cameraman for DVD. Thus here in 2010 we are privy to a far better presentation of the picture than any previous generation save for the one that saw it fresh at the theater in 1928.

There are various versions floating around on the internet (if you don’t mind the terrible image, for instance, you can watch the entire movie on YouTube if you wish), but your best option is to either buy or rent the TCM Buster Keaton Collection. (here’s the same set for rent at Netflix — choose Disc 1 to watch The Cameraman.)

And remember what I said when we were discussing D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms — for the best silent movie experience, try watching it completely silent without the cheesy organ tracks that the DVDs include, and if your player/computer permits it try slowing down the playback by 5-10% to eliminate the herky-jerky too-fast motion that plagues so many films of the era. The movies come across much better when you do.

Review of TCM’s Buster Keaton Collection DVD set: Here’s a nice review of the TCM DVD set containing The Cameraman, with some background on the making of the film, the recovery of the best version, et cetera.

Jackie Chan’s homage to Buster Keaton: From his classic movie Project A, a series of gags on a bicycle that instantly beg comparison to the great physicality and boffo laughs of The Great Stone Face.

When the new “Karate Kid” opened a few weeks ago, it came out alongside “The A-Team,” a disappointing action comedy. Many predicted that The Kid would come in second but it ended up winning the weekend, earning over $50 million dollars at the box office. In its second weekend, the sleeper held and has now earned over $100 million.

“The Karate Kid” opens with Dre and his mother readying to leave the United States for China because of his mother’s job. Dre is clearly upset about moving to a foreign country. In the plane, at his mother’s insistence, he practices his Chinese with someone who, it turns out, does not even know the language. When they move into their new home, the charismatic Dre spends time at the playground and quickly makes friends as well as enemies who bully him on the basketball court and knock him down in front of a girl he likes.

Fortunately, Dre and his mother have moved into an apartment building that employs a Kung Fu expert as the maintenance man. (Yes, it’s a stretch but an enjoyable one nonetheless.) Dre gets beat up a few more times by this nasty group of bullies, a group who are incidentally taking Kung Fu classes with a malicious instructor who likes his pupils to kick people when they’re down (literally). However, once he realizes that his maintenance man happens to be Jackie Chan (or Mr. Han, as his character is named), he asks Han to teach him how to fight. Eventually, he succeeds and Dre learns Kung Fu as he prepares to fight back against the bullies in a major tournament.

At first glance, the plot may look boring and predictable and it does have its flaws. There are a number of unnecessary plot-lines thrown into the mix for no reason whatsoever. One boring subplot involves the parents of Dre’s crush keeping her away from him. Additionally, Mr. Han’s emotional back story feels out of place when revealed late in the film. The movie also has a lot going for it.

I haven’t seen the original “Karate Kid” and can’t compare the original. I can say, though, that the reboot is the best movie I’ve seen in a while. It’s fun, lighthearted and enormously entertaining. The story is also uplifting with well-developed themes (both about fighting for yourself and respecting your parents), and the actors are well-cast. Jaden Smith is charismatic and charming, Jackie Chan’s solid, and Taraji P. Henson does excellent work as Tre’s likable mother.

Looking at recent box office receipts, it’s a nice surprise to see “The Karate Kid” overcoming its bland competition which just goes to show that there’s always room at the multiplex for family entertainment with good values.

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The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans.

Poverty is a theme running through the lives of both John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Chow was born on Lamma Island, a blip in the ocean near Hong Kong, in 1955. He quit high school to get whatever work he could find to help support his family, and ended up auditioning for a place in the acting academy of TVB (Television Broadcasts Limited, a popular Hong Kong TV station). They ran a facility that performed the same task that the old studio system did in Hollywood: find new talent, whip them into shape, and put them under draconian contracts.

Chow’s contract made him an indentured servant of the studio for fifteen years, but it allowed him to build a following on TV in various soap operas and made-for-TV movies. A migration to feature films was inevitable, but like American stars like Tom Selleck, the movies didn’t quite know what to do with him, even after a performance in Hong Kong 1941 (1982) won him Best Actor at Taiwan’s version of the Oscars, the Golden Horse Awards. His even did a film with John Woo during these years, but as Woo was tied down to a formula their future magic failed to manifest itself.

But Chow’s screen presence stuck in Woo’s mind, and when Tsui Hark finally gave him the chance to follow his muse and make A Better Tomorrow, he fought hard to include Chow in a supporting role. His reasoning was simple: “Chow represents everything I value in a person: morality, friendship, honor, love. He is like an ancient Chinese hero who really cares about people.” This would seem to be a strange type of person to cast in the role of a death-dealing gangster, but Woo was working on a whole different level that the average action director. Samurai codes of honor, Christian elements of forgiveness and faith, and chivalric notions of brotherhood and honor were the coin of this realm, and as Chow puts it: “John Woo wanted someone who looks like a typical family man, but can really do all these things when he must. Not the typical kung-fu hero.”

Of course, turning the ordinary-looking Chow into a leaping, twirling, operatic knight-errant took some work. He didn’t possess the impressive acrobatics of a Jackie Chan or the kung-fu mastery of a Jet Li, but he did have a presence and a grace of movement, almost like John Wayne’s, that Woo could amplify with his unique editing style. Soon Woo discovered he was giving Chow a breathtaking dance of death all his own, and the effect was wonderful. Seeing the kind of film that A Better Tomorrow was becoming, Chow tore into the script and gave the part every bit of the emotion and passion Woo was striving for. “[Woo is a] very romantic and sensual director,” Chow says, “who puts a lot of himself in his films: love, human dignity, but also anger about the loss of tradition in the cities.” So just as John Wayne became John Ford’s mythical archetype and James Stewart became Frank Capra’s, so too did Chow Yun-fat allow himself to be molded into Woo’s image of a hero for the ages. As the director warmed to Chow’s portrayal, his part in the film grew exponentially until it had become a star-making turn to rival Wayne in Stagecoach and Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

A Better Tomorrow hit theaters as more than a movie — it was a grand coming-out party for a long-hidden talent that was destined to dominate the industry. Film Comment magazine put it best in a review that commented on Chow’s on-screen introduction in the film:

No scene exemplifies. . . star power more eloquently than A Better Tomorrow, when, simply by his way of eating street food, Chow tells us all we need to know about his character — we see this crook’s warmth, his cocksure humor, and the careless joie de vivre that will get him in the dutch later on. It’s a brilliant piece of screen acting — the kind that people emulate when they walk onto the streets after the movie.

Emulate they did — young men all over Hong Kong took to wearing Chow’s long Armani duster jacket, his dark sunglasses, and his suave mannerisms (the whole lighting-your-cigarette-with-a-$100-bill thing, strangely enough, failed to catch on in the same fashion). At the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards Chow stood on the podium to accept the award for Best Actor, and the thirty-one-year old was soon in ferocious demand. He was now a bonafide superstar — but a Hong Kong one, not a Hollywood one. There’s a big difference between the two, as Chow discovered:

We don’t have very large budgets for the production, so the studio won’t pay a lot of money for hiring the star. So everybody wants to work hard for more money before 1997. Sometimes I’m so jealous that the stars here [in the USA] can take two, three years [between] movies. In Hong Kong, if you take three, four years [off], you die. You cannot survive like that. It’s tough, but it is the way that we treat ourselves to be a star. Sometimes everyone is proud of themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but on the other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have been working like a dog.

He had become, in his words, an “acting machine.” Hong Kong director King Hu remembers the frenzy that surrounded Chow in those years: “I was trying to get film financing from the Taiwanese distributors. All they wanted to know was: ‘Is there a part in your film for Chow Yun-fat?’ When I said there wasn’t, they asked: “Can you write in a role for Chow Yun-fat?’” In the wake of A Better Tomorrow, Chow made an insane ten films a year in an attempt to capitalize on his success. “My record was three days working without sleep,” he said at the time. “I know if I don’t slow down I’ll die.” It got so bad that, as Bey Logan tells it, “During his heyday, there was a joke that Chow was in demand by so many producers that, when he arrived at the studio, a crew from one film would shoot his face, another his hands, another his back. . . all for different movies!”

On the bright side, Chow was able to expand his artistic reach far beyond his breakthrough role in A Better Tomorrow. He experimented with a wide variety of genres, and found to his relief that audiences liked him in all of them. Chow’s Hong Kong box office during those years was nearly double what Jackie Chan earned in the same period, and in any given year he had no less than three films sitting in the Top Ten. A part of me wishes that we could get back to the same work ethic in modern-day Hollywood, with actors shooting far more movies but on lower budgets, where more artistic chances could be taken, and hence more movies like Hard Boiled could manifest themselves.

During these years of high-octane production and overwhelming success, Chow continued to make the films that would serve as anchor-points for his career — his collaborations with John Woo. The first order of business was a sequel to A Better Tomorrow. Chow’s character perished in the original, and yet it was unthinkable to forge ahead with a sequel without him. Woo solved the problem by making Chow’s new character the twin brother of the former hero. In 1989’s The Killer, Chow was back as another criminal with a code of honor and a heart of steel-tipped gold, in a film with a tragic and elegiac tone underlying the mind-boggling action set-pieces. “Intrinsic to the creation of this mood,” writes Michael Bliss in Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, “is the acting of Chow Yun-fat, whose calm demeanor and soulful looks convince us that John has emotional depths that go beyond what is suggested by the film’s dialogue.”

It took their last team-up together, Hard Boiled, for Chow to finally appear on the right side of the law in a John Woo film, but even then his previous expressions of deeply conflicted morality were still in play. According to Kenneth Hall, Chow’s role as the rogue cop Tequila combines “basic integrity and compassion masked by a show of indifferent callousness,” as well as “a soulfulness expressed in his love of jazz music; an easy rapport with his fellow officers, making him especially popular with his subordinates. . . and, contrastingly, a kind of calculated but heated, almost out-of-control viciousness.” This is the stuff of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taken and other American classics of the genre.

“Tequila suffers guilt and fear throughout the film,” Hall notes. “Like ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan or Wes Block, the Eastwood cop in Tightrope, Tequila is in danger of becoming his own worst enemy, of turning into the worst of what he pursues.” This subtext feels thoroughly American, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the later Woo-Chow films were far more successful in the States than in Hong Kong itself. “It’s the violence,” Chow maintains. “A lot of the [Hong Kong] audience can’t stand it. I, myself, don’t like violence. I don’t like gunfire. John Woo does. He loves the sound of the bullets. On the set, he never wears earplugs.”

Unlike so many other high-profile collaborations in the ego-drenched movie industry, the one between Woo and Chow developed into a warm relationship filled with mutual admiration. As Hard Boiled was wrapping up principal photography, both men were planning on making the jump to Hollywood, and so the picture was taking on the emotional resonance of their last hurrah in Hong Kong. Emotions were high, and Chow tried to think of a way to thank his friend for changing his life in so dramatic a fashion. He decided that the most fitting way to immortalize their sense of brotherhood was to recreate it on film.

“While working on Hard Boiled I never intended to appear in it,” says John Woo. “Chow Yun-fat is a very good friend of mine. On the last day of shooting he came to me with the idea that I do a cameo appearance. He wanted to create a scene between he and I that showed our true friendship to the audience. We made up dialogue and a character for me.” Woo was to portray a grizzled ex-cop turned bartender who, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, would offer advice and support to Chow’s Tequila. Woo says that “Chow Yun-fat wanted to show his respect so we made my character his mentor, someone who cared about him and gave him direction.”

Hard Boiled marked the end of the fruitful collaboration between the two men. As with most American director/actor teams you care to name, neither has been nearly as good alone as they were together. In Hollywood, Chow’s The Replacement Killers did OK, as did Anna and the King. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a major hit, making over $200 million, and he had a part in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. Yet other films failed to make much impact. In one now-legendary near-miss, he was even close to signing onto the first Matrix in the Laurence Fishburne role, a perfect match given the influence of A Better Tomorrow on the film’s look. But he bowed out, and thus let a major coup slip through his fingers.

It’s been almost twenty years since Chow Yun-fat and John Woo have worked together in the old style. These days, they aren’t the hot new thing in Hong Kong anymore, they are aging Hollywood players who get together at their homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles with their wives and families, where they quietly barbecue together and remember good times. “Many of my favorite of my own films are not popular in the West,” Chow laments, but he is loathe to complain too much. At least he no longer has to make ten movies a year and work like a dog to survive. And he always has those magical years between 1986-1992 to look back on fondly, even if he does often wince at the violence his characters deal out on screen.

Next week, the production of Hard Boiled, and the innovative techniques that immortalized it as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

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

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Chow Yun-fat receives the AZN Lifetime Achievement Award: American stars like Quentin Tarantino offer an overview of his career, and Chow gives a nice acceptance speech in English:

A 1993 Interview with Chow Yun-fat: A bit stilted in English (although his accent is surprisingly good), but contains a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t heard anywhere else:

A few more books on the films of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Here’s a pair of titles that contributed to the material in this installment. Both contain profound looks at the thematic subtext of what many might see as outrageous yet shallow action movies:

John Woo: The Films by Kenneth E. Hall

Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo by Michael Bliss

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.”

When his teachers complained that his Chinese name was too hard for them to pronounce, he chose a solid Christian name, John, as a substitute. Soon, he considered himself “a fervent Christian,” going so far as to flirt with becoming a minister so that he might somehow repay the kindnesses laden on him by the church. He attended a Catholic high school, and made his first money doing work at various churches. “All of these things,” Woo says, “made me learn what dignity is, what honor is, and gave me a lot of hope.” Even after his father died, he remained unbowed and refused to join a gang, do drugs, or succumb to any of the other pitfalls of life in the slums. When asked how he managed to keep on the straight and narrow in such trying circumstances, his response is simple: “I had a great mother, and I was devoted to the church.”

The other thing that transformed Woo’s life in those years was cinema. “My mother was a huge fan of American classics,” Woo says, “so she often took me to the movies. They were free for kids. Because we lived in the slums I loved movies so much for helping me escape from that hell. There was so much beauty in movies.” It got to the point where Woo found himself cutting classes in order to sneak away to see all the latest pictures. By the time he graduated high school his mind was filled with filmic lessons learned from classic American movies, the French New Wave, the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, the samurai films of Kurosawa, and much else.

He began making short experimental films of his own in an attempt to mimic the beauty he saw on screen, funding them by working as a ballroom dance instructor at yet another church. “I wasn’t a great dancer,” he admits, “I just knew the moves and taught people. But that made me learn the ability of the body to move, and to see the romance in physical action.” In hindsight, this peripheral education would have the same brilliant effect on his future filmmaking career that military drill training had on the career of legendary Hollywood dance choreographer Busby Berkeley. “As I’m shooting sometimes,” Woo says, “or when I choreograph action, I feel like I’m dancing. When I have my hero diving in the air, or shooting with two guns, it’s pretty much like ballet.”

Film school was not only beyond his reach economically — no such institution existed at all in 1960s Hong Kong. So after high school, he finagled his way into a job as a production assistant at Cathay Studios, and over a period of many years managed to work his way up the food chain, hopping from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest to Golden Princess. Eventually he became a director of formula martial arts flicks (one starring a very young Jackie Chan) and goofy comedies, but his heart still lay with those Melville pictures seen as a kid, with action and visuals filtered through a fertile mind’s eye chock-full of Christian imagery and iconography. “I tried to convince the studio to let me make a gangster film,” Woo remembers, “but they didn’t want me to.” As the comedies and martial arts flicks he made began to draw less and less at the box office, his rising star dimmed, and he found himself a has-been at the box-office before he had even the chance to do a single film with full creative control. “I was so very frustrated,” Woo says about the long doldrums of his early directorial career. “Some people even said I should go back to film school or just watch tapes and learn about film, which hurt me. You know, I do have my dignity. I’ve always believed I am a good director.”

Finally, in 1985 he got a break thanks to his friendship with director/producer Tsui Hark. Woo had previously helped Tsui through some particularly rough patches and lean years, so when in the mid-1980s Tsui was getting his own production company off the ground, one dedicated to the improvement and modernization of Hong Kong films, he gave Woo a chance to finally direct the kind of movie he wanted, a “homage to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Martin Scorsese, or Sam Peckinpah.” But this movie wouldn’t just be a copycat production, it would reflect Woo’s own outlook on life. “I wanted to make a film that would emphasize traditional values: loyalty, honesty, passion for justice, commitment to your family. Things I felt were being lost. . . .These are the values that I put in my films. My kind of hero fights for justice, for what is right.”

The result was A Better Tomorrow (1986 — the film’s original Chinese name directly translates to “True Colors of Valor” or “The Essence of Heroes”), a movie filled to the brim with guns, cool Armani clothes fluttering in the wind, male bonding, honor-killing, and Christian-inspired notions of sacrifice and redemption. And did I mention the guns? The movie was a smash hit and a cultural touchstone for a generation of Hong Kong filmgoers.

After fifteen long years, Woo had finally found his métier and become a bonafide auteur. He had also found an actor capable of epitomizing the noble yet conflicted spirit of the heroes populating his brutal, balletic action films: Chow Yun-fat.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the ascension of Chow Yun-fat from ex-soap-opera star and “box-office poison” to Hong Kong’s answer to Steve McQueen.

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

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

John Woo at Netflix. You can rent quite a few Woo items here, but alas, no A Better Tomorrow (1986) or A Better Tomorrow II (1987) quite yet. Still, what’s left on the menu is a rich list. From his early years, you’ve got Hand of Death (1976) and Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979). From his Hong Kong gangster prime there’s his masterpiece The Killer (1989), the gritty Bullet in the Head (1990), the lighthearted and playful Once a Thief (1991), and of course Hard Boiled (1992). Then you’ve got his Hollywood oeuvre: Hard Target (1993), Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997), Mission: Impossible II (2000), Windtalkers (2002), and Paycheck (2003). Finally, you have his latest triumph, the Chinese historical epic Red Cliff (2008), Woo’s attempt to make a film with the sweep and grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. Have fun.

A John Woo tribute at YouTube. Courtesy of creator Ernest M. Whiteman III, here is a visual primer on why John Woo is held in such regard by fans as both an action director and as a filmmaker who possesses great emotional and thematic depth:

Crossings: John Woo Documentary. If you can stand the strangely compressed aspect ratio of this video at YouTube, here is a five-part overview of Woo’s life and career.

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history.

His first triumph, made on a shoestring budget and a scant few weeks of shooting time, was a little picture called Rocky (1976). He had no money, no stars, no amazing effects, and yet Avildsen used camera, music, and editing to craft scenes of immense power and impact. Has there ever been a film, before or since, that ends on a more rousing wave of uplift? That takes such pains to create identification and empathy with its wide array of characters? That more patiently or expertly builds up to its cataclysmic swell of emotion? That has the guts and sense of timing to fade to black at the exact peak, frustrating our desire to know what happens next even as it leaves us too blissful to care?

Rocky did all of that and much more, and despite its fight scenes now looking like slow-mo hokum compared to the MMA-style mayhem that now rules on TV, it remains the most memorable and effective boxing film ever made. That’s really saying something, given the immense amount of solid competition the genre boasts.

But as other directors began ineptly looting and mimicking Avildsen’s style and innovations, it looked as if everything that made Rocky great would quickly become so cliché as to make a repeat impossible. We all know that sinking feeling when we begin perceiving the clunky wheels of the typical “Hollywood sports plot” turning — that excruciatingly slow crawl towards the utterly predictable final showdown, where the very last seconds of a contest are shamelessly milked until the hero finally hits the last shot/punch/goal/basket. Even the Rocky sequels couldn’t escape these pitfalls, and it would be hard to blame an audience for glumly concluding that Avildsen’s 1976 artistic triumph had spoiled the sports movie for all time.

So who would have guessed that, eight years later, Avildsen would essentially pull off the same trick again? How on earth did he once again make a Rocky-style plot arc work, without the end result becoming a pale pastiche?

He achieved this feat in large part by turning everything we remember from Rocky on its head. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel Larusso is played not as a thickheaded lummox, but as a fast-thinking, bone-skinny teen whose nasal Jersey whine sounds more like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than Sylvester Stallone. He’s neither a down-and-out fighter with his best years behind him, nor is he looking to “go the limit” to prove something profound to himself. He’s just a kid at the very beginning of his adult life, who for most of the film limits his ambition to simply not getting beat up. Similarly, Elizabeth Shue’s Ali Mills is light years away from Talia Shire’s Adrian Pennino: rich instead of poor, charming rather than an ugly duckling, sociable not shy. And Pat Morita’s unforgettable Mr. Miyagi isn’t washed up or pathetically ambitious like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill — he’s the very epitome of contentment and balance and wisdom.

Rocky achieved its verisimilitude with generous dollops of grime, rust, blood and profanity, whereas The Karate Kid is notable for its relative wholesomeness (note how Elizabeth Shue even wears a one-piece swimsuit to the beach instead of the obligatory teen-movie bikini). The music marks yet another telling departure. Rocky’s iconic score, by Bill Conti, was a mix of 1970s funk, heroic brass, and a choir acting as a Greek chorus, all combined into a sonic brew that still ranks as one of the most recognizable and rousing in film history. For The Karate Kid, Conti was once again brought in as the composer. But this time, in between pop songs like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” he chose a light mix of delicate strings, only occasionally allowing them to burst forth into full orchestral splendor. For the training montage, Conti completely eschews Rocky’s reliance on trumpeting brass and instead opts for the lonely skirling of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute, creating a more spiritual and intimate vibe.

Avildsen’s camera, for its part, is probing and observant, often making excellent use of telephoto lenses to highlight what would otherwise be a missed reaction or expression. He achieves true poetry in the training scenes: on the beach among the circling cranes, on the lake amidst glittering golden waters, and even in the fights and strategies that pulse through the climactic tournament. He also warred with the studio when necessary to protect certain crucial scenes, such as the one where a drunken Miyagi reveals his service in WWII to Daniel. That one adds a whole new layer of depth to what was already a touching and authentic relationship, and yet the studio wanted it cut, deeming it superfluous.

On top of all that, the excellent screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen (who distinguished himself more recently by penning the immensely satisfying kidnap flick Taken) consistently leads Avildsen down novel paths. The teen villains of the story (portrayed by, among others, Steve McQueen’s son Chad and Elizabeth Shue’s brother Andrew) are refreshingly human, at times even gaining our sympathy. Unlike the usual faceless, gormless teens in Hollywood fare, this group is delineated exceedingly well, and remain recognizable as individuals even when hiding behind Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton makeup in a genuinely chilling night scene. Kamen fleshed out his bad guys so well that the Cobra Kais, led outside the dojo by actor William Zabka’s smirking blond-haired bad boy Johnny Lawrence, now have a sizable fan following among Karate Kid aficionados. One admirer even made a clever YouTube re-edit of the final fight so that Johnny wins:

Meanwhile, a band called No More Kings has made a song about the redemption of Johnny called “Sweep the Leg,” with a fun “Karate Kid continuation” music video written and directed by Zabka himself:

In interviews, Zabka has expressed pleasant surprise that The Karate Kid remains so alive in the popular culture, calling it a “sacred film” and noting that there are even Cobra Kai bowling teams out there. It’s enough to convince me that The Karate Kid II should have been all about Miyagi reforming the Cobra Kais, slowly rehabilitating them into good guys.

In so many ways, Avildsen’s 1984 film is courageous in the way it deviates from the instantly recognizable Rocky formula. How strong must the pressure have been on Avildsen to make the easy, safe choices, mimicking his earlier masterpiece in every detail? His resistance to those impulses does him credit, and hence to dismiss The Karate Kid as a mere Rocky clone is to do it an injustice.

But if there is one overriding secret to the success of The Karate Kid, it is the transcendent performance of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi. In 1984, most Americans still conceived of the East, at least in cinematic terms, as a mystical wonderland of Kung-Fu magic and swordplay. Hong Kong directors like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam were only beginning to create the explosion of masterful, modernized pictures that would eventually change the entire way the world looked at Asians on film. It’s hard to remember how utterly fresh a character like Mr. Miyagi was to 1984 audiences, completely unexposed as they were to the renaissance happening in Hong Kong. Fully fleshed out, with a compelling backstory and potent motivations, he was written as charmingly colloquial and disheveled, a character who could consistently shatter the stereotype of the “magic Asian” to raucously humorous effect.

Almost always in American cinema — to this day — Asian protagonists are depicted as cardboard caricatures at best and laughingstocks at worst. Avildsen rejected the initial front-runner for the part of Miyagi — the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune — and instead bet his entire film on the talents of a thoroughly Americanized stand-up comedian, one who in his salad days used to bill himself in comedy clubs as “the Hip Nip.” Comedians have a strangely robust record of shining in good dramatic roles — think Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, et al. — and they often manage to strike a solid balance between laughs and drama. Morita did exactly that in The Karate Kid: affecting just the right Japanese accent, leavening his character’s power and seriousness with just enough comedy, and always figuring out ways to make you laugh with Miyagi instead of at him.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid in awhile, you’re in for a treat — Mr. Miyagi was no fluke, he remains one of the most winning characters in the history of cinema. It was the role of a lifetime for Morita, who garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as it happened, he lost that year to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields, who himself became the first Asian to win an acting Oscar). Any number of others would have played Miyagi as either an embarrassing joke or an irremediably grim Samurai grandmaster. But in his every glare, mannerism, and pose, Morita elevates the character into a veritable Gandalf. Look closely at the scene when he bows gravely to a shocked Daniel (who has just discovered that his hated chores were actually important lessons), or when towards the end he smacks his hands together with such orchestra-enhanced thunder that the audience jumps. In those moments The Karate Kid — so often seen as an also-ran and afterthought to Rocky — breaks away from that film’s orbit and soars free all on its own.

So Avildsen pulled it off not once, but twice — I still can’t believe it. And if he never makes another great movie, he can still sit back and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that two of the very best fight pictures ever made have his name on them. That he did both of them on such low budgets should give hope to conservative filmmakers who assume liberal Hollywood will never give them a chance. There is nothing in The Karate Kid that couldn’t be accomplished on a micro-budget — all you would need is the gumption to dream up the script.

But will anyone take on the challenge, as Avildsen did those many years ago? Only time will tell. Until then: wax on, wax off. . . wax on, wax off. . . .