After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and actors, and authors, and painters, and musicians) doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. I miss young John Woo almost as much as I miss young Steven Spielberg, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.

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: (more…)

John Woo is a director’s director, often causing other practitioners of the trade to gape and wonder “How on earth did he do that?” When they hear that a technically audacious movie like Hard Boiled cost only four million dollars to make, their amazement deepens. And when they learn that the film took 123 days to shoot, longer than most Hollywood extravaganzas, they begin to understand the amount of work, preparation, and creativity that goes into crafting such a picture.

David Bordwell, writing in Planet Hong Kong, describes how

Many of Woo’s visual tics, like freeze-frames and slow-motion walks and glances, were already passé in the West, but the “heroes” cycle allowed him to integrate them with MTV dissolving musical segues, an endlessly arcing camera, wistful silhouettes against saturated landscapes, and glamorous, anguished players. The result was a glossy synthesis of Italian Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and the West.

“We are all learning from and imitating each other,” is Woo’s own way of explaining it. “Hong Kong in the old days got a lot of influence from American movies, especially technique. We got a lot of inspiration from the West. We used Western techniques to tell a Chinese story. We just combined elements to create a new cinematic language. Now it’s the West that is borrowing back. It comes full circle. We are all in the same film family. It is a good thing, I think.” (more…)

A 1995 Los Angeles Times Magazine cover proclaimed him “The Coolest Actor in the World,” and yet most Americans to this day have never heard of him. For fans of Hong Kong films, though, he is Asia’s answer to Steve McQueen — if the latter had made over seventy movies in ten years, most of them decent and some of them great.

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. (more…)

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…)

Maybe you first saw it at a museum retrospective or a revival theater, with the marquee emblazoned with tag-lines like, “The most action-packed film of all time!” and “More exciting than a dozen Die Hards!” Or perhaps your first taste came in a dorm room or a friend’s basement, with a piece of pizza in one hand and a brewski in the other, both forgotten as your mouth gaped and your eyes bulged. Some of you, no doubt, spied it in the Criterion Collection bin at the DVD store and, curious, made an impulse buy, thinking you were in for a particularly well-made Kurosawa-like police procedural.

Whatever the circumstances, if you’ve ever watched Hard Boiled, a 1992 movie from Hong Kong directed by a distinctive auteur named John Woo, within minutes you were privy to this:

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen

And your action-movie lovin’ life was never the same.

One of the great Golden Ages of cinema blossomed in Hong Kong between the early 1980s and 1997. Director Tsui Hark once described that city as the Chinese version of New York: “Very business, very crowded, very stink, and people very nervous.” But with one big difference: while New York perennially writhes in the death-grip of the Democrats’ tax-and-regulate machine, Hong Kong is a capitalist’s paradise, harboring freedoms and opportunities unimaginable in modern America. This mindset isn’t just a part of their business or political community, it’s also reflected in their films. John Woo once described the special appeal of Hong Kong pictures: (more…)

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. (more…)