johnnie to's ELECTION

I want to see a movie with Reese Witherspoon and MAtthew Broderick as HK gnagsters, though!

Seriously, I loved "Breaking News" so this is on the list.

dudes

i misspelled johnny

It's not his name anyway, though, is it?

Mad Detective? (i'm watching the DVD tonight)

should be seeing that at fantasia, I think

it's playing at fantasia

doh xpost

that fishing scene, yo

good movie eh

GREAT movie, esp. those last 15 minutes (have you seen the sequel yet slocki? i hope it's not a letdown)

btw, britishes should be aware that this is screening on Film4 tonight, 1.25am -3.25am - or you can buy the DVD for abt a fiver in Zavvi

ya i saw the sequel right after the first one! not as good, but still good.

i'm always actually really amazed by the skills and charisma some of these hk actors have, they run circles around even someone as good as chow-yun fat.

true

Have you seen Exiled?

like simon yam in exiled & election or full contact or some category 3 gorefest, the dude can do anything

exiled is dope

Simon Yam is best in Bullet in the Head.

Anthony Wong is best in everything.

What's amazing is some of really good performances are delivered by guys who are like the equivalent of Justin Timberlake or Nick Carter. . .

the best hk guys are working on some mcqueen/mitchum level, but they also happen to be much more versatile.

election 2 sort of put me off hamburger for awhile

Yam's career began as a male supermodel, before he turned to acting in the mid 1970s. He then signed with TVB, starring and co-starring in a number of TV series prior to "apply his trades" in the movies in 1987. His elder brother is Deputy Commissioner of Police Yam Tak-Wing.

To is mentioned in an nytimes article today

Yeah a new movie with Johnny Halladay!?!?!?

as someone who still hasn't seen this all those months after the ilx film poll thread, kinda pissed off that triad election is on netflix on-demand but original election is not. i wouldn't watch the naked gun 33 1/3 before the first two.

very similar in tone to the naked gun films actually

Vengeance trailer
the dubbing with American accents sounds pretty awful.

as someone who still hasn't seen this all those months after the ilx film poll thread, kinda pissed off that triad election is on netflix on-demand but original election is not. i wouldn't watch the naked gun 33 1/3 before the first two.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 10:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really? they must have taken it down, i watched it on netflix on demand a couple weeks ago

it's still available, I just checked

oh of course as soon as i have to put my account on hold until i get paid.

damn you to hell, netflix

two good links:

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2010/02/10/talk.asia.johnnie.to.cnn?iref=allsearch

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=10912

that fishing scene, yo

― omar little, Friday, September 19, 2008 6:15 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was so good, and really well shot, are the rest as good?

u mean 2?

oh I dunno I thought there were more mentioned itt

Election 2 is even better, imho

not to be confused with JOHNNY HTOO

http://i.imgur.com/PWo8x.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp3Y1lR3LBs

hell yeah

that almost made me pass out from excitement

ikr?!?!?!?!

http://i.imgur.com/R7wolJw.png

ah ah ah ah *presses fast forward on my life*

YES

what a trailer
what a trailer

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=11&art_id=133273&sid=39583973&con_type=1&d_str=20130429&fc=10

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1225874/four-arrested-after-suspected-triad-member-hacked-death-outside

watched cold war after someone convinced me it was the new johnnie to

need to start paying attn to this thread

cold war was tense but ultimately kind of meh i thought

was kind of disappointed by drug war tbh

http://25.media.tumblr.com/ba8a3fd218d847e57b61b2992d8effe2/tumblr_mph4c2wbdK1ry4hn1o1_500.jpg

I've never been crazy about the genre, but Drug War is impressively bleak.

have you seen 'election'?

I don't think I've seen any previous To.

Drug War is really good; definitely in the "good" column of To stuff. (Though not quite at the Election/Election II level.)

do
not
see
blind
detective

he can't see you either!!!!

classic

you knew shit was gonna get serious when lam suet showed up

thought this was really well done... though had some flaws for sure. all the drug use in the film was kinda hilarious and OTT and reminiscent of that anti-marijuana PSA that ends with the kid turning the shotgun on himself. i guess you could even see the whole film as a PSA against drugs, i wonder how much pressure the mainland exerted on the production. nevertheless, really liked sun honglei in this - had a suitable gritty 'mainland' edge that you don't often see from hk actors.

drug was alright but it had a kinda inert ambience, there was a kind of dourness to it which reminded me of old french neo-noir films

drug *war*

yeah i think it depends on how compelling you find the relationship between koo and sun

i wanted to mention, since it hasn't been mentioned before, that tony leung ka-fai was really, really excellent in 'election.' such a great old school charismatic villain performance.

idk how much of my reaction to this was about the general idiocy of 'drug wars', just when there are inklings that america and europe might be seeing the errors of their ways, china will continue the good fight

what is the next best to thing after election

the mission, exiled

election 2 is pretty sick (in more ways than one)

skip 'vengeance' imo

'breaking news' is solid. 'the big heat' is a nice superviolent late '80s relic.

to's movies are only as strong as the scripts, and oftentimes they end up very gimmicky

that said, he can often direct his way around a gimmick... if you can look past the silly memento-crib in vengeance, johnny hallyday turns in a really good performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZU0bljAVlY

hallyday is really good. the movie feels like an 'exiled' retread aside from that imo. it might be the 'team of killers vs vicious simon yam' thing.

yeah... i'm not sure how i feel about to's emphasis on brotherly fraternity between contract killers. i mean, comes from a long tradition, but it often feels a bit hollow. it's a recurring theme in his movies for sure

i think 'the mission' is the strongest of his works in that mini-genre, maybe because it's such a stripped-down exercise in masterclass action directing and while it's violent, it's also a basically good-hearted film.

i love that the whole movie boils down to a bunch of charismatic actors biding their time in between gun battles in which they basically stand in one place shooting at people we don't see until the last ten minutes of the movie.

dig the balearic music in this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnqIC3IU3j8

Ok, yes definitely a spaghetti western in Far Eastern fair. But this movie sux. These are suppose to be professionals? They can shoot tin cans but they can't hit the guy standing next to them. And they empty their clips yet fire a dozen shots! I would say this is more a poor poor parody. That is the kindest thing I can say about it. It is just play silly without meaning to be. It's stupid is what it is. Slick & hip? You need to get out more often. If you are looking for something that you can sleep through, hey, this is your movie. Just turn down the volume.

Slick & hip? You need to get out more often.

there was this a few weeks ago:

http://www.film.com/movies/ranked-johnnie-to-films-from-worst-to-best

a day out and i think i'm liking drug war better and better. there were a few missteps towards the end but i think they were necessary to set up koo for the finale. verdict: Very Good Movie

i liked drug war!

the "print" i saw was pretty shitty tho, felt like i was watching a bootleg bluray

i watched a blu-ray rip...looked pretty good. think it might have even been shot on 35mm??

film was set in tianjing i think, real sense of northern bleakness in the gray sky lightbox, unfinished roads, piles of concrete shingles on the side of the road.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2165735/technical?ref_=tt_dt_spec

hel l yeah, keep 35mm alive

there's northern light and a bit of smoggy grimness but also lots of sleak cars and sense of emergent wealth, it looks more like moscow than some industrial backwater

the space is important, the vast disquieting emptiness around the climactic bloodbath which you wouldn't get so much in the hk films

yeah i wanted to write how his wide angle has a lot more space to breathe up north

i feel like i should be able to tell whether a film is on 35mm or digital but often i find it hard to tell without waiting for some minor celluloid glitch

but he has been pretty good at finding big expanses in hk/macau, the bale scene in vengeance was kind of lol but good

digital tends to look 'brighter' overall, and there's a kind of cleanness or gloss to it as well. biggest clue is in low lit scenes - with digital, unless the cinematographer has crushed the shadows to black, there's often tons of 'shadow detail' that's not there with film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oZOMNeJjzQ

not only was this a terrible movie but the 'look' of it was so boring, and completely at odds with its early 1900s shanghai setting

has anyone been done anything interesting with low light digital since collateral? michael mann was raving at the time about that but i can't recall another film since which has captured halogen glow like that

inland empire did its own thing i suppose

miami vice is the other big movie that has great looking low light scenes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVRd40bOPpk

anyway drug war's low light scenes looked great imo

blind detective looks EXTREMELY digital

all the little camera moves in this were sick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7NewHU99Q

whyyyyy

GREAT piece from Hua Hsu here

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9834016/johnnie-drug-war-violent-evolution-hong-kong-cinema

hes a good writer and it seems strange to be reading him on that sewer of a site next to Overrated, Underrated, or Properly Rated: Pearl Jam

I had no real grasp on life in Taiwan or Hong Kong, but there was something thrilling about seeing these radically normal-looking Chinese people tote guns and crack wise. I never trusted Jackie Chan — he seemed too pliable and elastic, too eager to please. Jet Li didn't seem long for a world vexed by modern problems — gun smuggling, drug trafficking, financial collapses. I was mostly obsessed with the nonchalant swagger of Chow Yun-fat, the meticulously choreographed shootouts of directors like John Woo or Ringo Lam. I had little understanding at the time of where these movies came from. They recalibrated my sense of what I could demand from a movie, not just in terms of high-quality onscreen gunplay but also the possibilities of who could play the hero or villain. They were someone else's dreams. Maybe, in one of the densest cities in the world, the possibility of sprinting down the street by yourself was pure fantasy, and that's all you needed.

really captures the appeal of hk movies for azn émigrés, or at least this one in particular

that paragraph definitely stood out for me

good essay but has all the hallmarks of someone writing about hk who has never lived there, or maybe only visited for a few days on vacation. or maybe i just find sentences like Throughout the 1980s, local movies provided the surface upon which everyday people could project their questions about the uniqueness of Hong Kong and, as the British prepared to return the colony to China in 1997, their anxieties about its future. to be almost useless in their potential to give insight.

u read any bordwell on hk cinema

he's so good on the nuts and bolts of like, how it works visually

yeah i love bordwell. he has love for everything

need to cop planet hong kong for my coffee table, and maybe re-read now that i'm a bit more familiar with cinematographic language

my favorite bits about hk cinema are how oftentimes, the voice acting is done entirely in post production. this is because it 1) keep costs low so you don't have to reshoot for a missed line 2) ease of export since you'll probably be dubbing into mandarin at some point anyway. and how certain directors will make something like 6-10 movies a year, that's crazy.

like, iirc, part of the reason why woo didn't really succeed in hollywood was because he couldnt bring over his crack stunt team, there were things like unions and they all had to have insurance and so much red tape etc.

all italian movies were like that for a super long time

there was this a few weeks ago:

http://www.film.com/movies/ranked-johnnie-to-films-from-worst-to-best

― Miss Arlington twirls for the Coal Heavers (Dr Morbius), Friday, August 16, 2013 9:45 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

So putting "Romancing in Thin Air" as #1 was massive trolling

But "Sparrow" is really, really special

Excellent

Linked in that article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlCYNt2z9k

Yeah that's a great shot but falls apart toward the end

So does the movie

breaking news is ok but not that good. The big heat is too low, fulltime killer just about right.

Al you should see sparrow. It's like a Hitchcock movie

Well maybe not Hitchcock, or only insofar in its 'look'

Just a really lush movie

yeah i'm gonna hunt that one down! it is too bad so many of his films are impossible to find. the mission deserves something more than the crappy import dvd i have.

http://www.chinasmack.com/2014/stories/3000-police-raid-chinese-meth-cooking-village-in-crackdown.html

Were they cooking meth in Drug War? I don't recall

Yes.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/state-television-airs-footage-of-major-drug-raid/

a 60th b'day appreciation
lookin fwd to the musical

http://moviemezzanine.com/johnnie-to-essay/

Tnx for that Morbs

Miss omar little :\

thx morbs

drug war was probably the best new film i saw last year. as with other of his films, for an action/genre movie it lingers in a surprisingly complex way.

i still think his best run, overall, was a few years around the end of the '90s, but sadly those films are among the ones that are tied up in rights issues and thus are harder to come by (especially in decent-looking editions). i'm talking about:

a hero never dies / expect the unexpected / the longest nite / where a good man goes / running out of time / the mission

what i'd give for a nice blu-ray criterion set of those films! call it "milkyway at fin de siecle" or something.

(you could go back a few years and include lifeline, beyond hypothermia, and too many ways to be no. 1--and it would be the best thing ever.)

Chow-Yun Fat sings

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-toronto-2015-johnnie-tos-office

reviews are pretty good...

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/review-office/

apparently only NYC engagement is in Whitestone, Queens!

it's not very focused but it's fun (also it's playing at amc times square)

has nomar seen sparrow yet??

not yet! i have no idea where to get a copy. might have to order it? the local dvd rental place just closed down, they tended to get all if not most To movies.

office looks amazing imo.

let me clear out some dropbox space maybe? i actually don't think i have any way of reaching you outside ilx haha

just hit you up with my email ;)

;)

OFFICE tonight at NYC MoMA in 3D

real heads caught it at the times square amc

well this was free for me

龜: i finally managed to watch SPARROW. thanks again for sending it my way.

damn to's such a good director. and simon yam is so good. he's a great and underrated lead actor, in total cary grant charm mode here but hanging onto that "yamsian" element of menace a bit. he's probably the most effortlessly chill of all HK dudes imo. and actually it's funny to think that, for me at least and probably many others, he made his stateside rep with this crazy psycho performance in 'full contact'. and he's done a few others like that as well, i.e. 'run and kill'. also he looks only about five years older here (movie is from '08) than he did in '92.

totally swell movie and beautifully composed and with a big heart, generous to all the characters, even the purported villain. enjoyed lam suet's borderline cameo mini role. and gordon lam is always a welcome presence.

i'd like to hang out w/kelly lin tbh.

btw i was thinking about THE MISSION recently too. listen to the balearic jams in this scene, it sounds like The Studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p4bXobWSn8

reposting from above obv, vid was deleted before

glad you liked it nomar! :)

https://mrjagofilm.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/sparrow-1.gif

http://i.imgur.com/xuqIQID.jpg

just want to recommend the film 'expect the unexpected' to everyone; might be my favorite to film. he's made some of his very best films since this time, but he was really on a roll from 1996 to 2000.

anyone seen THROWDOWN?

yeah, that's one of his weirdest films; lots of tonal shifts that are hard to adjust to at first. but i have grown to really like it.

rewatched the mission last night. best scene is them playing paper football outside the boss's office

that's one of the best movies of the last i don't even know how many years. it's brilliant. to has always made good movies, but his streak from about 1996 to 2001 was incredible.

<3 Francis Ng

anyone seen OFFICE?

me and morbs have seen it

how is it? it's finally getting a single screening in my neck of the woods in a few weeks.

also yeah paper football scene in the mission is great; to is really good at scenes of people hanging out (see also 1/2 of "expect the unexpected")

it's okay? it's a great piece of technique

anyone seen Three? only playing at a 42nd St plex here.

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/three-2016

sounds interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFiVIkMVagc

Still haven't seen Election -missed it when it was on Mubi, sorry- or anything else of his other than The Heroic Trio, which I really dig. Like the darker sequel too, Executioners, although he didn't seem to direct that, don't know if he had any other involvement.

watched life without principle last night (on hulu) - really enjoyed it

still great

is this the only Johnnie To thread? a few of his movies are on Canadian Netflix but it doesn't seem to be a great selection. I did watch Don't Go Breaking My Heart and found it handsomely shot but ruined by its utterly psychotic characters

revisiting drug war and it rules as much as I remembered

Watched Trivisa - a Milkway production, not directed by To but it could as well have been. Crazy plot twists, cynicism, quirk. Whole thing's a pretty explicit metaphor for the Handover, kind of a farewell letter to the vanishing Hong Kong film industry. Film's super explicit about corruption amongst the mainland authorities - basically one of the gangsters tries to go semi-legit and gets frustrated by the fact that Chinese officials are less dependable and more demanding than previous authorities, who also had to be bribed but only once while these guys just keep pushing it again and again. Film's from 2016, perhaps they couldn't get away with portraying something like that now. Or perhaps they could, I won't fake deep knowledge of the Chinese censorship system.

It's on Shudder, for some weird reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2EuZ4bngqE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7UCUlcE0A0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zksKhwBZljY

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5731

this looks like fun. stoked to see 'sparrow' on the big screen maybe

Yeah, a friend just told me about that earlier this week.

I wish, I wish

I have so far seen 13 Johnnie To films and enjoyed 12, man has a crazy hit rate. His romantic comedies rule too!

From that moma list I particularly recommend Life Without Principles.

Pretty sick that he's coming here! wish i could make it

The king is here!

Chaos and Order: The Way of Johnnie To starts TOMORROW! pic.twitter.com/v7OkaeWore

— MoMA Film (@MoMAFilm) September 11, 2024

was unable to get tickets for tonight or tomorrow night :(

Get there an hour early and do standby. MoMA always manages to squeeze people in because there are always no-shows, even with the highest-demand screenings. (Works better if you're alone because they rarely are able to find two seats together.)

damn, that's good to know, actually

I've done the same at lincoln center for NYFF

gonna see the mission for the first time in many years tonight :D

Standby is a good backup plan, but it is a hassle. The earlier you go, the better the chances of getting a seat (an hour is usually reliable), but it kind of sucks watching person after person walking by to the theater knowing all the good seats will be gone. The few times I resorted to standby, I was either way off to the side or way in the back. (The very front is actually not bad if it's in the smaller theater, but for the bigger theater, it kind of sucks.) So unless it's a must-see situation like the only scheduled Q&A, it's not a bad idea to wait for another screening if you can make it.

FWIW, quite a bit of fans out for To:

Johnnie to flocked by fans pic.twitter.com/GxcJDqa8T0

— Peter Damm (@petedamm) September 14, 2024

(The guy in the white hair is probably Dave Kehr, who likes To's work quite a bit. It must've been a fun Q&A for him to do.)

The Robert Frank exhibit has also opened at MoMA, so this was a nice meeting-of-worlds:

Johnnie To at the Museum of Modern Art absorbed in a lobby installation before his Q&A. pic.twitter.com/gBbsoaxjsL

— Shelly Kraicer (@skraicer) September 14, 2024

Someone recorded and uploaded both Q&A's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ZEa3rSboA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDMLR68jEbw