johnnie to's ELECTION

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

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