johnnie to's ELECTION

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