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Friday, 16 June 2006 |
By Frank Griffin
 We all have a defining moment, something that happens in our life that affects our outlook or defines us to others. Some even have more than one.
For me, my moment had its origins at a Video Software Dealers Association show in Las Vegas. For those who are NOT in the know, this is where various companies, ranging from big studios to small releasing companies (including porn), hawk their wares.
These functions were generally not open to the public. The idea was to get an owner of a video store (which made up 99% of the people there) over to your booth to show a sample of what you had: usually a cheap production whose emphasis was somewhere in the action/soft-core sex range with titles like Revenge On The Vegas Strip or No Chance To Live. You’d introduce the owner to one or more of your stars (mostly either a B-Movie actor like Wings Hauser or Richard Lynch, or some beautiful girl that you didn’t catch the name of and didn’t care to), and hope the sucker…er, owner, would file an order for several copies of the movies.
The big studios put more promotion in their displays: a castle that Disney set up one year, or an auditorium with an indoor theater that Paramount used to run a comedy promo film hosted by Leslie Nielsen as his Naked Gun character “sleuthing out” what was considered the studio’s hot sellers (usually a Friday, the 13th movie, among them). But comparatively, the big studios never had to worry about selling their titles. Who would turn down Sleeping Beauty or Nightmare On Elm Street Part 4?
There were other dealers that didn’t sell product (movies) but product-friendly devices for the stores, like popcorn machines or videocassette racks or advertising gimmicks like colored post-it notes with your store name on it. Even Coca-Cola had a booth to hand out free drinks and I admit I spent a lot of time going past it to pick one up. And porn was also there in all its glory, handing out flyers and freebies (key chains with the studio logo, for example), making deals with store owners, and letting you meet the dream girls of their films up close. Ginger Lynn, Janine, Chasey Lain, Bionca…no one would come out and admit it, but those ladies were the big attraction of the show, even over meeting established stars like Gene Kelly, Roddy MacDowall, and, yes, Cindy Crawford.
It was 1991 and the DVD was still a glimmer in someone’s eye, never mind the home computer. It was my third show that I had wangled a membership to and my interest lay mostly in meeting the girls and enjoying Las Vegas. I had the good fortune to meet a martial arts actress of B-Movie note named Cynthia Rothrock, who was there promoting Lady Dragon, the usual “back for revenge” kung fu melodrama. I knew her faintly from her China O’brien movies that had played on Cinemax, but I was more taken by her generosity towards her fans. Though I had been to her booth a day earlier, I ran into her in an aisle and was able to persuade a passer-by to use my camera to take a photo of the two of us.
When I returned home, I showed the photos to a friend of mine, who recognized Rothrock right off. He said she had made several films in Hong Kong and lent me a tape of one of them to watch at home. It was one of two movies he had taped at LP (four hour speed) on this particular tape. The first was Cynthia appearing in a film called Righting Wrongs. The second was a little known film (at the time) called The Killer, starring Chow Yun-Fat (who?) and directed by someone named John Woo.
If there was ever a defining moment in one’s life, this was it.
The Killer affected me more than Righting Wrongs, yet both had their share of spectacular battles between good and evil. Righting Wrongs was more a martial arts cop film, it’s highlight being a breathtaking fight between Rothrock and another gwielo (foreigner), Karen Shepard, herself a real-life martial arts champion like Rothrock.
But it was The Killer, with its heavy handed melodrama, it’s emphasis on the romance between a contract killer and a singer he had inadvertently blinded, and the relationship that develops between himself and the cop (Danny Lee) who pursues him (some say a homo-erotic bond between the pair) that had me hooked. Its examination of honor, betrayal and redemption as personified by the killer’s “front man,” Sidney, was to me unlike many films that I had seen in this country. Coupled with Woo’s unique touch of romanticism and high pyrotechnics, as well as one of the most ironically tragic endings in film history, I realized I was watching a classic.
After that, I couldn’t get enough. A lot of the Hong Kong films in the Bay Area at the time, and probably the whole United States, were films that had been duplicated several times before resting on the store shelf. As a result, I found myself renting and watching fuzzy tapes that I would get from a hole-in-the-wall store in El Cerrito: films like The Heroic Trio with Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui; Royal Warriors with Michelle Khan (later known as Michelle Yeoh); or Jackie Chan’s Project A and Police Story. …And I loved every moment of them. Eventually, reputable companies like Tai Seng and Universe would start to release professionally made VHS, but there would be a hitch that even Hollywood would never think of. A film would be split and released on two tapes, so if you wanted to see the whole movie, you paid twice the rental fee you would for a Hollywood film.
Worth it? Hell, yes.
Initially, it was the action picture that attracted me, and soon so many other people after me. Many of the films were standard cop dramas, their plot seemingly lifted from the latest Steven Seagal or Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the time. But while the Hollywood action film was seemingly the same movie made over and over again, there were differences in the Hong Kong versions. The drama was more pronounced, the surprises were more astounding…and the actors, unlike the Americans, did their own stunts.
The stories about those moments were almost legendary. Cynthia Rothrock being injured during the filming of Yes, Madam. Michelle Yeoh’s famous fall from a moving van to a moving car to the pavement in Police Story 3. Jet Li injuring his leg during the shooting of the famous ladder fight at the climax of Once Upon A Time In China. To this day, it continues. Witness the breathtaking battle between Aaron Kwok and hip hopper Coolio on a large pane of glass suspended high above the towering skyscrapers of Hong Kong in the film China Strike Force. The actors have wires, to be sure, but would Ben Affleck or Tom Cruise risk their lives in such a way? Or would they tell the director to computerize the sequence for their safety?
One scene will always stick with me as an example of just how much danger Hong Kong stars faced on a day-to-day basis. This is how Cynthia Khan’s van “ride” in In The Line Of Duty 4 played out: during a car-jacking scene she hangs out a window by her thighs, clinging to the roof and holding on to the driver-side door, then running on the pavement to keep her balance (and to avoid falling under the vehicle), while the van speeds up to crush her against the truck ahead of it.
Besides the cop films, there were also epic sword movies, to which, as gweilos (‘foreigners’), we had to become used to the fact of people flying; silly comedies; and the occasional tear jerker. It was later that most fans like me began to embrace all the genres and appreciated the cinema as a whole. One looked forward to comedies like He’s A Woman, She’s A Man and The Chinese Feast, and dramas like C’est La Vie, Mon Cherie, as well as combinations of the genres like Age Of Miracles and Peking Opera Blues. But could I take the next big step?
It was to the credit of my Asian friend, Eric, that I was introduced to something I was a bit nervous about undertaking at first…the movie theaters in Chinatown. He and his friends had gone for years to see films like the Shaw brothers swordplay movies and The Killer on the big screen. But I felt a little apprehensive. At the time, the early 90s, there were three movie houses in San Francisco’s Chinatown (there are none now)...The Great Star, The Pagoda, and The World. Why nervous? Well, after all, the patrons were 99 and 9/10th Chinese residents…and here was this white guy sitting among them, reading the subtitles, laughing at the jokes, becoming a part of what was essentially their movie going experience. Soon, though, the ticket vendors and snack bar merchants were used to seeing me there.
I remember that the first ones I saw were at the Great Star, a theater that had known better times decades before. The films were The Inspector Wears Skirts 4, a comedy about female police recruits on a par with Hollywood’s Police Academy series, and Black Cat 2: The Assasination Of President Boris Yelstin (which starred the future Mortal Kombat star, Robin Shou). I overcame my apprehension and settled in to be dazzled. Inspector was incredibly silly, but the second was astounding - for its time, at least. Black Cat was the Hong Kong version of Le Femme Nikita and, in this sequel, Jade Leung (the Cat) was assigned by the CIA to travel to Russia to prevent the assassination of…well, President Boris Yeltsin. She does so in a mélange of stunts and explosions and, though lacking the romantic melodrama of The Killer, it was still, to this beginner, exciting to watch. Since the theaters were unlisted in the newspapers, I had to haunt them on weekends to discover which treasure was playing.
And there were many in the weeks to come, with names like Police Story 3 and City Hunter, The Bride With White Hair and Treasure Hunt…The Phantom Lover and Fist Of Legend…and John Woo’s classic Hard Boiled. I still recall a long line outside the Great Star in the rain the weekend Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master 2 opened for Chinese New Year.
But soon a different theater was picking up on this new “interest” in Hong Kong cinema. The UC theater in Berkeley, now also closed, instituted a Thursday “Hong Kong” night. They were not only running films that were (relatively) recently run in San Francisco, but were reviving many of the late 80s-early 90s films that could only be seen on tape at the time, such as the In The Line Of Duty series, the Once Upon A Time In China series, The Moon Warriors, Saviour Of The Soul and John Woo’s The Killer. I remember one of their biggest draws early on was a pairing of John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled. The theater was packed and you could feel that those who hadn’t been fans were becoming fans that night.
Suddenly I found myself buying fanzines like CineRaider and Hong Kong Cinema…and then writing for them. In CineRaider I had a “mini-review” column of films I had seen in Chinatown or on tape. Fans began to hold party-screenings of films. Memorabilia like posters began to turn up and be sold, some through mail outlets like Dragon Art, some sold in the lobby of the UC between films on Thursday night. Tapes gave way to laser discs, which could be rented for less money and possessed better quality.
These were “Glory Days.” It was only a matter of time before Hollywood took notice. They did. And in most cases, to the fans’ regret.
Hollywood was never able to duplicate the success and fame of its one and only martial arts Chinese-American star, Bruce Lee. By the time they realized they had a talent on their hands, he was gone. They had tried, with little success, to introduce gweilo stars like Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and others to take the martial arts mantle, but they never achieved the Lee legend. But then two things happened.
Police Story 3 was picked up by a Hollywood studio and released to the theaters under the title Supercop. Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh were flown to the States and put on shows like The Tonight Show[i] and [i]Dateline to promote the film. The gamble paid off. A few years after its success in Hong Kong, PS3 was again a hit, this time in the United States. And it launched the stateside careers of many Hong Kong talents. The other thing was 1997.
Hong Kong was due to be returned from the British to Mainland China in 1997 and there was concern that the film industry would be subjected to new Communist censorship. Production seemed to slack in anticipation of this event. Hollywood, never one to turn down an opportunity to make money, began to lure talent away from the colony. Directors like Tsui Hark, Kirk Wong, and John Woo, and actors like Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, and Michelle Yeoh were starring predominantly in Hollywood productions. Even a TV series starring martial arts movie star Sammo Hung called Martial Law enjoyed a two year run on CBS. One would think that Hollywood had decided a fresh infusion of Asian influence would bring a new and more exciting perspective to the Hollywood film.
It didn’t.
The first thing Hollywood did was try to exploit the images that the Hong Kong star had established overseas. So Chow Yun-Fat was cast as a reluctant killer in The Replacement Killers, Jackie Chan was up to his old tricks in “franchises” like Shanghai Noon and Rush Hour, and Michelle Yeoh was the first Chinese leading actress in the James Bond action film, Tomorrow Never Dies. The directors didn’t fare as well. Though John Woo had success with Broken Arrow, Face Off, and Mission: Impossible 2, no one could say that they were anywhere near as exciting or innovative as Hard Boiled, The Killer or Woo’s earlier films like Bullet In The Head. They looked like Hollywood productions with Woo’s name on them.
Hollywood also seemed to believe that, for some reason, Jean-Claude Van Damme was what the Hong Kong action film audience wanted. A Hong Kong director coupled with a white action star. Woo was the first, making Hard Target, a JCVD film whose only notability was that Woo was director. Then, another director was assigned to a JCVD film. Ringo Lam, noted for the Chow Yun-Fat classic, Full Contact, was saddled with the “Muscles from Brussels“ in Maximum Risk. After that fiasco, Lam seemed to fade from the Hollywood scene. JCVD was next teamed with director Tsui Hark - an artist famed for such classics as Peking Opera Blues, The Lovers, and Zu…Warriors of the Magic Mountain - for the forgettable Double Team and Knock Off.
Fortunately, Hark, like Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, kept his options open back home and still makes films in Hong Kong, like a recent remake of Zu and the film Seven Swords, which was nominated for Best Picture in the Hong Kong Film Awards.
Even Jet Li, considered by most the successor to Bruce Lee, looked embarrassed to be in such American losers like The One and Kiss Of The Dragon, but fortunate enough to make better films in China like Hero and Fearless. The only director with some success in Hollywood has been Ronny Yu, who helmed such romantic epics as Bride With White Hair and Phantom Lover in Hong Kong, but whose success in the United States are relegated to schlock horror films like Freddy Vs. Jason and Bride Of Chucky. Was I disappointed? Hell, yes.
These films, which I dubbed “HollyKong movies,” did more harm than good. The purist realized that Hong Kong (in most cases) had lost good talent to a corporate city that would continue to imitate Hong Kong films (as with The Matrix series), but separate the “Asian” quality out of them, acting as if Hollywood had reinvented the action film instead of trying to exploit a foreign genre. Other fans were disappointed that the new stars and directors in Hong Kong after the handover were not even close to the talent that left, so they moved on, some contributing to the growing interest in India’s “Bollywood” films. As for the Bay Area, with the drop of patronage, the theaters in Chinatown began to close down, one by one (the UC in Berkeley was closed because of the expense of earthquake retrofitting). Even Wong Jing directed comedies and as cornball as they are that wasn’t enough to keep theater seats occupied. For the most part, it was over.
Films from the East like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House Of Flying Daggers, along with some HollyKong movies like the Rush Hour series, still hold interest for some fans, but it has never been the same as it once was. Most Hong Kong films, while retaining acting talent from the 90s like Andy Lau, Simon Yam, Carina Lau, Lau Ching-wan, and the two Tony Leungs: Tony Leung Kar-fei and Tony Leung Chiu-wei, along with acclaimed director Johnnie To (PTU, The Mission), don’t hold the interest in fandom, for the most part, that it once did. Many Hong Kong films these days seem cast with teenage stars like “The Twins” or some current pop singer. Even with Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Michelle Yeoh still making films on both sides of the ocean, one wonders if the Hong Kong film will ever make a true comeback.
I think it has, to an extent. films like Seven Swords, Inner Senses, Election, The Mission, PTU, Breaking News, and so on, prove that the Hong Kong movies can still be the most fascinating and exciting films made. One may have to relegate watching them on DVD instead of the silver screen, but the spirit of their creativity is still there…and always will be. |
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