Hong Kong cinema

[nrh]

it’s real
https://youtu.be/-mTehGK8Ntc

[rischka]

YAY it's been a good day

[wba]

Looks fantastic!

[wba]

Just watched Dante Lam's wonderful wonderful wonderful bike racing film TO THE FORE (2015).

I just love sports movies, so I'm biased, but I hadn't seen a film by Lam since 2010, and it was delightful seeing him at work again. Need to check out more of his stuff (was only my forth).

[wba]

And after the cycling film by Lam, I gave a baseball flick from 2016 made shortly after the film by Lam a look: WEEDS ON FIRE (2016) by Chi-fat Chan.

There are no masterful touches like in the film by Lam, but the directing shows plenty of talent and some scenes and moments are quite inspired.
Definitely recommended to Hongkong film fans, this is probably one of the better films to have come from the ex-colony in recent years.

[nrh]

new johnnie to is up in the usual place, let me know if link doesn't work...

[mesnalty]

New To is fascinating, thanks nrh. Few milieux seem as well-suited to To's style of direction as the musical talent show, and he shines in the MMA sequences too. On the other hand the film strikes me as hollow and ultimately ridiculous. Could be a 5-star film, could be a 1-star film, so I'm taking the cowardly way out and settling on 3.

[rischka]

ok watching it TONIGHT

[rischka]

and i enjoyed it a lot! right down to the goofy over the top ending. didn't notice any to regulars in there but the leads were charming

any idea why to's production has fallen off so much? glad the retirement rumors weren't true

[nrh]

i mean the bottom of the whole hk film industry has fallen out a little bit. it's telling that this film is produced by gangster film producer dude who is father of the main actor.

i have a lot more to say and still need to get thoughts together, but it is a lovely, sometimes surprisingly tough movie. "it doesn't hurt" is the constant refrain, just using your body and youth to succeed for what? to has always alternated solo works (say 3 or life w/o principle) with more collaborative milkyway productions (a wu yen or a love for or all seasons, basically most if not all the wai ka fai movies even if wai's sensibility weighs heavily here), this reaches back to turn left turn right of all things for its aesthetics. and wai keeps his bollywood obsession from himalaya singh alive - idol culture aside this is just too farah khan to think the comparison is accidental, if it is accidental the parallel is sublime.

that hotpot/dance practice sequence! the student training doomed master montage! idk. i cried at the end so what can i say.

[mesnalty]

I thought of Farah Khan too!

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Air Hostess (1959) -- Grace Chang's first colour film. Chang plays an aspiring hostess for an airline, the face of Hong Kong's connections to and fro the outside world. Agreeably, aggressively sunny and features artful production design, with a particularly strong use of blue.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: "Somehow, this occasionally clunky, often campy movie about all the wonderful things that will happen to you when you work for an airline becomes a fantasy of pure forms—that idealized movie world in which nothing is convincing as reality, and therefore everything adds up to a reality of its own."

[liquidnature]

okay that looks wonderful thanks for the rec

[arkheia]

Oh nice, I watched Air Hostess last year and concur about the artful production design and colors. Even on a faded digital copy, the cinematography is spectacular, it’d be a real treat to see a nice film print or even a restoration someday.

The film scholar Hoi Lun Law wrote a loving analysis of the film's Oh Calypso dance sequence in Lola which I think goes hand in hand with your quote from Ignatiy's review about "a fantasy of pure forms—that idealized movie world".

There is a dazzling moment during the ‘Oh Calypso’ number in Air Hostess (1959) – directed by Wen Yi and starring Grace Chang – in which an intriguing mise en scène of music and mirror, camera movement and dance move, is staged and showcased.

The film cuts to what seems to be a reaction shot of the spectators amid the song: an editing staple of the film musical, particularly in those in which Chang appears (where close-ups of her euphoric singing and endearing smile are constantly punctuated by, as though rewarded with, admiring looks). At the centre of the shot, poised between two onlookers, sits a mirror (which is also a door). Suddenly, Chang glides into and across the frame, looking to screen-right but travelling towards screen-left. Shaking and swaying, she then quickly swirls upon exiting – barely at the edge of the frame – and turns into facing the opposite direction.

Then something marvellous happens. Chang promptly re-enters the shot (again!) from screen-right, returned in the frame-within-the-frame that is the mirror, as if she has magically leaped into it. The border of the frame is also the frontier between realms (one thinks of a comparable moment in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, 1932). The camera now commences a protracted pan to the left, gradually mapping the details and design of the set. What we see are the many mirrors that surround the dance floor and, in between each, a group of interested bystanders. Chang’s act is repeatedly caught in these many, silvery surfaces. At one point, the navigating camera even catches up with, and stays close to, her movement. The two are engaged in a game of hide-and-seek, with the camera chasing, hence capturing, both Chang the performer and her multiple manifestations. The modernity of Chang’s character in the film – her flight from a fixed female identity through the vocational choice of air hostess – is here suggested by the multiplication of her image, portraying her as a parade of entities.

If this shot in Air Hostess can be likened to an unscrolling painting, the imagery successively unfolded here, nevertheless, is only revealed to be curiously similar, if not exactly more of the same. In fact, the onscreen alternation of the spectacle and the spectator gives the impression of a series of action/reaction shots condensed into a single continuous take. The director finds an innovative way to appropriate part of the effects of an overused, if not overtired, editing trope in Hong Kong musicals from the period. The result is, at the same time, mesmerising and revealing of the film’s meaning and feeling.

An observation: it seems that the ‘Oh Calypso’ number in The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, 1998) not only inherits the song from Air Hostess but also its re-imagination of place, of the rapport between performer and space – registered and rendered by expressive camera placement and movement. A proposition: The subject, style and scope of the film musical has undoubtedly, as Adrian Martin points out, mutated. But from Busby Berkeley to Air Hostess to The Hole, camera movement persists as one of the most powerful means to express the genre’s utopian impulse – which is the creation of a place that never was and probably never will be, a presence that is palpably close yet yearningly distant. This paradox recalls our relationship with the camera when watching a film: it is simultaneously with us and not with us, a reverie we hold dear and a stranger we keep near … a fugitive confidant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a502on4D_1k

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

The film scholar Hoi Lun Law wrote a loving analysis of the film's Oh Calypso dance sequence in Lola which I think goes hand in hand with your quote from Ignatiy's review about "a fantasy of pure forms—that idealized movie world".

Quite so! Thanks arkheia, that was a good read. I particularly like Law's observation that "close-ups of her euphoric singing and endearing smile are constantly punctuated by, as though rewarded with, admiring looks," that's a good account of how they felt to me though I hadn't found the words.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

The Battle Wizard (Pao Hsueh-Li, 1977)

A bizarre, fun vacation in the wonderful world of Shaw Brothers. All about making the impossible possible through movies.

[Holymanm]

ooh and it's on prime, and looks good on it. ty for bringing it up!

edit: and also feel free to use here too

[rischka]

welp i did manage to relax enough to watch a film and it's 'running out of time 2' (2001) -- didn't expect much from this sequel but it was at least as good as the original. clever, colorful, funny and thrilling. includes a bicycle race, bird watching, lam suet as a compulsive gambler and a weirdly uplifting score that's like cabaret/circus music. owen compared it to batman/riddler dynamic and that seems accurate. ty johnnie to for coming through for me again ♥

[rischka]

holy flame of the martial world is just one step beyond the boxer's omen but it's a step too far for me i did enjoy the girl power though

[rischka]

watched because of filipe's LoveHK 2010s ballot: Let the Bullets Fly/Rang zi dan fei (2010)



jiang wen has real star power, the movie is clever and fun if a little long.

[rischka]

corey yuen and jet li : the legend (fong sai yuk) some incredible fights in this







i especially enjoyed josephine siao as jet li's mum

[rischka]

watching shaw brothers chinese opera style 'mu lan' '64



it's pretty good! perfect for a lazy sunday

[rischka]

in the chinese opera mood again w li han-hsiang's diau charn

https://i.imgur.com/aygWsYS.png

diau charn was one of the Four Great Beauties in 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms'

https://i.imgur.com/IRWOU76.png

she was a pawn in the campaign to restore the Han dynasty, using her beauty to divide a powerful minister from his general. nice colors!

imgur WTF