Archive for the ‘Action’ Category
Monday, May 1st, 2023
“First level is the physical contact. Use your physical skill against your enemy. That’s most action films doing this kind of genre. The second level is use your knowledge, languages, strategy, everything you could before physical contact to stop your enemy. Third, use your honor, belief, your love, show to your enemy. Turn your enemy into your friend. I tried to share those three levels in the movie.” —Jet Li on FEARLESS
After the success of FREDDY VS. JASON, it seemed like Yu might continue his relationship with New Line Cinema, making the sort of slick studio b-movies both parties were pretty good at in those days. As I mentioned in my review of THE 51ST STATE, Samuel L. Jackson tried to reteam with the director for the company’s weirdly anticipated goof SNAKES ON A PLANE. But Yu believed Jackson’s star power would outshine the snakes, so he wanted his character to be swallowed by a python in the middle of the movie.
“Now the audience is intrigued. Now everyone on the plane will group together and kill the snakes,” he later told Blackfilm. “That’s the way I thought it would be interesting. Of course, they said ‘Take a walk!’”
So walk he did – all the way to Shanghai, China. And there he met up with Jet Li, a fellow Hong Kong cinema export who’d made even more of a go of it in Hollywood than Yu had. Since the handover Li had been the villain in LETHAL WEAPON 4 and then starred in the English language films ROMEO MUST DIE, KISS OF THE DRAGON, THE ONE, CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE and UNLEASHED. (He had also made 2002’s HERO in China, so this was not his official return to Asia like it was for Yu.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony De Longis, Brandon Rhea, Chen Zhihui, Chris Chow Chun, Christine To Chi-Long, Collin Chou, Dong Yong, Hou Yuanjia, Jacky Heung, Jean Claude Leuyer, Jet Li, Li Feng, Michelle Yeoh, Nakamura Shidou, Nathan Jones, Qu Yun, Ronny Yu, Scott Ma, Somluck Kamsing, Sun Li, Wang Bin, Yuen Woo-Ping, Zhigang Zhao
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, April 26th, 2023
Now we come not to the end of this Ronny Yu series, or to its peak, but at least to a watershed moment. If you read this whole series, or at least the BRIDE OF CHUCKY review, you don’t need to ask the question “how the hell does the guy who made THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR end up making FREDDY VS. JASON?”
But at the risk of reptitition, let’s run through it again real quick. For starters, Yu had been making horror movies for 20 years (THE TRAIL, THE OCCUPANT, MUMMY DEAREST, BLESS THIS HOUSE), so that part wasn’t out of the blue. Then in the ‘90s two things happened: the new wave of Hong Kong cinema became popular around the world, and many Hong Kong filmmakers began to worry about what would happen to artistic freedom once colonial rule ended in 1997. That combination of circumstances led filmmakers like John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark, as well actors like Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung, to start finding opportunities in Hollywood. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brendan Fletcher, Chris Marquette, Chuck Jeffreys, Damian Shannon, David Kopp, David S. Goyer, Garry Chalk, Jason Ritter, Jess Hutch, Katharine Isabelle, Kelly Rowland, Ken Kirzinger, Kyle Labine, Lochlyn Munro, Mark Swift, Monica Keena, Paula Shaw, Robert Englund, Ronny Yu, slashers, Tom Butler, vs.
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror | 16 Comments »
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023
“THE 51ST STATE is very dear to me, because it was the first time in Hollywood that I didn’t have to deal with dolls.” –Ronny Yu, 2004
Three years after the unlikely career milestone of BRIDE OF CHUCKY, Ronny Yu made easily the weakest of his English-language films – a UK-Canada co-production called THE 51ST STATE, but we call it FORMULA 51 here so people don’t think it refers to DC statehood. (Actually I’m not totally clear what it does refer to. But the number 51 is in the name of a super-drug that’s central to the plot.)
Under any name it’s a thoroughly 2001 film, with wall-to-wall dated music (score by somebody called Headrillaz), annoying whooshes and flash cuts, character names and descriptions written on screen as they’re introduced, a long scene at a rave type dance club, and two stars – Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle – who had ridden the ‘90s indie wave to the specific level of commercial viability where they could be cast in stuff like this. It’s one of a handful of movies, along with THE NEGOTIATOR and SHAFT, that could arguably be considered a straight up Samuel L. Jackson vehicle. But even though it starts and ends with him he’s kind of a mysterious, unexplained character, while co-star Carlyle gets to have the love story and sex scene. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Keaveney, designer drugs, Emily Mortimer, Hang-Sang Poon, Meat Loaf, Rhys Ifans, Robert Carlyle, Ronny Yu, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Pertwee, Stel Pavlou, Stephen Walters
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Crime | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, April 18th, 2023
“Virtue be yours!”
There are several reasons I wanted to do a Ronny Yu retrospective, and coming in at around #3 (but maybe it should be higher) is the existence of this, his first American production, which is (to date) his only movie about kung fu kangaroos. WARRIORS OF VIRTUE is a crazy fuckin PG-rated family action adventure fantasy that mixes some of the elegant imagery and mythology of Yu’s previous work with a bizarre mix of NEVERENDING STORY and TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. It could be argued to be Yu’s worst movie, or his most unusual one. It’s totally derivative, yet there’s absolutely nothing like it. It’s hard to imagine it happening in any year besides 1997, and also it’s hard to imagine it happening in 1997. But it happened. I was there.
I mean I wasn’t in the magical world of Tao where it takes place, or on the soundstage in Beijing where it was filmed, but as a BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR devotee at the time I did pay to see WARRIORS in the theater, and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since.
It’s the story of ordinary American kid Ryan Jeffers (Mario Yedidia, JACK), and it’s one of those depictions of youth that seems like it was concocted by a 150 year old who lives in a containment unit on Mars but has read some old magazine articles and thinks he has a pretty good idea what life must be like for the kids these days. To this guy it makes sense to open the movie with a dog dropping toast through a window to Ryan as he excitedly reads a stack of comic books in the bathroom. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angus Macfadyen, Dennis Dun, Julie Patzwald, kangaroos, Mario Yedidia, Marley Shelton, Michael Dubrow, Peter Pau, Ricky D'Shon Collins, Ronny Yu, Tom Towles, Tony Gardner
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 13 Comments »
Thursday, April 13th, 2023
THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR 2 (1993) is directed by part 1 editor/co-writer David Wu, with Ronny Yu as producer and co-writer. I guess since he’s the editor Wu throws in a bunch of quick flashbacks (sometimes to new backstory, but mostly to the first movie, even though this came out around four months after the first one so anyone who’d seen it probly remembered). This story takes place at about the time of part 1’s flash-forward prologue, when Master Cho (Leslie Cheung, ONCE A THIEF) has been freezing his ass off sitting on a mountain for ten god damn years waiting for a flower to blossom and/or for his ex turned evil witch Li Ni-Chang (Brigitte Lin, DEADLY MELODY) to come talk to him.
She doesn’t, so he sits out almost the entire movie while a new generation of Wu Tang students deal with “the witch,” who now leads a cult made up entirely of women who have been wronged by men. Our new main character Kit (Sunny Chan) gets in trouble with the Wu Tang elders not for getting in fights and stuff but just for mentioning the name of “that coward” Master Cho. Kit is about to marry his girlfriend Lyre (Joey Maan, CENTURY OF THE DRAGON) when Ni-Chang flies in, kills some people with her hair, and abducts the bride to teach her to “never be so blindly loyal to these heartless men.” She brings her to her cult, where everybody hates men and bangs their swords together rhythmically, which seems pretty fun. Also they dress kinda like Queen Amidala.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benny Wu Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Christy Chung, Jackie Yeung, Joey Maan, Kwong-Hung Chan, Lee Heung-kam, Ronny Yu, Sunny Chan
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 12th, 2023
This is the one. THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR is the movie that put Ronny Yu on the map. Or at least mine. This was 1993, back when people like me were first discovering Hong Kong cinema, and martial artists flying around on wires seemed like the greatest discovery since their primary antagonist, gravity. I remember waiting weeks for a widescreen, subtitled VHS I special ordered from Suncoast Motion Picture company in a mall somewhere. I must’ve watched it several times in the ’90s, but when I revisited it for this series it had been so long that I could only recall the look and feel of it, and basically nothing about the story.
The way I remember it, we all agreed back then that this movie was a masterpiece. But here I am 30 years later, and I don’t think the generation of film fans after mine would necessarily know who Ronny Yu was if I asked, or have heard of this movie. It has recently finally come to remastered blu-ray overseas, so a good transfer was on a streaming service for a while, and now can be bought digitally, but when I started writing this series there was only the old Tai Seng DVD – a pretty rough, non-anamorphic transfer. It made me wish I’d saved that tape. Watching it now, of course, it lacks the freshness and novelty it had in 1993, the thrill of a new world opening up to us. We’ve seen this kind of fantastic martial arts world imagined many more times and in much more detail over the last quarter century.
But I think THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR still packs a punch. It’s a short, sweet, and stylish little tragic love story that speaks about good and evil but refuses to paint even its operatic fantasy world in such easily definable categories. And by looking at it as part of this Uncle Sam Wants Yu series I’m able to see it as a culmination of everything the director had been working on up to that point. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brigitte Lin, Eddy Ko, Elaine Lui, Fong Pau, Francis Ng, Lam Kit Ying, Leslie Cheung, Philip Kwok, Ronny Yu
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 18 Comments »
Tuesday, April 11th, 2023
FIST OF THE CONDOR (El Puño del Cóndor), available now on the Hi-YAH! streaming network,* is the long-awaited (by me at least) reunion of Chilean martial arts star Marko Zaror (UNDISPUTED III, SAVAGE DOG, JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4) and writer/director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. They came up together making KILTRO, MIRAGEMAN and MANDRILL, but this is their first together since REDEEMER in 2014. From the looks of it they spent that time training, meditating, and learning powerful secret techniques.
I loved this movie, and I think it follows the established Zaror/Diaz Espinoza pattern of being even better than the last one, but I have exactly one (1) caveat: I wish I’d remembered that the first trailer called it FIST OF THE CONDOR: PART ONE. It felt kinda like if I’d watched KILL BILL VOLUME 1 thinking it was the whole thing and expecting her to cross all the names off her list. When it ended I had to do a double take, rewind and watch the last scene again to get my bearings. But I understand it now. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, Gina Aguad, Jose Manuel, Man Soo Yoon, Marko Zaror, twins
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
CHINA WHITE (1989) is the movie where Ronny Yu tackles the ’80s Hong Kong gangster genre that we all fell in love with when we found out about John Woo, Ringo Lam and those guys. Like A BETTER TOMORROW or BULLET IN THE HEAD it chronicles the tragic rise and fall melodrama of dashing young anti-heroes who run a criminal empire and care about family and loyalty and what not. Like CITY ON FIRE it deals with somebody undercover getting too close to a crook, but in this case it’s a female informant falling in love with a guy who she doesn’t know is bad (so, a little bit like THE KILLER). But along with these standard genre themes we have the strongest example so far of Yu’s international world view.
That’s because it takes place in Amsterdam, where the Chow brothers, Bobby (Russell Wong, ROMEO MUST DIE, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR) and Danny (Steven Vincent Leigh, RING OF FIRE, SWORD OF HONOR) have made a home, but must make peace or war with gangs of other nationalities. They’re most threatened by the Italians, led by Scalia (Billy Drago shortly before DELTA FORCE 2). This is a cutthroat internationalism, but Yu sees opportunity for these immigrants, and seems to come out in favor of cross-cultural/interracial relationships. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Man, Andrew Lau, Billy Drago, Carina Lau, Hong Kong action, Lisa Schrage, Ronny Yu, Russell Wong, Steven Vincent Leigh
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime | 6 Comments »
Monday, April 3rd, 2023
Occasionally during this Ronny Yu series I will go on tangents about films that are not directed by Ronny Yu, but are related to the topic at hand. I’ve been meaning to revisit my maybe-favorite-Brandon-Lee movie RAPID FIRE for years, and thought it would fit in well here. To be honest I forgot that I already reviewed it in 2009, but that’s okay, this is a better review. It was worth a reboot.
Lee followed his movie debut in LEGACY OF RAGE with LASER MISSION (1989) and SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO (1991), but it was the Yu film that attracted the atttention of producer Robert Lawrence (A KISS BEFORE DYING) and made him want to find a vehicle to turn Lee into a huge American action star.
As I referenced in the LEGACY OF RAGE review, the Metrograph theater did an interview with Ronny Yu where he said of Lee, “He was 19 when I met him. He was wearing a leather jacket, leather boots, riding a bike, he was very rebellious,” and “He said, ‘I hate martial arts. I hate it. And don’t talk, don’t even mention Bruce Lee to me!’”
Years later in RAPID FIRE (1992), Lee’s character Jake Lo is introduced wearing a leather jacket, leather boots, riding a bike, looking very rebellious. An art major at a college in L.A., he pulls up to campus during a demonstration for democracy in China. Seeing the protest signs causes him to flash back to the historic events at Tiananmen Square, where he saw his dad (Michael Chong, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.) killed by soldiers. According to RAPID FIRE’s entry in the AFI Catalog, “Lee was involved in the development of the story, and a key element that resonated with the actor was his character’s struggle to deal with his father’s death, which mirrored Lee’s personal life.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Leong, Alan B. McElroy, Basil Wallace, Brandon Lee, Branscombe Richmond, Brigitta Stenberg, Christopher Young, Chuck Zito, Cindy Cirile, Dwight H. Little, Jeff Imada, Kate Hodge, Michael Chong, Michael Paul Chan, Nick Mancuso, Paul Attanasio, Paul Yang, Powers Boothe, Raymond J. Barry, Ric Roman Waugh, Ric Waite, Roger Yuan, Tzi Ma
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 11 Comments »
Thursday, March 30th, 2023
LEGACY OF RAGE (1986) is Ronny Yu’s Hong Kong action movie that’s in a crime/martial arts type vein, written by Clifton Ko (ONCE A THIEF) and Raymond Fung (later art director of Yu’s CHINA WHITE). It’s also the first starring role for then-21-year-old Brandon Lee, following his father’s path from American television (he was in KUNG FU: THE MOVIE) to Hong Kong cinema. Of course, we can also draw a parallel to Yu’s travels between Hong Kong and the U.S., which is part of the reason producers Linda Kuk (HARD BOILED) and John Sham (YES, MADAM!, ROYAL WARRIORS) thought they might work well together.
But Lee’s character Brandon Ma is not specified to be an immigrant, and I think his mouth movements are Cantonese (though both that and the English soundtrack seem to be dubbed by someone else). I was nervous when the opening had some nerd rollerskating through traffic listening to a Walkman, but luckily that’s just some drug courier and not Brandon. He gets a much more macho introduction controlling the machine that lifts and smashes cars at a junkyard.
This Brandon is a good-hearted guy – when his girlfriend May (Regina Kent, A BETTER TOMORROW 2) is angry at him for being late he doesn’t even bother to explain that he was delayed by heroically carrying a toddler to the next bus stop after she was left behind by her mother. That’s just the kinda shit he does, so it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
Brandon and May work together at a hotel restaurant called Casablanca, as a waiter and a dancer, respectively. Is the junkyard demolition thing part time? I’m not sure, it’s not mentioned again. Other than maybe having two jobs, you could call him a slacker – he sleeps on a mattress with no bed frame and has two posters of motorcycles on his walls – but he gives May a ring, which I think indicates engagement. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bolo Yeung, Brandon Lee, Hong Kong action, Mang Hoi, Regina Kent, Ronny Yu, Teddy Yip
Posted in Action, Crime, Martial Arts, Reviews | 6 Comments »
