Tag: john woo

The Asian Cinematic Journey

TiberiusLeave a comment

About time I addressed a noticeable pattern of mine

Between Hong Kong cinematic action pieces of yesteryear and Japan’s golden age of cinema, I’ve been quite busy exploring the directors of East Asia. So far, I’ve addressed four powerful names in the cinematic world (John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi), but this is only the tip of the iceberg, as I’ve definitely seen more than just those for in both the live-action and animated worlds. And before I expand on that, I thought I’d address that for a few seconds:

I love this era of literal memes, it beats brainrot 100% of the time.

The archives of this very blog show that the things I write the most about animanga and almost always on the series itself as opposed to the production side of things. It’s been this way since the blog first launched in 2023 and when it comes to writing about the production side, it’s heavily skewed toward games, movies and TV series. The reasons for this have to do with what creators are willing to share to news agencies. From my experience, game devs are happy to document the process from storyboard to controller to thrown off a cliff by Margit the Fell Omen.

Animanga is a lot of the same but it highly depends on the publisher. So while the 3D Mortal Kombat games have videos where Ed Boon et al talk candidly on the creation and re-introduction of legacy MK characters, Francis Ford Coppola feels cathartic talking about the troubles facing Apocalypse Now, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul would walk you through the making of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, only a few manga publishers I’ve found are to be this open about their processes. Individual mangaka certainly, but editors for companies like Shueisha, Kadokawa, etc. are more than a little lockjawed. Even when they do show journalists the tour or sit down to conduct an interview, the details are either light or the sources are in Japanese, which I’ve explained during my review of The Elusive Samurai anime adaptation is nowhere near at a level where I can confidently review the contents. This part is understandable when the studio is busy bringing manga to life in real time, but if nothing is currently being worked on or not set to be for another half-year or so, then there’s really nothing worth keeping secret about the general production part at least, and I say this as a guy who revels in surprises.

Sometimes information is behind a paywall or a region code and no amount of sloppy-toppy offers will get me access to that succulent content short of a VPN subscription and moving my IP address somewhere else.

Maybe this will help when it comes to viewing the BBC’s documentary on The Troubles

A not insignificant portion of my animanga reviews have my parsing what I can from what I’m able to find in English, the most notable examples on this blog being that of Nazo no Kanojo X and Haibane Renmei, where the mangaka doesn’t have easily accessible photos of themselves or evidence that they’ve done interviews in the past and the other where the eccentric writer pulled an anime adaptation off the cutting room floor of his studio. Who says Haibane Renmei was a final draft at the time?

With that said, my recent trip to the cinematic side of things in East Asia is something of a pipeline, I consider. The precise origin point isn’t so much lost as its under tough debate within myself. I would say that it began when I was in community college in 2018 and my Asian Art History professor introduced the class to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran which is a medieval Japanese interpretation Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Japanese romanticization of medieval Europe is a time-honored tradition outside of Isekai, it seems.

But as I recall, I was on a streaming site whose name I forget where I was made aware of a Chinese-animated and directed film by the name of Have a Nice Day.

Without spoiling too much of the plot, it’s inciting incident is when a cab driver, Xiao Zhang, takes a million yuan ($150,000 USD) at knife point. Not for completely selfish reasons; his girlfriend was the victim of a botched cosmetic surgery and he wants to use the money to get it fixed in South Korea. The rest of the film is something of a No Country For Old Men type of movie, in the sense that even more unscrupulous folks are after the cash, with each pursuer quirkier than the last. Are they dangerous? Yes and no. They are dangerous, but often to themselves than anyone else. And Zhang is still in some kind of danger as some of these types gun for him too, but have to fight the rest of the mob off as they chase him down. One prize, clashing goals, and a story made up of losers and those who lost less. Make of that what you will. It’s currently free to watch on Tubi as of this writing, so I might as well remind myself what I liked about it.

At the time, I was simply looking for movies and content to watch in the dark of night on my ancient Samsung touchscreen laptop. I was 18 turning 19 at the time and the 2AM binge was a fierce mentality. After a few years of that, binging doesn’t do it for me anymore, as I’ve explained in the past. I was scrounging for films I’d heard of but haven’t seen, and without a specific order in mind. Just wait for the lightbulb to flash on, scour the web for a pirate site that’ll allow to me watch or torrent without issue, and I’m on my way. In some cases, I took these with me to the movies during the holidays and because the copyright expired on some of these, I was able to watch them all in the Almighty Internet Archive.

To keep track of all of these, I had a Wordpad document organizing the movies listed by decade, starting with the 1930s black and white films where just about every production member is long dead, the production studio defunct or eaten by another one over the years, and no one left alive to make a fuss over it. Pirating movies is my time-honored tradition, Jake.

Of the films listed, some of these do happen to be Kurosawa films, but looking back at that old document, interspersing Eastern films with the plethora of Western films harkens back to a time when I couldn’t tell the difference between animation and anime, but didn’t care because the drawings moved. You think I gave a damn whether Zatch Bell! or Yu-Gi-Oh! were animated in Vancouver or Yokohama? Seven-year-old me could tell it was art, and it was f[horse]king art!!

Where did this series go, by the way?

Speaking of art, I can talk at length about the production and cost side of even foreign cinema, but aside from country of origin, there really isn’t anything foreign film studios do differently in terms of filming. And yet as far as accessing these films go, it’s historically been a challenge for the simple reason of Hollywood being Hollywood. Harboring the lion’s share of the world’s movies, a foreign film would need an international film festival to get more eyes on it. These days, there’s not much trouble achieving that and more, but in an industry where the mantra is to “know your audience,” dropping a foreign film on an unfamiliar audience can further alienate the audience and hurt the film’s efforts, provided the audience is looking at that sort of thing. It can feel like homework if there isn’t prior exposure to the subject matter.

What does this mean for Asian cinema in the past? Well, long before the interconnected-ness of the modern age, the best you could do was release films of age-old stories, hence why the western film genre dominated from the late 1890s to the 1970s. So powerful and inspirational were these stories of cowboys and Indians that non-American directors took a stab at it by way of the European (mainly Italian) subgenre, the spaghetti western. East Asia, in particular, had to make do with old tropes and stereotypes for specific genres to gain traction over the decades with pioneers like Bruce Lee, John Woo and even Akira Kurosawa gradually introducing these concepts to the western market. The benefit being that their names are known, the drawback being that kung fu, samurai, shinobi, and other medieval concepts were assumed by many to be all that the region had to offer at least until minds like John Woo and Park Chan-wook showed us that even East Asia can cinematic set piece and gun-fu to the top.

Another thing to highlight about Asian cinema would be the local politics. Like it or not, history and politics touches everyone and in the grand scheme of things, East Asia and Southeast Asia have a disturbing tradition of strong men dictators who couldn’t help but meddle in the affairs of private citizens, historically and contemporarily. Mainland China has loosened its grip in recent years, but in some areas the CCP can still put a thumb over film production. Japan is a democracy these days, but pre-war films were heavily scrutinized for dissent from the Meiji era to the mid-Showa era. Post-independence South Korea had a hardline anticommunist stance that kept creatives walking on eggshells in the film industry and (as I’ve discussed before) in their manhwa/comics industry, leaving their manhwa to be discovered decades after publishing online. Needless to say, if the government didn’t like it, it wasn’t gonna get a wide release outside the country, never mind have a guaranteed impact at home. Why bother making uncultured foreigners care about our movies?! We have mouthpieces to produce!!

But we live in a freer world, so that’s not an issue anymore… supposedly… It’s only a recent discovery (or re-discovery if I’m being honest) that I’m adding these films to my watchlist and the showing thus far has been nothing short of:

Insert Invincible title card effect here

I will not stop writing about these films. I’ll use my remaining appendages if my fingers fall off.

Hong Kong Action Cinematic Masterpieces

Tiberius1 Comment

The Cantonese Collective

Hollywood has a century and change with a wealth of films and genres to back it up, but it’s obviously far from the only producer of groundbreaking films. On the other side of the world on the Pearl River Delta, there’s a city in Guangdong Province that’s been a part of the British Empire longer than it’s been Chinese, and a look through city streets and select-people’s names shows this.

Hong Kong! One of Britain’s prizes in East Asia, to summarize the history of the area, 19th Century European powers sought foreign markets for trade. Britain, for instance, was making inroads in Asia and one of their stops was a fishing village in Southern China. China didn’t want the Brits to sell opium to their people due to the adverse effects on health and in doing so, ignited a war that they lost to Britain.

Although Hong Kong Island was the prize, it did nothing to satisfy British interests and they’d try to renegotiate the existing treaty. China said no again and this time more of Europe and even America had something to gain from an even more vulnerable China, or at least their neighbors. Sticking with Hong Kong, Britain’s near-peer rivals could and have sacked similar-sized territories thus necessitating a formation of the British military to keep the territory safe, though this stronghold of sorts was also witness and participating in further engagements for the rest of the 19th century.

By 1899 and the start of the Boxer rebellion, China had ceded so much territory that it was derisively known as the “Sick Man of East Asia.” Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and Japan all took some of their land and/or influence, further European powers split Shanghai amongst themselves, and Japan was making it crystal clear that this would be their backyard, largely solidified when they won out in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. British-appointed Hong Kong leaders largely sat back while this corner of the globe kept adjusting lines on maps one ink-dipped fountain pen at a time… at least until Japanese ambitions brought the chaos to the governor’s mansion following Pearl Harbor.

Part of Japanese expansionist ambitions, the great lie told to the colonies of East Asia was that the answer to western imperialism was Japanese imperialism. They lost their opportunity when the US and UK shot down a racial equality clause at Versailles, so Japan’s next move was to dislodge western influence in the area through blood.

The 1920s and 30s gave Japan multiple opportunities to gradually expand in China and Mongolia, but their endeavors were somewhat halted by the US oil embargo after vile reports of, for lack of a better term, Olympic-level rapes and murders being committed in Nanjing.

This book has the details, and predictably none of them are for the faint of heart. Read at your own discretion.

After Pearl Harbor, American, British, Dutch, and commonwealth possessions were eaten and absorbed into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, including Hong Kong, who wasn’t safe from Japanese atrocities across the Pacific. As we know, the combined forces of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and resistance fighters in Japanese-occupied territories worked tirelessly to send the Japanese back to Tokyo and finish it off with a pair of bangs in 1945.

The Cold War saw roughly every part of the world violently or peacefully throw off the yoke of colonial influence and the last two in China were Hong Kong and Macau in 1997 and 1999 respectively from British and Portuguese hands to a two-systems situation, with full reintegration of the territories into China by 2047 and ’49, on the 50th anniversaries of their return to China, but recent news particularly in Hong Kong leaves the fate of the region uncertain.

Suffice it to say, Hong Kong’s history is one to preserve and retell for eternity. So, why bring up geopolitical history in a post hinting at their cinematic history? Well, I felt that the outside world would certainly have an influence on the region and Hong Kong would have something to give back to the world. Notably, it’s film industry.

Before Hong Kong, Shanghai was China’s moviemaking capital, but very few films of that era are available for wide viewing. Conversely, Hong Kong under British ownership had more room to flex its artistic muscle and it did, compared to mainland China and Japanese Taiwan. Since the end of World War II, the Hong Kong movie industry enjoyed an approach to movie making that wouldn’t be seen until the late civil rights era in the US where more and more independent films would rise to challenge Hollywood.

As a matter of fact, Hong Kong-born cinema was free from subsidies and government influence as a consequence of British ownership, so there weren’t any efforts at the time to scrutinize their films for any anti-British sentiment, like the Shanghainese film industry or the colonial Taiwanese film industry, both of which would be heavily vetted for dissent or used as propaganda tools for the empires. Still, the British empire would likely have something of a propagandist industry, especially in the Cold War. But the filmmakers in London would be doing that anyway, and they wouldn’t need the crown or MI6 to influence their slant seeing as the alliance with the US and NATO membership status would guarantee anti-Soviet hostility even in British media.

The Brits wouldn’t be outdone at this time.

But enough about the pillow where the crown rests, time to continue on about one of its overseas territories. In retrospect, each time the UK tried to put a thumb on their territories, it declared independence with the worst lesson learned. Conversely, when London leaves the colony alone, it learns to develop on its own, coming out better as an independent state. For Hong Kong’s sake, freedom plus location equals a prime source of inspiration. A millennia of Chinese stories ripe for the adapting was set to follow, and with Hollywood pumping out British and American works (at times distributing continental European cinema over the years), the world was Hong Kong’s oyster.

Most of the time, HK filmmakers stuck with the stories they knew best, though by the 1960s and 70s, some of Hong Kong’s best movies would be bolstered by legendary actors and directors, to include but are not limited to Stephen Chow, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Donnie Yen, Chow Yun-fat, and one of the biggest in martial arts cinema, arguably the biggest in his lifetime, Bruce Lee.

Personal story, where I grew up in the Bronx, there were at least ten different Chinese restaurants within walking distance or a short bus or train ride away. One of them had a mural of Bruce Lee in his trademark stance from the Enter the Dragon series.

Millennia of martial arts disciplines and practices led to filmmakers incorporating the concepts into many of their films. The aforementioned Enter the Dragon, Drunken Master, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Rumble in the Bronx, Kung Fu Hustle; hallmarks of Hong Kong cinema and complete with martial arts action and uniquely comedy. Several of these tend to be based on folktales from the mainland or at least the Guangdong Province, sort of like how kids in the US learn about Paul Bunyan or John Henry. Larger than life folk heroes giving the audience a window into their world at that point in time. For Hong Kong’s film industry, it’s had lots of time to reach perfection over the years, even rivaling foreign competitors, taking in as much cash flow as the US, UK, India, the mainland, Japan, and France.

Sadly, the fun had to end at some point. Domestic competition initially benefitted individual studios and filmmakers to found some of their own, like Golden Harvest, for instance, but when the competition collapsed in the early 1970s, only one studio, Shaw Bros., was left to carry the weight of the industry on its shoulders. The studios in Hong Kong felt this pressure and was compelled to get as many films in theaters as possible in a short amount of time. The problem with rushing movies out the door like that is the same for rushing video games out of the door: quality control. Few rushed movies come out perfectly and the ones that do have to compete with the rest of the dreck they release with or rely on rapidly aging tropes which was the case for Hong Kong. Trope bloat was killing the industry and filmmakers didn’t understand why.

Another, more indirect, cause of the industry’s downfall came with an increase in affordable housing. More tenants move in and start families and/or get jobs, other things take priority, and entertainment becomes a luxury that only a few can afford. Speaking of which, job creation eventually grew the middle class who increasingly became critical of low budget indie films, so good luck getting an honest answer out of Brian Chang when you ask him about the Blair Witch Project.

Or at least the Cantonese answer to The Blair Witch, I suppose.

The final two death throes had to do with piracy and Hollywood making in-roads in East Asia. If you think companies are overblowing the concern for piracy, in some parts of the world, piracy was still necessary if you wanted to watch movies, and going back to East Asian politics, some countries were severely restricting distribution in their territories at the time. Some still do and lobby draconian retaliation for even having the film in their soil. The final straw was Hollywood’s push into the East Asian market and all the aforementioned factors would mean that the Einstein of Cinema would need to breathe new life if Hong Kong was going to rebound. As of 2025, it still hasn’t.

All things considered, all that time rising, shining, and fading was arguably more than enough for Hong Kong cinema to make an impact on media, even to the point that countless classics get referenced to this day. The most recent example that comes to mind would be the gacha game Zenless Zone Zero where the developers at Hoyoverse released an animated promotional music video for their limited S-rank character Ju Fufu, with numerous homages to Hong Kong cinema.

Channel: Zenless Zone Zero

The thumbnail alone is a movie reference. Quick! Guess which one!

And predictably, the Hong Kong films of old would find their way into video games. Of these, I’ve played two unconnected video games, one of which has an interesting story. Starting off:

Sleeping Dogs (2012):

Released by Deep Silver in 2012, it’s more than a Hong Kong GTA clone. It’s cast consists of big name actors on both sides of the Pacific, one of them–Will Yun Lee–taking the visage of the protagonist, Hong Kong-born Wei Shen, a troubled youth who set himself right after he moves with his mother and sister to San Fran. Sadly, the move hardly changed the life of his sister Mimi who was ultimately defeated by a heroin addiction. For Wei, he still had connections to old friends back in Hong Kong, a not insignificant number of them being Triads from adolescence.

In the game, the SFPD imbeds him into the Hong Kong Police Force deep undercover to nab a high ranking Triad in the Sun On Yee, based on the real life Sun Yee On. The gameplay infuses eastern and western tropes and even some concepts, as a result of Hong Kong’s outside influences. The East Asian concept of face culture is implemented in both the plot and in gameplay where an underling, regardless of skill, makes the boss look more capable than they really are. Company-suck up culture with an East Asian flare.

Since he’s playing both sides in this, there are missions where Wei is a detective and story missions where he continues to embed himself in the Triads. Contrary to the game’s description, there’s really no conflict between these that can’t be solved relatively easily. The Triad characters suspect Wei of being a rat three times at most before he Academy Award acts his way out of it–a skill I expect undercover cops to have but it’s stretched to comedic levels until the end. Meanwhile, the HKPF hardly warn that his cover is under serious threat. Maybe they think he can handle it or not, but that’s not a unanimous view. Some of Wei’s handlers express doubt over his ability to stay on the straight and narrow once this is over… even though you the player can probably balance out the criminal activities with the cop work for the duration of the game. The game doesn’t even punish you very harshly for screwing up, merely awarding less upgrade points at the end.

Still worth experiencing, as the DLCs make up for it, each with unique mechanics.

Hard Boiled (1992)

I’d been looking for this one for a few months before I had found it on the Internet Archive sight. John Woo’s blowout success before embarking to Hollywood, like Sleeping Dogs, it’s another cop story, but with arguably more guns than a US gun show.

A pair of Hong Kong cops, Inspector Tequila Yuen, runs into an undercover cop and agrees to help him shut down a gunrunning ring. Tequila is a loose cannon who skirts past the rules to get results, which works in the long run but leaves him subject to reprimand each time. The movie itself has loads of action with some downtime sprinkled for a total of at least 10-15 minutes of breathing room combined. Paying close attention to the cinematography, it’s rare to find a contemporary gun-fu flick without shaky camera effects and I forever praise John Woo for omitting a maligned practice.

The camera stays afar and runs up close during pivotal moments so the fear of missing anything during the action scenes is highly reduced. By the film’s end, the loose ends had been largely tied up leaving for a bittersweet ending.

I didn’t know it at the time, but a video game I played was marketed as a sequel to this very movie. After watching Hard Boiled, I see how that came to be.

Stranglehold (2007)

Speaking of bittersweet, the sweet part is knowing that this is a surprisingly well-done Max Payne clone. The bitter part is knowing this came out with Midway staring bankruptcy from the business end of a rifle.

A follow-up to Hard Boiled set 15 years later, Triads kill a cop and kidnap Tequila’s family and he goes on a one-man mission to get his loved ones home. Sound familiar?

Well, it actually precedes Taken by a year at most, meaning it was probably in development as early as 2004 or 05. Taken likely had been in production since at least late 2005 to mid-2006. Coincidence, nothing more. For John Woo’s sake, Hard Boiled and it’s video game sequel were at least well-received even if the latter is a Max Payne clone and the former helped to influence, interestingly, not just Max Payne but also The Matrix. Funny how it all ties in together, isn’t it?

I’m not yet done with Stranglehold, but I did finish and download Hard Boiled from the Archive site for preservation’s (and private viewings} sake. So once I’m done with the game at least, I hope to give it a review and how well it compares to Max Payne whilst doing its own thing.

Hong Kong used to be a giant in the film world. Someone has to bring it back to its former glory… or s[guns]t, I don’t know. Start a video game company there.

Enough people doing this in Hong Kong should revive it’s anemic industries.