Of the small sampling of Hong Kong films I’ve seen, the ones I’ve liked best are not usually the pop action blockbusters but some of the so-called art movies, which in some cases have been box-office failures (largely because there is no art-movie market in Hong Kong): Yim Ho’s Homecoming (1984), Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990), Stanley Kwan’s Actress/Center Stage (1991), and Yim Ho and Tsui Hark’s King of Chess (1991). Lawrence: The Forward Policy of Western Film Critics in the Far East,” that the spectacle of Western critics enthusing over John Woo movies would be roughly comparable to Asian experts on Anglo-American cinema flipping over Michael Winner’s Death Wish movies.) (Hong Kong critic Stephen Teo has suggested, in “The Legacy of T.E.
I was also less than enthralled by John Woo’s A Bullet in the Head, praised to the skies by many critics I respect, because American movies already inundate us with baroque exercises in extreme violence and dumb-ass male prerogatives. Subsequent looks at his highly skilled work, which seemed to confirm this comparison, were further turnoffs, especially since in my opinion world cinema already has at least one Steven Spielberg too many. When Tsui Hark was first recommended to me as the Chinese Spielberg (around the time of his Peking Opera Blues), that was enough in itself to cool my interest.
#RICKY KING CHING SERIES#
But the delirious title of her series - “Incredibly Hong Kong!,” which sounds like it could have been dreamed up by Bill and Ted - still points in this general direction, and something in me resists this sort of appeal. Scharres’s current Hong Kong series at the Film Center, like her other efforts to make Chinese movies better known here, is considerably more comprehensive than this description implies. The fact that it’s truly a popular cinema made for a regular-attendance audience - the kind of cinema we used to have in the United States before the old studio system fell apart and event-oriented attendance and video rentals took over - seems to make it, for many English and American enthusiasts, a return to childhood innocence and a certain antiintellectual simplicity. If one can say Taiwanese films are the products of reflection and nostalgia by intellectuals in their 30s and 40s, then Hong Kong films represent the dynamism of people in their early 20s.”įor me, this is both the advantage and the drawback of Hong Kong cinema certainly that dynamism has a lot to do with the ways that it’s been celebrated by a handful of Anglo-American critics. Because they are young, the Hong Kong audience is especially attracted by speed, novelty, and fantasy. In this system, stars are a box office guarantee that is still required. “Hong Kong cinema belongs to a young audience, and its creativity tends towards the high spirits and unrestrained fantasies of the young.
(Similarly, the New Yorker‘s refusal to accord even a capsule review to La belle noiseuse can, I suspect, be explained by its long history of neglecting Jacques Rivette, and the same thing goes for its silence on Andrei Tarkovsky.)Īccording to Chiao Hsiung-Ping, a Taiwanese critic, “the only special qualities of Hong Kong cinema are precisely entertainment and commerce,” the two qualities she finds most lacking in the cinema of Taiwan. It’s a bias shared by many of my colleagues, for reasons that are in part self-serving: if we were to suddenly acknowledge the importance of Hong Kong movies, we’d be forced to acknowledge many years of negligence on our part, and obliged to admit an embarrassing lack of knowledge and sophistication on the subject. I have to admit to a certain resistance to Chinese cinema in the past, and to Hong Kong movies in particular. And probably no programmer in this country is more dedicated to making Chinese cinema known than Barbara Scharres, director of the Film Center. In this country there is probably no important national cinema more neglected than the Chinese - actually a transnational entity, as I’m defining it here, including movies from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. China will always belong to the Chinese people. With Leung, John Sham, Yong Lin, Yia Ho, King Shin Chien, and Chan Koon Cheung.
With Hui, Wong, Olivia Cheng, Ricky Hui, Maria Cordero, and Joi Wong. Written by Ko, Michael Hui, and Raymond Wong From the Chicago Reader (March 20, 1992).
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