city on fire
review
Amazon.com
Lyall Bush
CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
By Lisa Odham Stokes
and Michael Hoover
Verso, 372 pages
The world first took notice of Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s, when Bruce
Lee's Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon brought a new level of
psychological realism to the "chop socky" movies being made up
until that point. But it wasn't until the 1980s that a new generation of
directors and stars--a moviemaking system, in fact--reached its boiling
point, and American audiences began to hear about John Woo's
"heroic bloodshed" films and Jackie Chan's Chaplinesque
martial arts action movies. City on Fire is the authoritative account of
that system, and authors Stokes and Hoover--a pair of community college
teachers from central Florida--have traced the industry back to the
early decades of the century when Shanghai-financed films first gave way
to local productions like Rouge, Li Minwei's story of courtesans. The
remaining bulk of the book is given over to the go-go '80s when record
attendance at local movie houses fueled the industry and gave
large-as-life careers to the likes of Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan,
Michelle Yeoh, and Maggie Cheung, and to directors like Woo, Ann Hui,
Stanley Tong, and (Quentin Tarantino's favorite) Kar-Wei Wong. As the
authors tell it, it was in the '80s when Hong Kong moviemaking most
resembled the early days of Hollywood, when money flowed and movies
rolled out from sketchy scripts and a few rat-a-tat weeks in the editing
room (complete with a "dark underbelly" of exploitation too).
The final, encyclopedic chapters detail American productions like Rumble
in the Bronx and Face/Off, and international successes like Peter Chan's
Comrades: Almost a Love Story. But it's really the years from 1978 to
1995 that the authors are sweet on, and anyone interested in--or in love
with--Hong Kong cinema will find themselves feeling the same way, paging
through this fascinating title.
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