Cool World Chow, Yeoh, Leung and Li ... You May Not Know Their Names, But You Won't Forget Their Movies By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 23, 1999

Chow Yun-Fat, icon of Hong Kong Films. (Photo by Kerry Hayes/New Line Cinema)

This is the new backdrop to a revolution of creativity, strongly influenced by a crazy-quilt melange of Akira Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Martin Scorsese, where characters worry about the Chinese takeover and cops play sax in cool jazz clubs in their spare time.

Yes, we're talking action pictures, gangsters and triads, but we're also talking love stories, mind-blowing stunts and pop-operatic poignancy. We're talking out-of-this-world supernatural encounters between men and killer witches, or between blue-faced, hopping vampires and goofy sorcerers' apprentices.

And last but not least, we're talking female action heroes who routinely bust the rib cages of their male assailants without so much as breaking a fingernail. Don't mess with Moon Lee! (Or is that Moon Li? One of the peculiarities about Hong Kong movies is the variety of names for each performer. With so many dialects of Chinese – and so many cockamamie English translations thereof – the spelling of names run the gamut. There's no telling, for sure, whether the pop chanteuse who stars in "Chungking Express" is Faye Wong or Faye Wang. Many filmmakers give themselves English monikers to make it easy. Director John Woo, for instance, is an Anglicization of his original name of Wu Yusen. Performer Brigitte Lin's full name is Brigitte Lin Chin-Hsia. But why is Michelle Li sometimes known as Michelle Reis? Beats us.)

You can find these films – with whatever names happen to be in the credits – increasingly in alternative video stores in Washington and around the country. And during July and August, you can sample a smattering of recent works at the Freer Gallery of Art, whose free Hong Kong film series is already underway.

But we must preface this paean with a huge caveat: Without guns, without fighting, without gallons of blood and multiple deaths, there would be no Hong Kong cinema. With the plague of violence that has recently permeated the United States, the issue is impossible to avoid.

But if you'll permit us to opine, there's violence – such as the misogynistic kind in "The General's Daughter," which virtually salivates over its female victim – and there's the Hong Kong brand, which turns violence into something akin to Keystone Kops slapstick.

The Asian variety is so obviously over the top, so deliriously zany, so obviously theatrical, it enters the realm of the cartoon. The adult cartoon zone, that is. Obviously, you wouldn't want to pop John Woo's "The Killer" into the VCR for family night. But, we think, there is a difference.

For one thing, Hong Kong cinema is graced with a sort of naivete, a goofy, anything-goes spirit that turns bedlam into bubble gum.

In the gun battles of the great filmmaker Woo, gun casings constantly hit the floor like castanets. Heroes leap through the air in slow motion, guns blazing from both hands, while most of their bullets tear harmlessly through walls and windows. Their victims get killed, sure. In droves. In piles. Hong Kong producers spend more money on blood squibs than scripts. But this kind of surreal violence evokes bouts of balletic paintball more than real world horrors.

That said, what are we telling you? That Hong Kong, the third-largest movie production center in the world (after Hollywood and India), happens to be one of the world's most creative, effervescent fonts of filmmaking.

Since the 1970s, the former British colony has turned out literally thousands of films, all of them on a shoestring and shot within days or weeks, and most of them loaded with high-octane vitality.

Because their audiences are so linguistically varied – they have to make films for Mandarin, Cantonese and other Asian- and English-language markets – Hong Kong filmmakers are forced to entertain on the most immediate level or perish. Creativity is the only means of survival.

It used to be Bruce Lee was the sole poster boy for Asian action films with such '70s cult classics as "Enter the Dragon" and "Fists of Fury" (aka "The Big Boss").

These were the so-called "chop-socky" flicks, churned out during that decade by two production arms, the Shaw Brothers and Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest. They featured the cheap James Bond scenarios, the high-pitched battle yells and – as all too many stand-up comedians have reminded us – the bad dubbing.

But when the Shaw oligarchy shifted into television production, opportunities opened up for independent producers to make whatever they wanted. Commercial success was all that mattered. During the 1980s and 1990s, a veritable revolution occurred, which has continued virtually unabated.

Even though the People's Republic of China's assumption of control over Hong Kong has caused massive creative flight to Hollywood and other filmmaking locales, movies continue to proliferate.

More than gunplay: Director Wong Kar-Wai's "Chungking Express." (Miramax/Rolling Thunder Pictures)

At the receiving end, those films are increasingly reaching beyond the traditional inner ring of demand–the Chinatowns of London, Toronto, New York and San Francisco. Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan and directors Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Wong Kar-Wai have become cult figures in the alternative video circuit. And with the help of such champions as Quentin Tarantino (whose "Reservoir Dogs" owes a great deal to Lam's fantastic "City on Fire") and his Rolling Thunder Pictures, Hong Kong cinema has begun to be appreciated and distributed in the arthouse circuit.

Many leading lights of Hong Kong cinema, lured by Hollywood and concerned about China assuming control of the island, have made the crossover to Hollywood. Chan, heir apparent to Buster Keaton with his unbelievable gymnastic abilities, body-damaging stunts and insoluble good humor, has grinned, somersaulted and roundhouse-kicked his way into box office popularity in America with such films as "Rumble in the Bronx" and "Supercop."

Woo has already become a major Hollywood player with "Hard Target," "Broken Arrow" and "Face/Off." He's currently shooting the sequel to "Mission: Impossible" with Tom Cruise. And Chow, Woo's leading man in Hong Kong, the Asian continent's hottest star and, quite possibly, the coolest man alive, has already starred in "The Replacement Killers" and "The Corruptor." Currently, he's making "Anna and the King" with Jodie Foster.

Prepare, too, for a greater Hollywood presence from actors Jet Li (who had a co-starring role in "Lethal Weapon IV"), Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung, and Tsui, one of Hong Kong's more arty directors, who has already had the dubious distinction of directing Dennis Rodman in "Double Team."

But it's not the school of Hong Kong's latest Hollywood stuff that has us excited. It's the most recent past.

You just have to watch Chan's outstanding "Police Story" series to appreciate how much greater he was in the Hong Kong guerrilla-budget system than here. Woo's American films, such as "Hard Target" and "Face/Off," don't hold a candle to "A Better Tomorrow," "Hard Boiled" and his other low-budget HK classics. And there's no way that Lam, Tsui Hark and Wong could replicate their extraordinary work over here. The American studio system simply isn't built for low-tech talent.

If the Hollywood industrial complex amounts to an ocean liner charting its formulaic course through America's territorial waters, Hong Kong movies are like Jet Skis, zipping in lunatic circles, churning wake, blowing smoke and zigzagging madly around their Titanic-sized competition.

Even though the characters and situations are extremely local–the stories are almost always set in Hong Kong and occasionally mainland China–the human situations get you where you live. The sensitive stuff is never far from a Hong Kong film. Fidelity to one's friends–even to the point of shooting them in the head to put them out of their misery!–is a big value. So are true love and blind devotion (literally blind in the case of "The Killer"). Male heroes, especially ones played by Chan, are often shy in romantic situations before exploding into action. And you never know what unexpected bit of comedy might ensue. Only in Hong Kong cinema will you find an entire restaurant staff spending almost 10 minutes trying to subdue an oversized, extremely slippery raw fish, this in Tsui Hark's "The Chinese Feast."

What inventiveness! What variety! The pop-art world of Wong's "Chungking Express" is nothing like the mist-swirling mysticism of Ching Siu-Tung's "A Chinese Ghost Story." And the almost-dorky comedy of Ricky Lau's "Mr. Vampire," with a whole squad of vampires who pogo through their afterlives, has zero connection to Woo's so-called "gun fu" shoot-'em-ups. But they're all from the same wellspring.

The Blockbuster video chain, powered by wholesale-dealing connections with Hollywood studios, continues to muscle independent video store owners out of business, neighborhood by neighborhood. But it's important to realize, there is life beyond Mel Gibson. There are entertaining worlds out there to be sampled in such progressive video stores as Potomac Video–Washington and Video Vault in Alexandria. And as the Freer Gallery series proves, those movies are still coming.

Jet Li is charming, almost Mickey Rooney-ish "Hitman," an energetic, amusing movie from Stephen Tung-Wai (aka Wei Tung), which screens Aug. 1 in the Freer series. A shy, former mainland soldier looking for ways to send money home to Mom, he hears of a $100 million "revenge fund" left posthumously by a Japanese industrialist to avenge his death in case assassins gun him down. Working with a two-bit hustler (the burly, hilarious Eric Tsang), Li looks for the sinister "killer angel" behind this murder.

Film noir–a staple of the HK genre–is very much the operating mood in "Dragon Town Story," Yeung Fung-Lung's murky drama set in rural China during the early 20th century. In the movie, which screens Aug. 20 and 21, a young woman recruits a professional to kill the warlord who slaughtered her family. The drama, which suggests a collaboration between Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and Alfred Hitchcock, remains captivating all the way through to its twisteroo ending.

Welcome to Hong Kong. Hope you keep coming back for more.

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