Tsui Hark

[Mr Sausage]

Does anyone know anything about Search for the Gods? Letterboxd doesn't list it, Wikipedia lists it as a feature, and IMDB lists it as a short. I've read Lisa Morton's book, but cannot remember what she had to say about it. Has it ever been released on home video?

[TechnicolorAcid]

Where is the Wikipedia article for it, if I may ask? On the page for Hark’s filmography, there isn’t a link to it. Maybe you’re confusing it for the TV movie of the name from 1975 which does have a DVD by the way.

[Mr Sausage]

Where is the Wikipedia article for it, if I may ask? On the page for Hark’s filmography, there isn’t a link to it. Maybe you’re confusing it for the TV movie of the name from 1975 which does have a DVD by the way.

So you noticed there is an entry for Search for the Gods in his Wikipedia filmography, but somehow still thought I was confusing it for something else?

[TechnicolorAcid]

Sorry, I meant did you possibly search it up and get the 1975 TV movie instead of the Hark film, I was a bit vague in what I meant. Sorry about that.

[Mr Sausage]

No, I haven't confused a 1983 Hong Kong movie with a 1975 Kurt Russell tv movie. I don't know what possessed you to ask this.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Cause that was the only Wikipedia article I found for something called Search for the Gods and the mention on Tsui Hark's filmography neither lists it as a feature or either have any actual info about it at all besides that he was the director. But it is a bit of a silly question, you're right. As for your question of if it had a home video release, chances are probably no unless it had an obscure bootleg release, even less so if it is a short film considering the very low chance of it being released unless either in a collection or with another film. There is also the possibility that it's a lost film due to the limited amount of info surrounding it.

[therewillbeblus]

Does anyone know anything about Search for the Gods? Letterboxd doesn't list it, Wikipedia lists it as a feature, and IMDB lists it as a short. I've read Lisa Morton's book, but cannot remember what she had to say about it. Has it ever been released on home video?

I've checked the usual places and can't find it anywhere. That doesn't mean there's been no home video release - sometimes extras/shorts aren't uploaded to certain spaces online. But it seems pretty obscure, and I suspect that Tsui Hark is popular enough where it'd be at least added unsubbed if it was around

[Mr Sausage]

The Chinese Feast (1995)

A celebration of traditional Chinese culture in the form of its cuisine. The film luxuriates in rare and exotic dishes from Chinese history, and films their preparation as tho’ it were a martial arts exhibition (slight discomfort in how many items involve endangered animals). The plot and characters are all over the place, something about a former loan shark who wants to learn how to cook so he can emigrate to Vancouver to pursue his love interest, a chef’s daughter who falls for him, her father whose restaurant is on the verge of hostile takeover, and a cooking master fallen on hard times. The movie is stuffed with plot and characters and yet wears it lightly, usually as just the bare connective tissue between comedic set pieces. Really, this is a vibe movie. It’s all chemistry and aesthetic charm. Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen are a delightful comic pair, and Tsui films everything with beautiful style and creative energy, moving effortlessly from one antic bit to the next, and employing a restless, zipping camera always finding some new way to be dynamic in even prosaic scenes. If nothing else, the movie’s a beautiful example of Tsui’s visual skills. It’s also the first time I’ve ever enjoyed a Tsui comedy. Tsui favours a broad style of Cantonese comedy where everything is loud, furious, and clowning. Mostly it’s not my thing, but sometimes it can be used to good effect in movies like Peking Opera Blues that are only partly comedies. A full-length comedy gives Tsui too many opportunities to overdo it--or it normally does, anyway. Somehow, here, he’s managed to turn even the broadest and most childish comic conceits into something charming and pleasant. I rarely laughed, but I was often left with a smile. Maybe because no matter what was happening, everything was so beautiful to look at, and, again, the two leads are such effortless stars. In fact, the comic set-pieces are choreographed so beautifully and shot with such verve that the film ought to’ve been a musical. Tsui’s instincts, experience shooting martial arts, and feeling for Peking Opera would’ve made him ideal for a big Hollywood-esque musical. And now that I think of it, Shanghai Blues also feels like a movie on the cusp of the musical—one small tip and everyone would be breaking into song. John Woo is the one usually credited with making musicals displaced into gangster action films, but I think Tsui has some of the same instincts. A Chinese Feast is one of Tsui’s most pleasant and enjoyable movies.


The Banquet (1991)

Filmed at a rapid pace by a gigantic crew (including four directors, Tsui among them) and starring seemingly everyone in the Hong Kong film industry, this is less a movie than a fundraiser. It was produced to aid the victims of the Yangtze river flood in ‘91. The plot is skeletal, something about a businessman played by Eric Tsang and his agent played by Jackie Cheung competing with a developer, Sammo Hung, for some prime real estate, and along the way trying to dupe an Arab prince out of his money by throwing a banquet. It’s only there to string along the endless cameos that comprise the movie, including a long scene where Eric Tsang dreams he meets a succession of HK stars. Tony Leung must’ve shot one of his scenes here during the filming of Hard Boiled, because he’s dressed exactly like his character in that movie. You don’t want to be too hard on a film made on the fly for charity, but it’s thin and extremely unfunny. Only for Tsui completists.


Tristar (1996)

A bizarre romantic comedy where a catholic priest (Leslie Cheung) who tends to make women fall in love with him at the altar, a prostitute (Anita Yuen) in debt to a gang of sex traffickers, and a wild, reckless police detective (Lau Ching-Wan wearing the fakest beard in movie history) all become entangled with each other through a mind-boggling series of plot maneouvers that are thrust at the viewer without a sense for logic or motivation. Why anyone does anything in this movie is hard to say; the movie seems to’ve been made up on the fly. Major plot strands are resolved suddenly and then brand new plots begin. New characters are introduced, disappear, then suddenly reappear an hour later. People do one thing and then do another thing--no reason why. It’s a romcom with ADHD. This is exactly what I feared The Chinese Feast would be, a goofy, tedious comedy with only intermittent use of Tsui’s extravagant style. Leslie Cheung is wasted as the blandly smiling pretty boy, and Lau Cing-Wan lets his fake beard do the acting for him. Only Anita Yuen really comes off, giving a full throated performance that, while not funny, is at least fun. She knows what movie she’s in, anyway. What distinguishes the movie is something unique to Tsui, his interest in female spaces. Anita Yuen and her three prostitute friends dominate the movie where any other film would focus on the relationship between the cop and the priest. The women discuss their dreams, make business plans, support each other, and swoon over Leslie Cheung without becoming jealous or catty. The film’s non-judgemental attitude towards their work and focus on their relationship is the highlight (even if part of the plot is about Leslie Cheung trying to save them from prostitution). Less interesting is Yuen’s romance with Cheung or anything to do with Lau’s pointless character. This doesn’t recapture the magic of The Chinese Feast despite the same director and stars, but it has its moments. Too few of them, but they’re there amidst the chaos.


The Big Heat (1988)

Credited to Andrew Kam and Johnnie To, but To went on to say that not only was Tsui constantly meddling and rewriting, but that he actually fired Kam part way into production and hired To, only to take over directing duties himself along with Ching Siu-Tung once production neared the end. Sounds like Tsui didn’t know what he wanted and made everyone else miserable as he scrambled about looking for something, a process he would repeat on Swordsman. As wonderful a director as he is, he sounds like a miserable producer. This one’s a grim and brutally violent movie (it opens with a shot of a man drilling through his own hand in explicit detail) about a cop with a nerve disorder that affects his shooting hand, and a group of criminals out of Malaysia trying to muscle in on Hong Kong. There’s also something about the cop’s former partner being killed, a gay shipping magnate the criminals are blackmailing so they can use his ports to ship guns and narcotics, and a rookie cop’s romance with a nurse, Joey Wong (playing a character so bland that when surrounded by police all pointing guns, she just smiles cheerily as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening). Many of the action scenes are wonderfully kinetic, and there are some stylish scenes here and there, not a few of which bear the stamp of what would become To’s characteristic style. But so much else is disorganized and cliched, and it’s aggressively mean spirited: people’s fingers are blown off; their legs are snapped in two by gunfire; gunshot victims stagger backwards into to sheet metal, decapitating themselves; men are torn in half by elevator cables; and children in wheelchairs are shot full of holes along with the nurses trying to protect them. Coming on the back of his acrimonious split with John Woo, it does seem as tho’ this movie, like A Better Tomorrow III, is Tsui’s attempt to outdo his former partner, this time in gritty ultraviolence. Few directors know action as well as Tsui, To, and Ching Siu-Tung, and they push things to such violent extremes the movie becomes exploitation. But it never reaches the extravagant heights of Woo or Tsui, at least not until the last five-ish minutes which just go for it (and are probably the scenes Tsui filmed himself, to judge by the gleefully manic tone). The movie’s closer to the stuff Yuen Woo-Ping and Corey Yuen were making at the time. Think: an ill-stitched Tiger Cage film.

[afilmcionado]

Dangerous Encounters - First Kind restoration confirmed to be coming to HKIFF as well. Looks like we’ll be getting solid distribution of it!

https://www.facebook.com/hkiffs/posts/p ... xm6CWDhZPl

[Mr Sausage]

Love in the Time of Twilight (1995)

A companion piece to The Lovers. Both are romantic fantasias set in the past and starring Nicky Wu and Charlie Yeung, but this one is less lush and melancholic, preferring the manic energy of romantic comedy. Set in the world of the Peking Opera, the ghost of a young banker recruits an outcast opera troupe member to travel back in time to prevent his murder. Like the laughing painted face in the opening of Peking Opera Blues, the movie announces its artifice from jump, here with the title card mimicking the opening of a Looney Tunes short, replete with sound-alike music. The movie then transitions to its first scene, a Peking opera rendition of Snow White. That’s the challenge Tsui sets himself, to meld the spirits of traditional and modern entertainment into a comic whole through a shared feeling for artifice. The exaggerations of Peking Opera sit side-by-side with effects out of cartoons (some of which work better than others). There are other meldings of the new and traditional: science and the supernatural (here, ghosts and electricity), stage and screen (Peking Opera has to compete with the rise of cinema), and fantasy and history. The movie is outrageously creative, throwing in so many ideas and conceits you nearly get whiplash: historical drama transitions to ghost story transitions to time travel story transitions to the spirit realm, all in the first hour. The movie never rests on a narrative strand for very long. This might sound confusing, but the film manages these transitions organically, or at least speeds across them so quickly you don’t feel the cracks. Tsui also finds a novel variation on a favoured comic situation, a room full of people who have to hide from each other through increasingly elaborate means, only here done with two people stuck back to back, one of whom mustn’t be seen by anyone else in the opera house while the other can’t go anywhere without being pestered. It’s a wonderfully conceived and staged bit of comic fun, using fore- and background compositions to set up the gags. It’s impossible not to like a movie so restlessly creative: whenever something isn’t working, be sure the next bit is coming quickly and probably will. And the hit-to-miss ratio here is high for a Tsui comedy. Even the less successful bits, like the loud whining doofus character, or some of the poor FX, help add to the overall comic energy even when not funny in themselves. And when the bits do land, it’s a delight. Where else in the world would you find Ghost, Back to the Future, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? melded into a single extravaganza, told with the outrageousness and flexibility of a cartoon? Like A Chinese Feast, this is a gem of a film and shares the mantle of Tsui’s best comedy.


The Raid (1991)

Co-directed with Ching Siu-Tung, this is a wartime adventure film following an old doctor in Japanese occupied Manchuria as he helps a unit of Chinese soldiers on a special operation to foil Japanese chemical warfare experiments. Tsui, a lifelong fan of comic books, adapts a famous Chinese manhua named Uncle Choi, mainly as a visual exercise in composing a film like a comic book. It has episodic storytelling, a tendency to isolate actions as tho’ in single frames, and uses all sorts of comic book techniques during transitions, such as pages turning, freeze frames morphing into comic book panels and vice versa, and text boxes functioning as narration (tho’ they are often themselves narrated). The tone is exaggerated and freewheeling, moving between low comedy, hijinks, and outrageous and frequently hyper-violent action. The action is elaborate in a buoyant, clifferhangery way, but rarely involving. And the pace is so frenetic that none of the characters are properly introduced or developed. Maybe as long-standing comic book characters we’re just supposed to know who they are, but the movie doesn’t give you enough to hang on to. The episodic nature of the source material plays into one of Tsui’s characteristic methods: sacrificing narrative unity to turn a film into a collection of moments and sequences. When properly animated, Tsui can make that work, turning the whole into a breathless series of aesthetic pleasures. When not, as here, you get a fitful movie that never seems to go anywhere as it hops between characters and situations. This is a fine experiment in style, but otherwise frivolous and only moderately entertaining. Magnificent Warriors is a better example of this kind of story.


All About Women (2008)

Tsui’s feminist rom com. The plot bounces between three different young women in modern China: an uptight nurse with “selective sclerosis”, so she stiffens up like a fainting goat whenever a man touches her. A company exec whose beauty has a siren-like effect over men, but who spurns romantic relationships in the name of feminism. The last is a punky internet novelist, rock musician, and boxer with an imaginary boyfriend who she talks to, buys meals for, etc (I’m not sure the movie realizes some of her behaviour counts as outright psychosis). For a self-style feminist rom com, all three plots revolve around the womens’ relationships to men: whether they’re using pheromone experiments to overcome their lack of charisma, navigating a love triangle between an admirer and their imaginary boyfriend, or trying to prove they are more than just a pretty face to men. Indeed the only connection between these random women are the men in their lives. Compare with Peking Opera Blues, Tsui’s other big movie about a trio of women, all of whom are allowed space to develop a complex relationship with each other that doesn’t involve men or love, indeed who are given space to explore their own gender identities. Now here’s a movie about a trio of women called All About Women that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. It ought’ve been titled All About Men. Tsui’s gender politics seems to’ve regressed, or at least he was opportunistic enough to use traditional gender dynamics to get a foothold in the mainland Chinese film market. It didn’t work; he’d eventually pull himself out of his mid-aughts box office slump with historical epics dominated by FX, starting with the first Detective Dee two years after this. David Bordwell believes Tsui’s artifice in this period was getting in the way of emotion rather than amplifying it, but this is a pretty ripe melodrama, so it’s hard to tell since, while there is an abundance of emotion, that abundance by its nature makes the emotions inauthentic. All the style gimmicks calling attention to themselves don’t help, tho’. There is something exhausting about Tsui’s work from this period. Seven Swords, Flying Swords at Dragon Gate, Missing, and this one, have the same fatiguing intensity where the style never lets up, and the lightness and energy of the early work is gone, leaving heavy, manic, relentless films that go on for too long.


Triangle (2007)

A gimmick movie: three directors, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To, each direct one third of this 90 minute movie in isolation from the others. Tsui is an odd choice for the first section, as the complex plot requires careful set up and Tsui is notoriously impatient with exposition. He layers his segment with stylistic tricks that are fun to look at and jumps in time that are certainly striking, but they all distract from the plot information necessary to understand the other two sections. His style here resembles that of Time and Tide, but it worked there because the rest of the movie hurtles along with the same nervous Tsui energy all through. Ringo Lam and Johnnie To aren’t those kinds of directors, tho’. They’re more patient and controlled—they certainly don’t carry you over structural cracks and incoherence through momentum and mutability. It’s a strange experience to go from something so jittery in Tsui’s segment to Ringo Lam’s steady, focused segment, with its careful approach to narrative details. The effect unfortunately is that the thriller plot doesn’t ratchet up in the second act but wind down. Lam is left to build his own momentum from scratch. Given how well Lam handles the plot information, I’d say he would've been a better choice for section 1. If nothing else, the film shows what a weird outsider Tsui Hark is. Lam and To have somewhat complimentary styles, sober, controlled, grounded, with elegant camera movements (To especially). Tsui is the madman of the three. The movie is an auteurist treat: even if you didn’t know the directors, a careful viewer could sense the shift in style and tone between the three parts. Of the three styles, Tsui’s is the showiest, Lam’s the least. Tsui jerks along from moment to quick moment, while Lam prefers things gritty and grounded, and To indulges in his operatic sense of movement and composition. In fact To’s section is near perfect, the kind of silent confrontation between multiple parties that he does so well. His slow, guided camera movements connecting the various parties across the moodily lit location, coupled with that sense of prankish fun as he layers on bits and complications, and then the amazing shootout in the tall grass, is the highlight of the movie. My least favourite section, oddly enough, was Tsui’s. His strange and singular style doesn’t seem well matched for the material he was given. Lam’s is the least memorable, which is as much down to the material as anything, given how middles are often the most forgettable parts of stories; but at least Lam’s section is functional unlike Tsui’s jerky approach to narrative. Triangle is a really interesting experience, well worth seeing. It’s just not all that satisfying as a movie in itself.


King of Chess (1991)

Ho Yim has official director’s credit, but producer Tsui as usual shadow directed big portions of this one. Oddly, Hou Hsiao-Hsien was an associate producer! There are two plot strands that the film cuts between: the first is about some tv executives who find a kid with psychic powers and try to make him a tv star chess prodigy. The second is set in a work camp during the Maoist 60s, where a chess genius played by Tony Leung Ka-Fei struggles to practise his art amidst the hostilities and deprivations of the era. This is really two movies, an historical melodrama and a lightly fantastical modern satire. The film opens with a long montage of footage of the cultural revolution: crowds full of revolutionary fervour, dancing, chanting, carrying pictures and banners, with plenty of footage of Mao himself in parades and walking amongst the people. That transitions to a shot of modern Taipei, with its glass skyscrapers and modern conveniences. You might be tempted to assume the film is making an explicit connection between the high idealism of Maoist China and the capitalist excesses of Taiwan, but ten minutes later there is a flashback to Maoist China where we see all the ugly excesses of that time, its fraught atmosphere of suspicion, its hunger and desperation, and its broken down infrastructure. So this is definitely not Maoist propaganda—but what is Tsui doing with these historical parallels and contrasts in his story about chess and modern media? Why is there such emphasis placed on one character’s necklace bearing a cross, which is present in both stories and not only gets numerous closeups, but forms part of a heavy-handed transition where the search for the lost necklace in a pot in a Taoist temple cuts to the anti-religious fervour of a Maoist rally. It’s hard to pin down exactly what the film is doing. Maybe the answer is in the quote right at the beginning, that “China will always belong to the Chinese people”. Because the next cut is to the Maoist footage, you’d be tempted to think this was propaganda for the one China policy (not unlike Zhang Yimou’s Hero), but the endless criticisms of the Maoist era make that less and less likely. Late in the movie, the John Shum character, a Hong Konger trying to escape the coming hadnover by making it in Hong Kong (or so the gossipers say), admits “I’m Chinese, I thought Taiwan was my home like Hong Kong. But I can’t adjust to it at all.” He could add mainland China to that list, as his childhood time in the work camp brings equal discomfort. The movie is not hopeful, but anxious. China is for all Chinese, and yet none of these Chinese characters are able to feel at home anywhere, be it in the times of glorious revolution on the Mainland, the shiny capitalism of Taiwan, or (the movie suggests), the headlong world of Hong Kong. All through the movie, the characters encounter an endless series of fractures and disunities, whether they're dogmatic tribalisms with their denunciations, suspicions, rankings, and essentialsms, or the zero sum games of capitalism where human beings are subordinated to their value as money makers. The film is full of existentialist anxiety and uncertainty at the coming handover, unable to see any form of home in it, seeing instead only people made to feel like outsiders no matter what version of China they reside in. But this is not a hopeless movie: there is one form of unity the film grasps hold of, the unity of culture, here the pleasures, excitements, and artistry of chess. This is a complicated and not particularly coherent movie. Tsui doesn’t seem to be driving at any particular set of ideas, rather restlessly (as always) moving around amidst the various fears, anxieties, hopes, and ideas that the coming handover brings out in him. For that reason, the movie is interesting and even moving. But this is not a wholly successful effort, and I wonder if something more satisfying and coherent would’ve been possible if Tsui had directed the thing himself or just let Ho Yim alone to make his own movie. I’m pretty sure much of the historical scenes were shot by Ho, with Tsui doing the Taiwan scenes and the climax of the historical section.


1:99 Shorts (2003)

This compendium of 1 to 2 minute short films meant to give encouragement to a Hong Kong emerging from SARS feels dystopian. Many of the shorts are essentially advertisements for happiness, shot using the standard visual grammar of tv commercials. There’s something inherently offputting about someone trying earnestly to sell you happiness, something so inauthentic seeming that you can’t help feeling that, whatever is going on, it’s the exact opposite of what you’re being shown. Teddy Chen’s entry, with a kid running around encountering smiles wherever he goes, is even set to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, a song whose context the filmmakers seem blissfully unaware of. Tsui’s entry is a characteristically goofy and energetic animated film, not especially memorable, but showing more style and imagination than everything else. It’s the highlight. There are a couple others that attained a certain mood, but mostly this whole project set my teeth on edge.


Septet: the Story of Hong Kong (2020)

An anthology of short films each made by a notable Hong Kong auteur and set during a decade of Hong Kong history, from the 50s to the 2020s (excluding the 70s, which John Woo was supposed to helm but had to drop out of due to health issues). Like any anthology this is a mixed bag. Patrick Tam’s was the worst, a stiffly shot, poorly acted chamber drama without an intense enough emotional palette to carry off its melodrama. The best segments are Ann Hui’s gentle piece of nostalgia and lost time, and Ringo Lam’s portrait of aging, cultural change, and urban progress as labyrinthine nightmare (it gains poignance as Lam’s final work, posthumously released, becoming a meditation on his own aging and death). Tsui, proving himself ever the singular madman, makes something out of step with every other segment, a futuristic, post-modern, self-reflexive story about two guys in an antiseptic psychiatric ward who confuse themselves for the directors of this anthology (including one guy who starts to believe he’s Tsui Hark making an anthology film called Septet in a bit which turns the movie back in on itself as he breaks the fourth wall to describe the aims and methods of the movie we’ve just watched). The distinction between doctors and patients is upended to the point the story becomes a Russian doll of reversals and reveals. It ends with Tsui Hark and Anne Hui showing up as themselves to humorously critique the segment we just saw, completing the moebius strip the short kept threatening to become. It’s weird and ridiculous, related to Hong Kong only tangentially, but a lot of fun and constantly inventive, one of the better segments even if it’s out of place among all the historical and sociological entries.


A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation (Andrew Chen, 1997)

Written, produced, and edited by Tsui, this animated version of his Chinese Ghost Story films took four years to complete (suggesting why Tsui didn’t direct as well). It has a novel animation style, using entirely CGI backgrounds and environments on which traditionally animated characters are painted. The animation was done by a Japanese studio, so it feels quite anime while also having its own unique style. The CGI is primitive, sometimes reminding me of the cut scenes from mid-90s video games, but it does have a flexibility that saves a lot of it from being stiff and awkward like so much CGI animation from the era. The original movie could be childish in charming ways, but was plainly for adults. Here, Tsui turns the story into an outright children’s movie. Animation provides ample opportunity for Tsui’s customary speed and invention. There is always some crazy bit of colour or imagery speeding past the camera, and the story never goes long before some new exciting situation occurs. The Chinese Ghost Story movies aren’t great favourites of mine, but I like them well enough. They’re charming, exciting fantasy romances. I feel similarly about this one. It makes up for its limitations in budget and technology by being fun, fast paced, and full of ideas. It follows the basic outline and characters of the first movie, but adds so many different things that it’s really a brand new version of the story rather than an adaptation.

[Mr Sausage]

And there ends my Tsui project, nearly two years to the day of my first post on it. I've now seen all his credited features (except the mysterious, unavailable Search For the Gods), all the films he shadow directed, and his two short films. What a ride.

I've updated my (no longer provisional) list of essential Tsui's to reflect what I think is the core of his achievement, the films that most represent his career. My favourites? Nearly that whole list. But I'm especially fond of Dangerous Encounters, Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China, and The Lovers.

I'm going to do some rewatching at some point (it's been a while since I saw We're Going to Eat You and Time and Tide), and I'll be there whenever The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero gets released. But otherwise, that's it. Now I'm on to 70s kung fu and Johnnie To.

[Finch]

Frank Djeng confirmed that Legend of Zu is coming from 88 Films.

[Maltic]

Spectrum Films in France is strongly hinting at a release for Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind.

They are also teasing a 4K release for Shanghai Blues.

Hawt.

Huge

https://twitter.com/SpectrumAsie/status ... 8416948615

Shanghai Blues will be screened at Cannes Classics before its UHD release at the end of November. The film will be presented with the new dubbing where the characters speak their original dialect and the old original track. All accompanied by a book about the master.

[Mr Sausage]

That's fantastic, but what do they mean new dubbing in the original dialect?

[Maltic]

I guess it's another "improvement", like the CGI-snake in the Green Snake restoration?

Luckily, we get the OG audio track as well.

[Stefan Andersson]

"Don´t Play with Fire" Comparison between Director´s Cut on French Blu and on French DVD:
https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=471200

I believe this is the restoration from 2024 Cannes Classics.

The introductory text card about explosives is missing.
VHS inserts in the Director´s Cut runs at 25fps both on the Blu and the DVD.
Bits of censored audio is still missing from the film, and are replaced with audio from the theatrical version, combined with subtitles that translate the missing audio instead of the replacement audio.

Linked article contains links to other Movie-Censorship comparisons for the same film.

[pistolwink]

I find it so strange that while Tsui is directing some of the most successful Chinese films ever—including one film that made nearly a billion dollars, almost all of it in China alone—his critical stock could hardly be lower. I wonder what folks who have been following his career for almost 50 years make of it. Do they see much of the "old" Tsui in these CCP blockbusters?

In a way, he reminds me of people like Carol Reed and William Wyler. Although they made some enormous and very successful blockbusters in their final decades, their critical reputations are sustained almost exclusively by their earlier work.

[diamonds]

I find it so strange that while Tsui is directing some of the most successful Chinese films ever—including one film that made nearly a billion dollars, almost all of it in China alone—his critical stock could hardly be lower. I wonder what folks who have been following his career for almost 50 years make of it. Do they see much of the "old" Tsui in these CCP blockbusters?

Spoiler

[Mr Sausage]

Tsui has been making blockbusters since the early 80s. He was responsible for some of the highest grossing HK films, both as director and producer. So his reputation does actually rest on some of his most financially successful films, eg. Zu and Once Upon a Time in China. His recent blockbusters may've brought in in more pure cash, but this is also a far different historical moment. Tsui's original audience was much more limited in scope. Now, he has access to the entirety of mainland China, with little competition from Hollywood, and is making blockbusters tailored to mainland tastes. He now has access to an audience vaster than he could've dreamed of back in Hong Kong. But I think the fact he was able to make so many popular movies in a smaller, more competitive, more congested market unsupported by government interest is more impressive than his current run making billion-dollar-grossing propaganda movies.

I've been pretty vocal about my disappointment with Tsui's late blockbusters. If you gave them to some old Tsui fans without revealing the director, I doubt anyone would guess Tsui was behind them. Their style is often workmanlike, with a textureless and overbright visual aesthetic probably the result of whatever cheap 3D tech is being used, and unobtrusive, tasteful camera movements that put you in mind of anything but Hong Kong. There's little of the restless, searching visual energy that defined his style, an increasing embrace of traditional gender roles over the gender bending of his golden period, and less of a joyous interest in traditional Chinese culture and folklore. While watching the first Detective Dee, all I could think about was the Guy Ritchie Sherlock movies with their dreary competence and anonymous visuals. At their best, as in The Taking of Tiger Mountain and the second Detective Dee, Tsui is able to conjure in these later films a bit of fun, even at times suggest his old craziness (Tiger Mountain literally has two endings, where Tsui states he's unhappy with the prosaic original ending and invents a second one full of careening lunacy--it's a cheerful reminder of what a madman he once was). But at their worst, like the Lake Changjin duo, he's simply a hired director of party propaganda. There's nothing in this period to suggest a great filmmaker.

That said, his post 2010 blockbuster era is not his worst. That's the preceding decade, where you find his three worst films: Black Mask 2, Missing, and All About Women. At this point he'd lost control of his style, which became jittery, impatient, and bloated. There are signs of this in his earlier post-handover work like Time and Tide, but by the end of the decade he no longer seemed to know what he was doing. He was cramming more and more into his movies, but with a nervous impatience that stops him from fully working with any of that material. These movies are exhausting and alienating.

His return to blockbuster filmmaking is something of a relief. It results in blander, more anonymous films, but Tsui is at least back in control of his filmmaking again. He's even telling properly constructed stories--a shock considering just a few years earlier, in his segment of Triangle, he'd become constitutionally unable to do exposition even tho' he was tasked with the most exposition dependent part of the movie.

[Mr Sausage]

Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants (2025)

I'm astonished at how bad this was, how frequently I was checking my watch, how interminable it seemed. An empty, anonymous movie with no life, ideas, or even a sense of personal style. The nadir of Tsui's filmmaking, as bad as Black Mask 2 and All About Women. That this is the highest grossing wuxia film in Chinese history is a sad, baffling fact.

The movie adapts part of a same Jin Yong novel that inspired WKW's Ashes of Time, with Tony Leung Ka-Fei even playing the Leslie Cheung character, tho' he's a flattened villain of the mustache-twirling kind rather than Cheung's layered, conflicted martial artist. There's an endless amount of plot here, but very little story. The movie takes place during the Mongol's attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty, with a magical hero born a Han Chinese but raised in Mongolia pursuing his love interest, whom he'd spurned, while also kinda navigating the war. Meanwhile, Tony Leung's Western Venom is after the the hero's girl so he can possess the magical scroll she carries. That's about it--it's not really a story, it's a set of things that happen in the same time and space; and yet a million things are going on at once here. The movie is exhausting. Because it's adapting a giant novel, there's so much context and so many relationships to explain that the movie isn't a story so much as a sustained piece of exposition. Even the conversations between characters are just exposition. Such is the film's madness for exposition that it will recap scenes we'd just seen, like, ten minutes prior. Even the prologue is a whole movie's worth of plot crammed into ten minutes just so we can sort of understand who the characters are.

The pacing, too, is rotten. The movie manages somehow to be both too fast and too slow. The movie cuts from scene to scene with such rapidity that nothing develops properly and you often have trouble locating yourself or understanding each scene's relationship to the others. Nothing seems to have space to develop properly. At the same time, individual scenes drag on, piling up details and information without seeming to go anywhere. The movie jittery and somnambulist, which is weird.

Then there's the visual style, the flat, overlit, textureless visual style that's sadly become Tsui's mode of choice for his late blockbusters. Yeah, the camera rushes around, but it never lands on anything interesting or finds an arresting composition. The camera's moving because everything in this film is moving, but without energy or creativity. It adds to the jitteriness without compensating for the sludge, and it also just contributes to the overload that defines the movie. You're getting a million details, characters, histories, and bits of information while flying breakneck between scenes while also watching the camera whizz through flat, fuzzy images and overbright colours that are hard to take in. It's headache inducing.

Predictably, the cast has no charisma; they are pretty dolls inhabiting shallow facades parading as characters. The performances are flat and perfunctory. And there isn't even much action to liven things, just a couple magic battles with characters throwing wind at each other (seriously) and one battle scene at the start that's hard to follow because the CGI is so fuzzy and annoying. The best action scenes occur during the credits, and are sadly short to boot (did they end up cutting all the action?) What's left is the political story, which is barely sketched, and the love story, which is wooden and unconvincing, shared by performers with no chemistry.

I expected this if I'm being honest, but I still hated sitting through all two-and-a-half hours of this mess. It has all the fatigue and bloat of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate coupled with the waxy, banal visual style of the Detective Dees and Tsui's general indifference to storytelling. A sad display from a once supremely talented man. But it's proving to be another huge success for him. Would that Xu Hao-Feng's 100 Yards, a genuinely complex and well-made wuxia, had gotten that attention instead.

[feihong]

Aw man, what a disappointment––but not altogether unexpected. The advance footage I saw of this looked pretty unfocused and unimpressive. About 15 years ago, after Seven Swords and even the first Detective Dee, I would have been over the moon to see Tsui Hark take on this novel (also the basis for Chang Cheh's Brave Archer series as well as Ashes of Time, and the miserable, concurrently-produced Jeff Lau comedy Eagle-Shooting Heroes). But my gut instinct is not to trust what he creates now, and it sounds like the suspicion is justified by the movie.

[Mr Sausage]

Forgot to mention it, but the subtitles were weird. There'd be colloquial sentences like 'Get out of here!' followed by sentences using 'forsooth', 'verily', or some other archaic word. I got a small bit of entertainment out of that.

[shiftyeyes]

Forgot to mention it, but the subtitles were weird. There'd be colloquial sentences like 'Get out of here!' followed by sentences using 'forsooth', 'verily', or some other archaic word. I got a small bit of entertainment out of that.

What do you expect when the title of the film is as antiquated as "The Gallants"? Noticed a bunch of errors in the subtitles as well.

I'm a fan of the source material (or so I really got into it the last few years due to my love of Ashes of Time and the publication of English-language translations). I really wanted to see an epic multi-part Lord of the Rings style big-budget movie adaptation, and it would've been fun if they cast some of the HK legends as the Five Martial Arts Greats (guys like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, the Tony's, Donnie Yen, etc). There are countless TV adaptations, but who has the 60 hours to spend on each of those? The Shaw Brothers Brave Archer films are pretty fun, but far from a definitive retelling of this story. Was optimistic when this Tsui Hark film was announced, but there were maddingly few details about its cast, story, etc. until about two months ago.

Ultimately, I thought it was entertaining enough. It really only adapts the very last part of the novel (the Mongolian battle stuff), which means all the good stuff is left out - essentially our hero's journey and all the fun martial artists and intrigue he encounters. We get a few snippets in flashbacks. I don't know how easy the movie is to follow if you're unfamiliar with the story, but they say that the story is very widely known all throughout China, so maybe they figured their primary audience already knew what was going down. I think this movie's decent enough for what it is, but I really disliked all the CGI stuff. I don't like the way the martial arts just looks like some Doctor Strange magic stuff. And without the main story of Guo Jing honing his skills, it just feels like he's a dude who's coincidentally also a superhero? The lead actor also feels somewhat more pretty and sensitive than I picture Guo Jing, who is usually portrayed as maybe a bit simple-minded, but determined and full of heart. I don't feel we get a good sense of Guo's journey or who he is. I was disappointed with the portrayal of Ouyang Feng (coming as an Ashes of Time fan). But I feel the character is more of a cartoon villain in the book anyway. I liked seeing Tony Leung Ka Fai (though would've preferred him to reprise Huang Yaoshi who's not in this movie), but the part felt mostly thankless and devolves into some silly CGI stuff.

But I had a decent time. Brought along two friends and they liked it too and one is even interested in getting into the books.

[pistolwink]

So does the Film Movement 4k/Blu-ray of SHANGHAI BLUES have the original Cantonese soundtrack as well as the new dub? I know this has been mentioned here before but I can't seem to find the info.

[andyli]

From what I heard it only carries the redub, and in a wrong format (should be 5.1).