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March 28, 2024, 09:15:47 PM

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Jackie Chan

Started by Chedney Honks, December 19, 2020, 04:50:54 PM

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notjosh

Quote from: Sonny_Jim on April 09, 2021, 08:58:50 AM
Yeah it's full of interesting little bits, like taping up the aluminium[nb]Aluminunum?  Alumanian?  Metal?  Metal[/nb] ladder to stop his hands getting cut up.  Also I had no idea about his circus background, which makes perfect sense now I think about it.

His first autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, has loads of stuff about the theatre school he went to with Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung. Absolute madness, bordering on child abuse, but the results were pretty spectacular to be fair. There's a movie about it, Painted Faces, which I have't seen yet.

MojoJojo

Does anyone remember seeing Jackie Chan on Richard and Judy promoting Around the World in 80 days? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0686152/fullcredits

Jackie Chan was exhausted (I think he'd just flown in during the press blitz) and couldn't muster any enthusiasm. I just remember him despondently describing how he used to do all his own stunts, but now he was older different things were important to him and he didn't want to risk injury.

(this isn't a dig at Jackie Chan - he was clearly absolutely exhausted, and was there to promote a film that was already looking like a turnip, just a bit of car crash telly that I wonder if anyone else remembers).

Quote from: notjosh on April 09, 2021, 11:56:08 AM
His first autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, has loads of stuff about the theatre school he went to with Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung. Absolute madness, bordering on child abuse, but the results were pretty spectacular to be fair. There's a movie about it, Painted Faces, which I have't seen yet.

Painted Faces is wonderful, features a subtle and very touching Sammo Hung performance, and is currently viewable in a nice HD version on Netflix for anyone interested.

Artie Fufkin

I watched The Foreigner the other day.
It was good in a 'Rambo : First Blood' kinda way.

Chedney Honks

I watched Winners & Sinners, an early 80s flick with Sammo and Yuen Biao plus a load of other famous faces from HK cinema. It's very of its time and place but after about five minutes of thinking it was a bit too goofy, it really clicked with me and I was laughing along having a great time. I've seen it described as a kind of HK Carry On and there is some dated 'romantic humour' but it all seems good natured. It was in the Lucky Stars collection on Eureka Blu-ray. Think it might be selling out in most places but I'd recommend if you're looking for a bit more comedy than action.

Absolutely love Winners & Sinners. Great hangout film, a mixture of really fun and silly vibes with unbelievably dangerous stunts. Cherie Chung is cute as a button too, and gets to kind of muck in with the schemes and hang with the lads in a way that didn't happen as much with the female characters in the sequels.

Magnum Valentino

Quote from: Artie Fufkin on April 12, 2021, 12:58:10 PM
I watched The Foreigner the other day.
It was good in a 'Rambo : First Blood' kinda way.

Doubt we'd be having so much trouble at the moment if we could throw a Jackie Chan at the paramilitaries.

Magnum Valentino

Quote from: Chedney Honks on April 12, 2021, 01:15:24 PM
I watched Winners & Sinners, an early 80s flick with Sammo and Yuen Biao plus a load of other famous faces from HK cinema. It's very of its time and place but after about five minutes of thinking it was a bit too goofy, it really clicked with me and I was laughing along having a great time. I've seen it described as a kind of HK Carry On and there is some dated 'romantic humour' but it all seems good natured. It was in the Lucky Stars collection on Eureka Blu-ray. Think it might be selling out in most places but I'd recommend if you're looking for a bit more comedy than action.

Apparently what's happened there is the discs aren't authored correctly and while they have the bonus features on them, they don't have the menu options to access them, which is why it appeared to go OOP the week after it was released.

I'm going to wait for Eureka to sort it out before I buy it. My original copy of Police Story 1/2 from them was also recalled over similar production troubles.

Joe Oakes

Always thought Magnificent Bodyguards (1978) was one of his most underrated films. The score is awesome, as it's bizarrely directly lifted from Star Wars. Unsurprisingly, they had to re-edit the music for later releases as apparently Star Wars got quite popular.

notjosh

Quote from: Chedney Honks on April 12, 2021, 01:15:24 PM
I watched Winners & Sinners, an early 80s flick with Sammo and Yuen Biao plus a load of other famous faces from HK cinema. It's very of its time and place but after about five minutes of thinking it was a bit too goofy, it really clicked with me and I was laughing along having a great time. I've seen it described as a kind of HK Carry On and there is some dated 'romantic humour' but it all seems good natured.

Have you got to My Lucky Stars yet? I don't think you'll be finding the 'romantic humour' quite so good natured. There are a couple of bits that genuinely made my jaw drop.

Chedney Honks

Not yet, but I'll certainly get to it soon.

Magnum Valentino

Winners and Sinners has two unforgettably brilliant moments - Jackie spin-fly kicking a hoodlum out of a window in slow motion and the insane car pile up that just keeps going and going. Bit disingenuous of Eureka to list Yuen Biao's name on the front cover if his involvement in the other two films is a minimal as this, he's in one scene!

Oh Yuen Biao is in the other two a bit more, he gets proper action set pieces in them as well. However, they definitely aren't 'trio' films like Project A, Wheels on Meals, etc.

Sebastian Cobb

I love the succinct alliterative titles of some of the films like 'Winners and Sinners' and 'Meals on Wheels'. How much creative licencing is there in the translation?

Quite a bit of creative licensing, although the English titles are often conceived by the filmmakers themselves. The Chinese title of Wheels on Meals (快餐车) is closer to 'Fast Food Truck', and the original Chinese title of Winners and Sinners (奇謀妙計五福星) is 'Five Lucky Stars'.

Sebastian Cobb

What about 'Half a loaf of Kung Fu'? It feels like that may have been translated and lost some idiomatic meaning, although it's still a good title.

Google reckons 招半式闖江湖 translates to 'Half Strokes' so maybe not.

notjosh

Watched Thunderbolt (1995) a couple of days back. Came out just before Rumble in the Bronx, and I'm not sure if it was also aimed at an American market, but definitely feels more American than his previous films. A proper nasty European baddy in it, and a couple of really brutal scenes. Also some decent car chases and crashes if that's your bag. Personally I prefer to watch him just hopping up and down stairs and swinging through railings like he's in the circus.

Most disappointing thing for me was that though there's clearly some great slapstick and action choreography in there, it's filmed in an overly stylised manner with loads of cutting so I didn't get to enjoy the action as much as I'd like. Cute romance in it though, so couple of points back for that. The female lead correctly points out that Jackie is dead sexy whenever he gets intense.

Magnum Valentino

Quote from: notjosh on April 29, 2021, 02:42:07 PM
Watched Thunderbolt (1995) a couple of days back. Came out just before Rumble in the Bronx, and I'm not sure if it was also aimed at an American market, but definitely feels more American than his previous films. A proper nasty European baddy in it, and a couple of really brutal scenes.


The scene in Bronx where they fling the bottles at him has stuck with me since childhood as a benchmark for brutality, it's absolutely horrific despite how childish and silly the film tends to be throughout the rest of it.

notjosh

In Thunderbolt they nick a crane and use it to
Spoiler alert
lift up his bedroom (which is a shipping container for some reason) and shake him about like a ragdoll
[close]
. Then they try to
Spoiler alert
drop it on his family, before kidnapping his younger sisters and giving his elderly dad a heart attack
[close]
. Horrible stuff.

Magnum Valentino

I really liked Winners and Sinners but My Lucky Stars and Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars are fucking interminable.

It's really frustrating watching them because Sammo's action direction is some of the very best I've ever seen. His vehicle stuff in particular is incredible and almost every fight scene has a healthy dose of lads going through glass.

But the comedy, and especially the comedy about women, is just awful, properly fucking unbearably unfunny. The wee fat lad that replaces Curly from the first film is too much.

Best thing about all three films, though, is that in the middle film Richard Ng is dubbed with a really distractingly authentic Peter Lorre impression, even though the rest of the cast aren't. It's not a gag that they all sound like actors you could do impressions of (like John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart).

Just one of the five, and Peter Lorre. Baffling.

notjosh

Watched The Tuxedo yesterday. I wasn't expecting much obviously, maybe something on the level of The Spy Next Door (lightweight fun), but it really was the worst Jackie Chan film I've yet seen.

What's weird is that the plot is pitched at a roughly 8-year-old level (ordinary man gets magic tux, becomes James Bond), but the film is full of really grotty sexism - loads of shots of tits and bums, and men leering over women being played for comedy. Even the villain's scheme has a body-horror element which is kind of gross. A few good physical moments from Jackie of course, but some of them ruined by special effects too.

According to Wikipedia, one of the reasons he wanted to make the film at Dreamworks was so he could meet Steven Spielberg, which is mental. If I was Steven Spielberg and I heard that Jackie Chan wanted to meet ME I'd start rewriting the script for Indiana Jones 4.

I'm still surprised that more Hollywood heavyweights, like your Tarantinos of this world, haven't been trying to work with him and put together some projects more worthy of his talents. I'd absolutely love to see him as a Mission: Impossible baddy now that he's stretching his range a bit.

notjosh

Saw Heart of Dragon (1985) last night. It's a bit of a Rain Man situation (though 3 years earlier) in which Jackie is a cop with a brother (Sammo Hung) who has unspecified learning difficulties. It's pretty much a dramatic film bar a couple of action scenes.

I found it pretty affecting. Playing a character with an intellectual disability[nb]apparently this is the preferred term now, in the subtitles I had he is just described as 'mentally retarded'[/nb] can be a bit of a tightrope. But, bearing in mind that I find it harder to judge acting in East Asian films because the intonation is so different, I thought Sammo Hung was pretty good as a naive innocent. Some of the emotional scenes he has with his brother are the best dramatic acting I've ever seen from Jackie, with some real raw emotions on display.

It's all mixed up with a stolen jewellery plot which is pretty hokey and forgettable. But that does result in a climactic shootout which is extremely tense and well-choreographed. It takes place in a building under construction, and has a really strong Die Hard vibe, with Jackie only resorting to physical fighting when his bullets run out. Even if the drama scenes are too saccharine for you, I think it's worth watching for this sequence alone. A bit like that crazy final sequence in My Lucky Stars which has nothing to do with the rest of the film.

I really want to watch Miracles next, based on the other thread, but as I've now seen most of the 'classic' Chan films I'm saving it as a treat while I work through his lesser efforts.

Crenners

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on January 15, 2021, 04:51:27 AMMore Chan-adjacent, but I just watched "Righting Wrongs" with Yuen Biao and Cynthia Rothrock, and it's great.

Fair bit of speculation that a restoration will be coming on Blu-ray next year, presumably via 88 Films or Eureka.

On an 88 and Jackie note, I just finished watching the new release of Armour of God and it was great. Never seen it before but some spectacular stuff in there, particularly the car chase in that mad little Mitsubishi and the fight with the four black lasses. There's one bit where one of the girls like somersaults off this little bridge and Jackie fucking volleys her in mid-air. I went oooff! The hot air balloon finale also made the soles of my feet ache with terror and vertigo. Utterly amazing. I don't know exactly what Jackie did and he obviously didn't skydive onto a hot air balloon but it was a really exciting scene.

I didn't especially like some of the farce and comedy of misunderstanding type stuff, felt a bit naff, I rolled my eyes a couple of times, and I normally have a high tolerance/appreciation for 80s HK humour. Alan Tam is good at what he does but I felt the whole love triangle stuff was a bit underdeveloped and hard to parse or give a shit. Lola Forner was as captivating as ever, she really gets what they're going for. Some dodgy humour these days but she's a great comic actor when she needs to be, excellent timing. I also find it entertaining to have a European actor dubbed with the sulky, petulant huffs and puffs of a young Asian woman. Booklet - or 'book' - is amazing, as well.


BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Crenners on December 17, 2021, 03:27:08 PMThe hot air balloon finale also made the soles of my feet ache with terror and vertigo. Utterly amazing. I don't know exactly what Jackie did and he obviously didn't skydive onto a hot air balloon

Then you don't know Jackie, that's exactly what he did (only out of a plane, not off a cliff).

Crenners

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on December 17, 2021, 03:34:02 PMThen you don't know Jackie, that's exactly what he did (only out of a plane, not off a cliff).

I don't know why you decided to phrase it like that, but I don't consider it a competition.

Anyway...Wow, amazing! It's a shame they couldn't have better captured the scale of the stunt, it looks like the contact with the air balloon is filmed separately to the skydiving footage.


BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Crenners on December 17, 2021, 03:40:06 PMI don't know why you decided to phrase it like that, but I don't consider it a competition.

I don't know why you'd take it like that, it was just a light-hearted way of saying you must be unfamiliar with Jackie's work as he's famous for doing his own stunts. Calm down, dear.

Crenners

#146
@BeardFaceMan

I hadn't seen this film before and the editing (plus the fact that the cliff jump and plane skydive were filmed separately) made it look slightly less impressive than what he actually did. The way it's presented looks like three separate stunts, in fact.

I don't know why you'd assume or suggest that not knowing how one stunt was done means I'm unfamiliar with Jackie Chan, but in the moment that's where you went. No worries.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Crenners on December 17, 2021, 04:31:29 PMI don't know why you'd assume or suggest that not knowing how one stunt was done means I'm unfamiliar with Jackie Chan, but in the moment that's where you went. No worries.

Well the reason I went there was because you said he "obviously" didn't skydive on to the balloon and one of his main selling points is that what you see is what you get with his films and he does all his own stunts, if you see the mental cunt snowboarding down a mountain and jumping on to a passing helicopter then that's exactly what he's doing, that's why it sounded like you're unfamiliar with his work.

You're very pissy today, aren't you?

Crenners

Apart from the ones Mars did, and the separate stunts which were cut together like the hot air balloon in AoG, I agree. 🎃

Anyway, pedantry aside and back to the film, this is a fucking great release. The booklet is probably the best I've seen from 88 so far and the extras are ludicrous. There are three commentaries, a load of interviews and a one-hour chat show where Jackie is really relaxed and funny and open. Transfer also looks very good and there are multiple audio options, various dubs and language options.

I like AoG2 but not such that I was desperate for this, so I'm really glad I went for it in the end. I'm sure they'll do a standard edition in a few months but I'll be glad to keep this set.

Magnum Valentino

Quote from: Crenners on December 17, 2021, 03:27:08 PMFair bit of speculation that a restoration will be coming on Blu-ray next year, presumably via 88 Films or Eureka.

On an 88 and Jackie note, I just finished watching the new release of Armour of God and it was great. Never seen it before but some spectacular stuff in there, particularly the car chase in that mad little Mitsubishi and the fight with the four black lasses. There's one bit where one of the girls like somersaults off this little bridge and Jackie fucking volleys her in mid-air. I went oooff! The hot air balloon finale also made the soles of my feet ache with terror and vertigo. Utterly amazing. I don't know exactly what Jackie did and he obviously didn't skydive onto a hot air balloon but it was a really exciting scene.

I didn't especially like some of the farce and comedy of misunderstanding type stuff, felt a bit naff, I rolled my eyes a couple of times, and I normally have a high tolerance/appreciation for 80s HK humour. Alan Tam is good at what he does but I felt the whole love triangle stuff was a bit underdeveloped and hard to parse or give a shit. Lola Forner was as captivating as ever, she really gets what they're going for. Some dodgy humour these days but she's a great comic actor when she needs to be, excellent timing. I also find it entertaining to have a European actor dubbed with the sulky, petulant huffs and puffs of a young Asian woman. Booklet - or 'book' - is amazing, as well.



Cheers Crenners, Amazon has sold out but 88Films still have stock so that's my Christmas evening film sorted.