This is an image that has been associated with me or characters I’ve played for the bulk of my career. It’s a still from the first film I produced, Death Fish, which was shot in August, 1997. One of writer/director Carlos Sanchez Lopez‘s influences was Sergio Leone, especially the film A Fistful of Dollars:
When I was a kid, A Fistful of Dollars was on television a lot because westerns were still popular and Clint Eastwood was at the height of his superstardom in the 1970‘s. Also, it was only about 100 minutes long without commercials, so it fit perfectly into a two hour prime time TV slot. If Clint had a new movie out in theaters, Fistful of Dollars would be on The Million Dollar Movie all week, so I saw it a lot.
Most of you know that I’m not really a film critic, but my friend who is asked my thoughts on Made In Hong Kong about a month ago, and I’m just getting around to posting them now. This isn’t really a review, just my opinion. I suppose that is a review, huh? Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it:
I wasn’t sure I had seen the film based on the trailer. The cast looked familiar enough and I had seen plenty of movies back then. Even though the trailer mentions that this if the first time Made In Hong Kong was released in the US, there were plenty of movies shown in Chinatown (not to metion bootleg VHS tapes and DVDs) that never had official American releases. I don’t even know the titles of many of the ones I saw back then. It also mentions that this is the firstindependent HK film, but I’m sure Tsui Hark would take issue with that.
Turns out, I had not seen the film before. The 4K restoration I saw looked like the movie was shot yesterday. It looked better than it would have had I seen it back in the 1990s, because in those days the 35mm prints were beat up by the time I saw them. It was actually a little disconcerting to me at first, but not everyone is going to have that issue. While it isn’t for everyone, I enjoyed the movie. Given the plot, it could have gone the extreme melodrama route like similiar gangster youth films of the era. The director chose instead to keep things grounded, focusing on the characters, their relationships to each other and the greater societies they inhabit, occasionally injecting some social commentary. I wouldn’t call Made In Hong Kong a bleak movie, but it does have that streak of fatalism prevelant in HK cinema leading up to the Handover and uncertainty about the future. It’s worth a watch, but not if you’re in need of cheering up.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on the Police Academy documentary. Got an email update yesterday from the team:
We finally got Steve Guttenberg on board and his 3-hour interview was amazing, but really reshaped the narrative of the doc. We tried to insert him in where he was needed but in the end, we felt we needed to start the edit from scratch. We strongly believe that this was the right decision and now the doc is shaping into something very special. We will have a more detailed update soon!
Been a while since I posted anything new, and it’ll be a while longer. If you’ve been here before you might have noticed that I’ve updated the design of the site and I’m now going through it and fixing broken links and whatnot. Just to post something (sort of) fresh, I’m recycling a comment I made on a Police Academypost at The AV Club six years ago. I know, you’re thinking, “A comment?!? Seems like a pretty half assed thing to repurpose!” It’s not; the comment is about 1300 words of objectively deep insight. I was intending to write a thesis further expanding on the those ideas, but never did.
smile 
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