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.
My Song Of The Day subscribers may have inadvertently been sent one of my recent MoviePass posts because it was tagged incorrectly. Here’s a song to apologize.
Though Nerf Herder is probably best known for providing the theme music for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer television series, this was the song that initially blew them up (at least in California) and most likely got them the Buffy gig. This shit was all over the radio when I was on the West Coast back in late ’96 – early ’97, and it always stuck with me, because it’s genuinely funny. Happy Thanksgiving (if you’re in America, otherwise, Happy Thursday)!
Kind of half assed today; the main reason I posted this song is because it was the first one I thought of with Friday in the name. I like it, it’s a silly pop song with a wacky video, but it’s catchy as hell. Robert Smith doesn’t even consider it a real Cure song, and he may be on to something because according to the bass drum, it’s actually by The Cures.
smile 
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