In a list of great directors that I love more than just about anything, two names are easily at the top of the list Akira Kurosawa and John Woo. And tonight I'm gonna get my Woo on.
Blessed with a small budget and the Hong Kong stuntman's union, Woo's earlier work was as free form and on-the-(Ringo)-lam as his beloved Mean Streets and French New Wave and it shows. The relative malaise of having a US$ budget big enough to fix things in post and a producer who isn't the gonzo Tsui Hark monitering your output is always going to dampen things.
Or merely force you play by the "rules" a little more.
But back in the day, Woo could effortlessly freeze frame on two characters to unite them in one glorious cut in a far more meaningful way than any linguitic exchange could ever hope to achieve. His films owe as much to the subversive melodramas of Douglas Sirk as they do to the tough-as-nails westerns of Sam Peckinpah. His characters cry, blee, and more often than not die for each other and the violence that they inflict and recieve in equal messure is often times more pretty than ugly. And to think Clint Eastwood of all people gets queried for his mildly "odd" stylistic traits.
He has directed films both before and after his mid-80's peak but even if he never worked again A Better Tomorrow 1&2, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, Once a Thief, and Hard-Boiled would still be considered classics. And frankly I'd still rather watch the strangely sporadic moments of greatness in Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and Face-Off than another dull and pointless Matrix rip-off .
At least John Woo can film and action scene.
2 comments:
How can anyone not like the unalloyed full-out hypergolic nonsense that is "Face-Off"? (On the other hand, don't bother with "Paycheck". Dull, bland, and suffers from Hollywood Suit all too much).
"Hard-Boiled" is possibly the greatest action movie ever made, ever. In fact it ought to be written "HARD BOILED". With triple exclamation marks on either side.
I remember seeing Hard-Boiled for the first time and almost dying out of how awesome it was.
And to think before I saw it I thought Commando was the greatest film ever made.
Post a Comment