23-2-09: GIVE THE MAN A HAND

THE ‘PROTÉGÉ’ AWARDS FOR TEN MOST SHOCKING HK MOVIE MOMENTS.

‘Protégé’ is a great movie, but it’s a hard one to summarize on a video sleeve. Yes, I have to admit, that is not Daniel’s hand holding the gun in the cover montage, but we have made all five extra fingers available to him every second Sunday…

Otherwise, we at  Dragon Dynasty played a pretty straight bat with the artwork (see above) and I hope this fine film finds the audience it deserves in the North American market.

For those of you who haven’t seen the film yet, I don’t want to give away the film’s most shocking grand guignol moment (though the title of this piece offers a hint…)

In its honour, here’s my list of ten shocking movie moments from prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /Hong Kong cinema:

(If you haven’t already seen these movies, (a) shame on you and (b) to avoid spoilers, try to skip over the relevant section.)

1)     Infernal Affairs: Anthony Wong hits the ground. I still remember how the first audience for the film jumped out of their seats at the Hong Kong premiere. In The Departed, Martin Sheen collided with the pavement with the same force but nowhere near the same impact.  

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2)     Dog Bite Dog: Lam Suet gets it in the neck. I actually first saw this on a VHS screener. (Go figure…) When it started, I thought the film was going to be about Lam’s character track down Edison Chen’s feral Cambodian killer, and it really knocked me sideways when he got turned into a human ketchup dispenser.

3)     Election: Simon Yam rocks Tony Leung’s world (and his little wife too…)

It feels like a typical ‘dessert’ scene, an idyllic fishing trip for two reconciled rivals, then Tony chooses the wrong bait and Simon gives him an industrial strength scalp massage. And then gets to grips with poor Maggie Siu…  Johnnie To proves he’s our Scorsese with a great scene in a great film.

4)     Bride With White Hair: Francis Ng and Elaine Lui are revealed to be Siamese twins. For most of the film, director Ronnie Yu has DP Peter Pao frame them as two separate characters, until we finally realize they’re co joined. (And whatever happened to Elaine Lui, anyway…?)

5)     Bunman: Actually, when you think about it, there too many shocking moments to mention, but… Anthony Wong’s customized mis-use of a handful of chopsticks must be near the top of the list. This is so not my kind of movie, but it was a serious cult item back when I lived in the UK.  I don’t think I’ve ever made it all the way through. Hard to believe a gentle guy like my friend Herman Yau co-directed this splatterfest.

6)     Flaming Brothers: Bad guys force Yi Lui to shoot his own son.  I remember seeing this in a theatre in Birmingham, and thinking you would never see that scene in a Hollywood movie (and maybe that’s a good thing!) A young pre-auteur Wong Kar-wai wrote the film. Who’d have thunk it?

7)     The Eye: After Lee Jin-sie gets eyesight back and sees the old guy in the corner of the elevator…  I’ve never been stuck in an elevator with Jin-sie but I think I was once in one with that same fellow. (I wish it were the other way around… )

8)     The Big Boss: When Bruce Lee finds the body parts of his relatives frozen in ice. I know this isn’t a horror movie, but that’s exactly why I wasn’t expecting it. Given the general standard of direction of this film’s non-action scenes, that reveal is very effective.

4)     Bullet In The Head: Okay, even given the title, how many people in the audience really expected to see it happen in the film? John Woo recreates the horrific Eddie Adams photograph of a suspected Viet Cong receiving summary street justice. This shot was even more surprising to me when I finally saw it, as my first bootleg of BITH was a censored Malaysian version, with that scene censored.

5)     Story of Riki AKA Riki Oh: In fact, pretty much the whole of this film would fit the bill. Its that extreme, it was single-handedly responsible for poor Fan Siu-wong not having a career for the next ten years. Stand-out moment is probably the big guy being fed through a meat grinder, which is shown with a red filter (thankfully!) on most prints.

‘Protégé’ has a couple of moments that will assure it a place in my next list. So, come to think of it, does Derek Yee’s new film, The Shinjuku Incident. He must have a thing about hands, and abusing Daniel Wu…

Given that everyone keeps telling me Hong Kong cinema is dead, perhaps the real shock is our continued production of films as good as ‘Protégé’, and Beast Stalker, Connected, Ip Man…