4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we wish a happy birthday to the great Spanish director, J.A. Bayona! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 J.A. Bayona Films
The Orphanage (2007, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)
The Impossible (2012, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)
A Monster Calls (2016, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Oscar Faura)
Society of the Snow (2023, dir by J.A. Bayona, DP: Pedro Luque)
Ringo Lam’s CITY ON FIRE is one of the first movies starring Chow Yun-Fat that I really wanted to see after I had made my way through the John Woo films. Chow worked with Ringo on a total of 5 films from 1987 – 1992, and they’re a gold mine. I have previously reviewed PRISON ON FIRE and FULL CONTACT, so I decided now was a good time to take a fresh look at this one.
Opening with an awesomely 80’s, neon-drenched saxophone solo from Teddy Robin Kwan, CITY ON FIRE tells the story of undercover cop Ko Chow (Chow Yun-Fat). He’s practically forced by his handler on the force, Inspector Lau (Sun Yueh), to infiltrate a violent gang of jewel thieves. The problem is that he has a history of getting in way too deep, so deep that he forgets where the job ends and his real life begins. It happens again when he’s able to get close to the leader of the thieves, Fu, played by his KILLER co-star, Danny Lee. When the gang hits a jewelry store with Chow in tow, and with the cops on their trail, everything goes to hell. Some store employees are killed, some gang members are taken out, and Chow even takes one in the gut. As the survivors meet back up at the warehouse, it becomes clear that there’s a mole in their midst, even though not everyone wants to admit it.
Does that premise sound familiar to you? If you’re a big fan of Quentin Tarantino and RESERVOIR DOGS, you can’t help but recognize how strongly his film was influenced by CITY ON FIRE. The influence is clear, especially in the broad strokes of the plotline and at the famous finale, but these are two very different crime films in execution, and they’re both excellent in their own ways.
In the late 80’s, some of the best action and crime films in the world were being made in Hong Kong. So many of the films had a reckless energy, which seems to be especially evident in director Lam’s works. In contrast to John Woo’s stylish action scenes, Lam’s scenes aren’t polished. They’re more grounded, they’re chaotic, and they’re not “cool” at all. For example, the film opens with an undercover named Chan Kam-Wah (Elvis Tsui) being called out and murdered in the middle of a busy market. Stabbed multiple times with a big butcher knife while desperately fighting for his life, the scene plays out in a realistic, clumsy, and very bloody way. In other words, it’s painful to watch without a slow-mo tracking shot in sight. We know immediately that no one is safe, and there’s a palpable tension as the undercover cop / criminal drama plays out that really works for the film.
Chow Yun-fat is fantastic, with his performance winning him his 2nd consecutive Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor. He’s not the impossibly cool heroic bloodshed hero of the prior year’s A BETTER TOMORROW. Rather, while he’s charming in certain early scenes with his girlfriend Hung (Carrie Ng), when he starts his new assignment, you can see that he’s completely exhausted with his life as an undercover cop, a life that seems to have broken him emotionally. You can almost feel an impending doom with his character that lingers over the film, turning it into something different than your average cops and robbers story. In the other major lead of the film, Danny Lee is so good as the leader of the gang of jewel thieves, Fu. He’s very professional, and once he’s accepted Chow into their ranks, he’s very friendly and personable to him. In these moments, you can see how the two men could bond. But Fu’s also shown that he will kill anyone who gets in his way, so you know it’s inevitable that the two will collide head-on at the end. When it comes, it hits hard.
I highly recommend CITY ON FIRE to any person who enjoys gritty crime films. The action is brutal, the lead performances are excellent, and the drama of the story will leave you emotionally drained as the end credits roll. I can see why it would have had a major impact on a lover of Hong Kong cinema like a young Tarantino!
CITY ON FIRE is currently streaming on Prime Video, PlutoTV, Tubi, and Plex.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly watch parties. On Twitter, I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday and I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday. On Mastodon, I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 1992’s Under Siege!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, find Under Siege on Prime, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there happily tweeting. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Since today is Roberto Rossellini’s birthday, today’s scene is one of the most powerful of all time.
From Rossellini’s 1945 anti-Nazi masterpiece, Rome, Open City, this scene features Anna Magnani as Pina. For the first part of the film, Pina has been a major character. We see much of occupied Rome through her eyes. We watch as she risks her life to help the Resistance and, because we’ve seen so many movies, we assume that the filmmakers will protect her because she’s the main character. In this devastating scene, Rossellini shows us that no one is safe in an occupied city, not even a pregnant woman.
It’s just another day in Rome.
John Milius later paid homage to this scene in Red Dawn.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
120 years ago, on this date, the great Italian neorealist director (and husband of Ingrid Bergman and father of Isabella Rossellini), Roberto Rossellini was born in Rome. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Roberto Rossellini Films
Rome, Open City (1945, dir by Roberto Rossellini, DP: Ubaldo Arata)
Europe ’51 (1952, dir by Roberto Rossellini, DP: Aldo Tonti)
Fear (1954, dir by Roberto Rossellini, DP: Carlo Carlini, DP: Heinz Schnackertz)
Journey to Italy, (1954, dir by Roberto Rossellini, DP: Enzo Serafin)
There was a time when Chow Yun-Fat was one of the hardest working actors in show business. He had 11 different films come out in 1987 alone, and his dedication to making movies would eventually lead him to superstardom all around the world by the turn of the century. Alas, even the greats must eventually slow down and by the end of the 2010’s, it felt like he had practically retired. He only starred in one film between 2017 and 2019. That film was 2018’s PROJECT GUTENBERG, and to say I was looking forward to the film would be quite the understatement. The filmmakers knew how to draw me in as the trailer recreated Chow’s famous scene from A BETTER TOMORROW where he lights his cigarette with a counterfeit $100 bill. The movie promised to play up his most iconic on-screen images, and I was down for it!
PROJECT GUTENBERG introduces us to an artist named Lee Man (Aaron Kwok), who’s been arrested in Thailand and taken to Hong Kong. The local police interrogate him for information about a ruthless counterfeiter known as “Painter.” Reluctant to talk at first due to fear, Lee is convinced that he must provide some information, or he could spend the rest of his life in jail. He eventually begins to tell the story of his time with the elusive criminal mastermind, played by Chow Yun-fat, through a series of flashbacks. Director Felix Chong (writer of the INFERNAL AFFAIRS and OVERHEARD trilogies) has crafted a story that seems like the confession of small fish being used to bait a big fish, before eventually turning into something much more sinister and fascinating. I won’t say anything else about the plot as there’s much fun to be had in watching it unravel!
I’m going to state right up front that Chow Yun-Fat is in prime form. Some actors age with grace, and then there’s the 63-year-old Chow of this film, who’s managed to age with almost a mythic gravitas. This film masterfully highlights his incredible charisma, recreates iconic images of his past gunplay, and then turns it all on its head by making Painter into one of the most evil bastards he’s ever played on screen! It’s an incredible use of his legendary career to provide levels of depth that no words on paper ever could.
Even with the iconic images of Chow Yun-Fat, PROJECT GUTENBERG would not work nearly as well if it wasn’t also a captivating crime thriller. Its counterfeit money operations, double-crosses, gun battles and international intrigue pulled me in, and I found myself on the edge of my seat at times as the story unfolded. The last 30 minutes of the film made me question everything I’d seen up to that point, but in a way that did not take away one moment of my enjoyment. It’s not a completely unique ending, as film lovers will certainly notice, but it works.
Aaron Kwok’s character of Lee Man is weak in comparison to Painter, but the actor navigates the tightrope of showing just enough emotional desperation that we understand why he’s doing what he does. When the plot starts taking some crazy twists and turns, I was still right there with him. I’ve always liked Aaron Kwok, and even with his bad haircut in the film, I still thought he did a fine job. I also want to shoutout actress Zhang Jingchu (RUSH HOUR 3, OVERHEARD), who plays the woman that Lee Man loves. Her character drives a lot of Lee’s actions in the film, and I found her very beautiful and compelling. Last, but not least, Liu Kai Chi (KILL ZONE, CALL OF HEROES) gets one of the best supporting roles in the film as a vital member of the counterfeiting team who befriends Lee before making an unforgivable mistake.
PROJECT GUTENBERG was a critical and box office smash when it was released in China in the fall of 2018. It won Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing at the 2019 Hong Kong Film Awards. On a budget of around $40 million dollars, it would bring in over $150 million in China alone, on its way to around $200 million worldwide. It’s a slick crime thriller that serves as a reminder that in the right role, Chow Yun-fat is still one of the great movie stars on the planet. This film understands that, bet the house, and won big.
PROJECT GUTENBERG is currently streaming on the free “Fawesome” streaming service.
Hi, everyone! Tonight, on Mastodon, I will be hosting the #TubiThursday watch party! Join us for Clue (1985)!
You can find the movie on Tubi and you can join us on Mastodon at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) We will be using #TubiThursday hashtag! See you then!
Today, we wish a happy birthday to director Amy Heckerling!
In this scene from the Heckerling-directed 1982 filmFast Times At Ridgemont High, Brad finally gets a moment of triumph. Played by Judge Reinhold, Brad spends most of this movie being humiliated. He kind of deserves it because he can definitely be a bit full of himself, especially when he was working at All-American Burger. But, at the same time, he’s there for his sister when she needs someone and, for a character in a 1982 teen comedy, he’s refreshingly nonjudgmental.
In this scene, poor Brad has been reduced to working at an all-night convenience store. Wherever Brad works, he appears to be destined to have to wait on Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn.) When James Russo attempts to hold him up, Brad finally snaps and becomes the hero that he’s always wanted to be.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today would have been the 87th birthday of the great Italian director, Ruggero Deodato! And that, of course, means that it’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Films
Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man (1976, dir by Ruggero Deodato, DP: Guglielmo Mancori)
The House On The Edge of the Park (1980, dir by Ruggero Deodato, DP: Sergio D’Offizi)
Raiders of Atlantis (1983, dir by Ruggero Deodato, DP: Robert D’Ettore Piazzoli)
Body Count (1986, dir by Ruggero Deodato, DP: Emilio Loffredo)
When I became obsessed with Chow Yun-Fat in the latter half of the 1990’s, I would constantly search for his movies at the Suncoast Video Store in the Park Plaza Mall whenever we’d go to Little Rock. Unfortunately, I’d run into cheap looking DVDs with titles like “God of Killers,” but I’d buy them anyway. That’s the title under which I first attempted to watch THE STORY OF WOO VIET, starring a young Chow-Yun-Fat and directed by Hong Kong legend Ann Hui. Whoever distributed the film was making a blatant cash grab on Chow Yun-Fat’s worldwide popularity at the time, and the DVD was terrible. I turned it off after a little while because the print was so dark you could barely see it, and the subtitles were illegible, constantly falling off the screen. I had not attempted to watch the film again until very recently. My friends on “Podcast on Fire” devoted an episode to THE STORY OF WOO VIET, which piqued my interest again. Lo and behold, I found a fine print with English subtitles streaming on Tubi!
As the story starts, we meet Woo Viet (Chow Yun-Fat) on a boat full of starving refugees. We learn that he’s a former Vietnamese soldier escaping to Hong Kong in hopes of making his way to the United States. It’s a tough start as we see a baby die of malnourishment and an old man murdered by Vietnamese special agents, which leads to Woo Viet fighting off and killing those same agents, all within the first 15 minutes. On the run for murder, he’s lucky that his Hong Kong pen pal, social worker Lap-Quan (Cora Miao), can help him get fake papers for his escape to the United States. As he’s getting ready to leave, he meets the beautiful Shum Ching (Cherie Chung), who’s also using fake documents to get to the U.S. Unfortunately, the Hong Kong trafficker who’s supposed to be helping them, has sold Shum Ching to a powerful gangster in the Philippines with plans to turn her into a prostitute. When she’s taken away from the Manila airport, Woo Viet goes after her. Unable to kick enough ass to save her, he ends up working as a hired gun for her kidnapper in hopes of buying her freedom. Throw in Shaw Brothers legend Lo Lieh as Sarm, Woo Viet’s partner in crime in Manila, and the stage is set for an escape to a better tomorrow or loneliness and a quick death.
After viewing the film, it’s probably best that I couldn’t watch THE STORY OF WOO VIET back in the late 1990’s. At that time, I wanted Chow Yun-Fat as the honorable gangster of films like A BETTER TOMORROW and THE KILLER, or the badass cop of HARD-BOILED. I could not have appreciated director Ann Hui’s work here, the second film in her “Viet Nam trilogy.” Gritty and downbeat, it’s about as far away from John Woo’s stylish films as you can get. When the violence comes, it lands with a painful thud as nails enter heads, knives slash bodies, and even toothbrushes are shoved through cheeks. This is Ann Hui working within a genre film plotline while infusing it with something akin to bleak realism. She would go on to develop her legendary career with the next year’s BOAT PEOPLE, and she would use Chow a couple of more times in films like LOVE IN A FALLEN CITY and THE POSTMODERN LIFE OF MY AUNT. This is not peak Ann Hui, but she still brings something interesting to this early effort.
As far as the performances go, Chow may have been 5 years away from the superstardom of A BETTER TOMORROW, but he already had what it took to be a film lead. Even in a film like this, without his heroic bloodshed honor, he has a way of making it look easy. Cherie Chung is appealing as Shum Ching, and she was soon on her way to film stardom in Hong Kong hits like PEKING OPERA BLUES, AN AUTUMN’S TALE (with Chow), and John Woo’s ONCE A THIEF (also with Chow). Like many Hong Kong actresses before her, after a string of successful films she would get married and retire in 1991. I like Cora Miao early in the film as the kind social worker, but she fades as the film progresses. Miao would work with Chow and Ann Hui frequently throughout the 80’s. Like Chung, she retired in 1991 and married director Wayne Wang (THE JOY LUCK CLUB). Finally, I wanted to give a shoutout to Lo Lieh as Woo Viet’s one friend, Sarm. While he may be known best for his classic work with Shaw Brothers in films like the FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH and THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, he gives a solid character performance here and would go on to work in Hong Kong for another two decades.
THE STORY OF WOO VIET is not at the top of the list of films that Hong Kong legends Chow Yun-Fat and Ann Hui would work on, but it’s still an important watch to see their obvious talent at this point in their careers. I’m glad I finally watched the film in 2026. After all the life I’ve lived since those days digging through the DVDs at the Park Plaza Mall, there’s no way it could have hit me the same way then that it does now.
Through the Shattered Lens 