American and Hong Kong Action Films Essay -- Movie Film Essays

American and Hong Kong Action FilmsWhen comparing the work on films of Hong Kong to the typical sue films of America, certain differences atomic number 18 clearly visible. The films from Hong Kong feature more melodrama, more fast-paced action word pictures, and most noticeably, more graphic violence, than the action films released in the US. When facial expression at what these Hong Kong films were influenced by, especially the films of behind Woo, it is surprising to see that many of these differences from American cinema are, in fact, inspired by American cinema. In John Woos most critically acclaimed and popular films in both Asia and the US, he has bony aspects from other works of fiction across the globe. He then takes these aspects and adds his deliver touches to them to make them something distinctly Hong Kong. John Woo first made his assure as a director on Hong Kong audiences in 1986, with the epic crime-drama A Better Tomorrow. The film tells the story of two broth ers, one an ex-con, the other an underground cop, and how they eventually team-up to fight a common enemy. The film is foremost a drama about the love of family (both of blood and crime), merely there are two scenes involving gunplay that helped redefine not only John Woos career, but also the action genre itself in Hong Kong. It is interesting though, that both of these scenes tend heavily from scenes found in other films from other countries (Logan 124).The first scene occurs early on in the film as mob hatchet man Mark Gor (played by Chow Yun-Fat) kills a gang of criminals for revenge of a comrades death. What made this scene so original and groundbreaking when compared to other action films in Hong Kong at the time was the way John Woo enjoin this gunfight, and the fact that it wa... ... drawing upon. Now the same phenomenon is happening in America. The Wachowski brothers appropriated Woos conventionalize shoot-out and added martial arts to it to make something entirely j uvenile for The Matrix. And even Tarantino had something new to give the genre, with his inclusion of quickly-delivered pop-culture referencing pastiche dialogue, something that is continually used today. This combination of annexation and originality ensures the action and crime genres will constantly be able to create itself, on both sides of the Pacific.Works CitedLogan, Bey. Hong Kong Action Cinema. Woodstock Overlook, 1995.Rodham Stokes, Lisa and Michael Hoover. City On burn off Hong Kong Cinema. London Verso, 1999.Dannen, Fredric, and Barry Long. Hong Kong Babylon. New York Hyperion, 1997.Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema The Extra Dimensions. Suffolk BFI, 1997.