From: Po Gwan, troop breaker (¯}­x) 
Subject: [TAKE OVER] HKSAR Film Top 10 Box Office (July 29, 1998)
Date: 05 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <6qaeec$8dp$1@crab.rutgers.edu>
Sender: dbhoj@crab.rutgers.edu
Organization: Tin Ha Society
Newsgroups: alt.asian-movies,soc.culture.hongkong.entertainment

...

21. From New York Times, August 1, 1998
Hong Kong Film: Exit the Dragon?
By NEIL STRAUSS

HONG KONG -- It's opening night for "Young and Dangerous: The Prequel," a 
follow-up to one of the most successful Hong Kong movies of 1997, but the 
South China Theater in the busy Mong Kok neighborhood of Kowloon is 
practically empty. As the lights dim, there are 35 people seated in a 
theater built for more than 1,000. "It's not too bad," says Ryan Law, a 
walking encyclopedia of Hong Kong film who runs an Internet site called 
the Hong Kong Movie Database, as he surveys the audience. "I've seen 
worse."

Before the movie starts, a preview of Disney's "Mulan" flashes across the 
screen. "This is terrible," complains Tim Youngs, who runs his own World 
Wide Web site about Hong Kong film. "I've never known this theater to 
screen a Hollywood film before."

"Young and Dangerous: The Prequel" is the sixth installment in a series of 
youth-gone-wild gangster films to be released in the last two years. This 
movie, like most of the others in the series, was made in about a month, 
and the audience at the opening can tell. They don't laugh; they don't 
gasp. The dominant noise in the theater is the ringing of cell phones and 
the beeping of pagers. Other than repeated stabs at the Communist 
Government -- "You're as rude as the Communists," says a police 
receptionist -- there's virtually no substance to this formulaic movie.

After they leave the theater, Mr. Law and and Mr. Youngs walk across the 
street to a shopping center called Chic.  Off the escalator is a tiny 
white storefront. Its walls are lined with illegal VCD's -- movies 
recorded onto compact disks -- in plastic wrappers. Inside the store and 
waiting outside to get in, there are more people than were at "Young and 
Dangerous: The Prequel." VCD's of "Young and Dangerous: The Prequel," 
along with dozens of other new as well as not-yet-released films, are on
sale here for $2.50 in American dollars, less than half the price of a 
movie ticket.

"If you don't like the quality," says the guy running the stall, "you can 
bring them back and exchange them for something else."

Within this all-too-common anecdote -- and within the space of two hours 
spent watching just about any Hong Kong movie these days -- can be found 
nearly everything that's killing the film industry here. Until just a few
years ago, Hong Kong films were among the most exciting things happening 
in cinema, and Hong Kong was second only to Hollywood in exporting movies. 
Talented directors were casting charismatic stars in movies that were by 
turns stylishly violent, breathtakingly magical, beautifully tender or 
balletically humorous.

And those films were not just selling out theaters in Asia but were being 
featured in festivals in the United States and, in the case of Jackie Chan 
action-comedies, actually beating out Hollywood blockbusters at the
American box office.

Slowly, Hong Kong-style art direction, action choreography and even plot 
elements began to appear in American films, most blatantly in Quentin 
Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" in 1992. Today, nearly every action film 
released by Hollywood is influenced by Hong Kong.  In fact, they're often 
directed by a Hong Kong star gone to Hollywood, like John Woo ("Broken 
Arrow,"  "Face/Off").

But as Hollywood discovered Hong Kong film, events leading up to fiascos 
like the premiere of "Young and Dangerous: The Prequel" were being set in 
motion. Some blame it on Steven Spielberg. In 1993, "Jurassic Park" became 
the first foreign film to come in No. 1 at the box office in Hong Kong 
since before the days of Bruce Lee. After that, audiences here began to 
flock to Hollywood films, especially ones filled with special effects, and 
ignore ones made in Hong Kong, which were becoming schlocky imitation 
cops-and-gangsters flicks.

Making matters worse was the incursion of real gangsters -- organized 
crime, or the so-called triads -- into the Hong Kong movie business. Film 
executives were murdered; stars were forced to accept roles in triad-
backed productions. Then came the pirate-VCD market, which has robbed the 
Hong Kong industry of an estimated 40 percent of its business, forcing 
theater and video rental chains to close. As if things weren't bad enough, 
the Asian economic downturn hit, slashing movie budgets and destroying 
crucial ancillary markets and sources of investment in places like South 
Korea and Taiwan.

Instead of sticking around to help clean up the mess, many of Hong
Kong's biggest stars fled for a better shore. Actors like Chow Yun-Fat
("Replacement Killers") have pledged not to return until they see
better scripts. At last count, there were at least 17 Hong Kong actors
and directors working on projects in Hollywood -- from Jet Li in
"Lethal Weapon 4" to Mr. Woo directing Tom Cruise in "Mission
Impossible 2" to Michelle Yeoh landing a starring role in "Charlie's
Angels." And where Hong Kong directors once remade Hollywood hits, now
Hollywood is remaking Hong Kong films. Jim Carrey, for example, just
agreed to remake the Hong Kong comedy "God of Cookery," with the Hong
Kong star Stephen Chiau as director.

"They are like paintings left in the sun," Bey Logan, a producer and
screenwriter and the author of "Hong Kong Action Movies," says of Hong
Kong films. "They keep getting paler and paler."

It has been a year since the British handed control of Hong Kong over
to China, and although this transition doesn't seem to have
intimidated directors politically, it has led many of them to gear
their films toward mainland China in the belief that the last hope for
Hong Kong cinema is to find an audience in China. Currently, China
lets in only 10 foreign films a year -- and it still considers Hong
Kong a foreign country. 

"Except during World War II, when the film industry came to a total
stop during the Japanese invasion, it's never been as bad as it is
now," says Paul Fonoroff, a film critic for The South China Morning
Post who has reviewed more than 700 Hong Kong films since 1988. "I
think the film industry is over as we know it."

The filmmakers left in Hong Kong are no less pessimistic. Sitting in
the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel in the Wanchai neighborhood, Gordon Chan,
a top Hong Kong director who has made movies with Jet Li ("Fist of
Legend") and Jackie Chan ("Thunderbolt"), has all the time in the
world, a fact that's very depressing to a director who once cranked
out three films a year.  Gordon Chan's most recent movie, the police
action drama "Beast Cops," is generally acknowledged as one of the
best Hong Kong films of 1998. But that apparently isn't going to do
him any good. "I just talked to the company that released it, and they
said they lost money on it," says Mr. Chan, a skinny man with a thin
black goatee.  "They told me it wasn't my fault, I did a good
film. But still it lost money. So what's happening? It's really alarming."

"We're already cutting staff salary at a very quick rate," he
continues. "I cut almost 75 percent of my salary. Remember the scene
with the car chase between the Hummer and the bus? We're so poor that
we borrowed the Hummer and we borrowed the bus, and there was no
budget for any car chase and especially no budget for any car
crash. So we had to use special effects to do the scene.

"We finished a film at a little more than 10 million Hong Kong
dollars" -- $1.3 million in American dollars -- "and still it
lost. It's very disappointing, especially when everybody came to me
and said, 'Wow, that was great, I saw it on pirate VCD.' That really hurts."

In 1992, Hong Kong movies took in about $153 million in American
dollars at the box office. Though ticket prices have practically
doubled here since, annual income has dropped by more than half, to
just under $72 million in 1997. As a result, average film budgets have
shrunk from several million American dollars to as little as $200,000
or $300,000. 

Once, the announcement of a feature production starring a popular
actor brought in so much money from other Asian markets that the film
was profitable before a single frame had been shot. As a result,
directors got lazy and shot films without scripts, and all-purpose pop
stars like Andy Lau appeared in as many as 12 movies a year.

Even worse, the triads became heavily involved in the industry,
pressuring stars to appear in films for which they were providing the
money. Actors and other film professionals who refused to cooperate
were reportedly kidnapped, raped and even, in the case of two
producers, killed.

Now, the triads are more interested in making money from VCD sales
than in film production, and the industry is looking desperately for
new sources of investment now that gangster, local film studio and
foreign money has dried up. Virtually anyone with money to invest --
bankers, construction workers -- can finance a film by a major
director. Gordon Chan, for example, says that his next film is being
paid for by the management team of a factory.

In an attempt to fight this state of affairs, Mr. Chan and four other
directors have formed a group called Creative Alliance. The
organization is trying to find new sources of revenue so that they can
regain control of their films and focus on restoring the standards of
Hong Kong film and bringing audiences back into the theaters. 

"What we're trying to do is give alternatives," says Mr. Chan. "But to
be honest, we are not very optimistic. We still think the market is
going to go lower because so much less money is being invested in it.

"There's no way to sustain a film industry, and there's no point in
rushing to the production line with more movies that are going to be
pirated. We need to wait and see what's happening and then find the
solutions. The Creative Alliance is to tell everybody that in the
meantime we're still alive." 

Back across the harbor, in Kowloon's Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood,
Clarence Fok, the director of the cult-classic film "Naked Killer,"
sits and stares at his latest work on an Avid editing machine. On the
monitor, two characters sit across from each other in a room bathed in
lime green and deep purple. One fires a gun from underneath a glass
table, and as shards of glass scatter in slow motion, a bullet hits
the other man in the forehead. He stares at the camera for a moment,
then topples over, with blood squirting thickly out of the wound.

The flamboyant, denim-clad Mr. Fok watches the scene raptly and then
announces proudly, "Cheap."

Adam Chan, Mr. Fok's stunt choreographer, shakes his head. "I can
create 10 good scenes like that," he says. "But all they have the
money for now is two or three." 

In a time when annual film production here has been cut in half (from
more than 200 films five years ago to fewer than 80), Mr. Fok is still
busy. Producers like him because he comes in on budget, he gives the
people what they want (sexy women and stylized gunplay), and he works
fast. This year, Mr. Fok plans to crank out five films, spending two
months on each and giving them titles like "A Better Tomorrow 98" and
"Naked Killer 2" to capitalize on past Hong Kong successes.

"I think of them like exercises," he says of the movies.  "Out of
these five experiments -- all are sensational with sex, seduction and
violence -- I want to work toward something new. Then I want to spend
some time in America and learn more about stunts, effects and camera
movements so I can go into another stage of my filmmaking." His
one-man plan to save the Hong Kong film business also involves
searching China for a young male actor and molding him into a new
martial-arts star.  Mr. Fok is one of the lucky filmmakers remaining
here. In this financial and artistic recession, he gets his scripts
and money from one of the few people in Hong Kong film who still has
access to money: Wong Jing. Mr. Jing is a populist director and
producer who helped turn the work of innovative Hong Kong filmmakers
like John Woo and Tsui Hark into likable and successful, albeit
formulaic, movies. As his colleagues jumped ship for the cash and
cachet of Hollywood, he stayed behind to become the king of Hong Kong film.

Last month, "The Storm Riders," a special effects-filled film he
produced, actually beat the record set by "Jurassic Park: The Lost
World" for first-day ticket sales. With a budget of $10 million, it is
a Hong Kong equivalent of "Titanic."

The other hope for Hong Kong cinema this year is "Enter the Eagles,"
the debut of Shannon Lee, the daughter of Bruce. Where "The Storm
Riders" is attempting to steal an audience back by imitating Hollywood
special effects, "Enter the Eagles" is trying to emulate another
Hollywood approach: a glitzy marketing campaign meant to turn a film
into an event, the result of a new deal between Hong Kong's biggest
studio, Golden Harvest, and the marketing company DBB. Though it might
seem as if these companies have deep pockets, the truth is that Golden
Harvest reported a $6 million dollar loss in the first half of this
year and last month laid off 70 employees.

Even Jackie Chan, Hong Kong's perennial action star, is suffering in
Hong Kong. About to appear in the United States with Chris Tucker in
"Rush Hour," he's hoping he can gain some new knowledge to help
reinvigorate Hong Kong movies. At home, he is offering $130,000 to
anyone who can write him a good script. Good scripts, an element
lacking even in some of the best Hong Kong films, are what many feel
will help restore audience faith in Hong Kong films -- especially
because they cost a lot less than special effects, an arena in which
Hong Kong will never really be able to compete with Hollywood.

The bright side of this grim situation is that the defections to
Hollywood and the shrinking budgets have created an atmosphere in
which younger directors and actors have a chance to compete -- and to
be creative with their art direction and camerawork. Wong Kar-Wai, the
director of visually innovative, cerebral films like "Chungking
Express" and the recent "Happy Together," has gained enough
international prominence to keep working regularly. But beyond him,
young, talented directors like Fruit Chan, Eric Kot and Wai Ka-Fai are
coming into their own, making either experimental narratives or
offbeat portraits of youth culture. 

But this burst of originality may be too late. Already, the period of
Hong Kong film from the late 1980's to the early 90's has been
categorized and filed away as "the golden age of Hong Kong film," as
if it were the equivalent of the New Wave for France. Some say that
Hong Kong films will flourish once again as soon as the economy in
Asia improves and a handful of new stars and auteurs appear. But most
industry insiders here are pessimistic, believing that Hong Kong will
become like Taiwan or Mexico, just another third-world country from
which a movie or director of note occasionally emerges. 

Times are hard," says Richard To, the head of the Hong Kong Film
Critics Society. "And the future is still very unclear. A lot depends
on whether the mainland Chinese market will be more open than now to
Hong Kong films. And a lot matters on whether pirate VCD's can be
stopped. Otherwise, there's simply no hope."

Perhaps the best evidence of this comes during an elevator
conversation with the assistant of a Hong Kong director. Asked if he
wants to become a director, he replies quickly, "No way." After a few
seconds of silence, he shyly adds, "Are you interested in buying a
digital camera while you're here? I can sell you one for very cheap."

The Hong Kong film industry may be sinking, but in the last couple of
years, a few movies have managed to rise above the general level of
mediocrity. In New York, most of the following films -- complete with
subtitles in English -- can be rented at independent video stores like
Kim's or at video stores in Chinatown. 

Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, directed by Wai Ka-Fai. This smart black
comedy explores how seemingly inconsequential decisions can have
life-altering consequences. The director, using wide-angle shots and
filming entire action scenes with a camera held upside-down, turns a
low-budget gangster flick into a creative manifesto that has been
interpreted, despite his protest, as a thinly veiled statement about
Hong Kong's handover to China.

Full Alert, directed by Ringo Lam. After making the Hollywood dud
"Maximum Risk" with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mr. Lam at least benefited
from the experience in making this movie one of the best new Hong Kong
cop stories (rivaled only by Benny Chan's "Big Bullet"). In a genre in
which gunning down men, women and babies is as commonplace as ordering
a drink, this rare psychological thriller deals with the human
conscience. The plot and characters are well-drawn, the camerawork is
Mr. Lam's best and the dangerous car chase scenes were filmed without
permission amid normal traffic. 

Fallen Angels, directed by Wong Kar-Wai. A sequel of sorts to the
wonderful "Chungking Express,"  "Fallen Angels" revisits the themes of
unrequited love, chance encounters and expired cans of pineapple. More
humorous than his recent "Happy Together," this movie has a beauty
that's in the details, from Christopher Doyle's mesmerizing
cinematography to the scene in which the actor Takeshi Kaneshiro
massages a dead pig. 

God of Cookery, directed by Stephen Chiau and Lik-chi Lee. A humorous,
heartwarming tale about a fallen chef out to clear his name, this
beautifully made film is equal parts John Woo and Benihana: all the
stunts involve the preparation of food.

Made in Hong Kong, directed by Fruit Chan. This may be the most
representative film of a new wave of directors who are making
low-budget, more realistic youth-oriented movies. Starring the
eminently cool, likable and scrawny Sam Lee, "Made in Hong Kong" is a
tragic love rectangle chronicling the relationships between an
aspiring gangster who would be better off in school, his mentally
retarded sidekick, the dying 16-year-old girl he's in love with and a
high-school girl he never met who has committed suicide.

Black Mask, directed by Lee Yan Gong. One of the most recent
high-budget, ultra-stylized Hong Kong thrillers features Jet Li as an
invincible comic-book hero. Full of explosions, electrocutions,
gravity-defying kung fu, lethal compact disks and a plot with more
holes than Li's bullet-riddled body, it qualifies as a classic action movie.

First Love (Litter on the Breeze), directed by Eric Kot.  A Wong
Kar-Wai spinoff, this clever low-budget art film blurs the barrier
between creator and creation as the director runs through different
love-story scenarios with the viewer. Some are boring, some are
beguiling, and any time the movie threatens to become too engrossing,
the main character interrupts the moment by telling the crew: "I'm
done talking. You can take the camera off of me."

The Storm Riders, directed by Andrew Lau. In future years, this magic
and swordplay epic will be seen either as the last gasp of Hong Kong
film or the fresh breath that helped rekindle interest. Set in ancient
China, "The Storm Riders" is pure eye candy -- full of elaborate
costumes, fire-breathing dragons, colorful cinematography, creative
special effects, fast-paced editing and, to top it off, a fight scene
on a Buddha statue hundreds of feet tall.

Comrades, Almost a Love Story, directed by Peter Chan.  Boasting one
of the best scripts of recent years, this simple, moving film examines
the timeworn tale of country boy meets big-city woman. The twist is
that the city woman refuses to accept the fact that beneath all her
cosmopolitan veneer beats the heart of a country girl.

A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation, directed by Andrew
Chan. The producer Tsui Hark revisits his famous "Chinese Ghost Story"
series in the first full-length animated Hong Kong production in over
a decade. This reincarnation myth -- with beautiful ghosts, malevolent
demons and a debt collector -- is over-the-top fantastic, just like
many of the drawings.

    Source: geocities.com/rwvong