John Woo
There's this old story going around in Hollywood about John Woo: One day Quentin Tarantino was meeting with some Hollywood executives when the topic of John Woo's movies came up. An executive said, "I suppose Woo can direct action scenes," to which Tarantino is reported to have replied, "Sure, and I suppose Michelangelo can paint ceilings!"
John Woo is a Chinese film director whose hyperkinetic balletblazing approach to cinematic carnage, but what they often fail to capture is the subtext of the films. Woo's protagonists are often tragic, doomed figures, striving to remain honorable in the face of annihilation. Woo himself came from from an impoverished, persecuted Christian upbringing, grew up in the slums during the Cultural Revolution, and witnessed plenty of violence firsthand. Therefore, a heavy vein of repentance and redemption runs through his films, and he uses plenty of religious iconography in his films. For example, the ending of The Killer took place in a church, with crosses and flying doves used as a backdrop for the doomed assassin's final bloody stand.
John Woo didn't have too much success in the United States. The studios he worked for didn't allow him creative freedom and he kept losing the final cut on his films. He's since returned to filming in China, where he completed the acclaimed Red Cliff, a historical war movie based on The Records of the Three Kingdoms.
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There are certain repeating themes that run through Woo's work. His movies are often obsessed with duality. His best films concern two characters on opposite sides of the law bound together by honor or tragedy. In this universe, a killer can be heroic if he holds on to his ethics. Villains in these movies are usually monsters: vicious and amoral killers with no sense of right and wrong. Finally, unlike many action heroes, Woo characters are not immortal. Often, their quests, codes of honor, or obsessions lead them into oblivion. One of his most famous characters, the remorseful hitman, Jeffrey, dies a horrible death outside the church in which he sought sanctuary while trying to protect the woman he inadvertently blinded. Woo claims Sam Peckinpah and Melville's Le Samourai as two of his inspirations and viewers can see their influence in his work.
His directing style is often aped by modern American directors, but the Hollywood polish usually misses the sense of energy and urgency present in his films. Woo's action scenes have a way of pulling the viewer along. Perhaps his most famous sequence is the three minute, one-take shot where Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung thread their way through a besieged hospitalwhile battling adversaries, jumping on an elevator, and continuing the fight on a different floor.
Woo worked for a long time in the Hong Kong studio system before he got famous in the US, so there are tons of movies to sift through. New viewers should start with either The Killer or Hard Boiled. The first is probably his most famous flick, while the latter is probably his strongest. His American stuff is inconsistent at best, but he did make a couple pretty spectacular films before returning to the Chinese film scene.
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