http://www.hkmdb.com/db/movies/view.mht ... ay_set=eng

1. Parkman Wong and Rico Chu's characters are around the wrong way; Wong plays "Blacky" and Chu plays "Apache" - not the other way around.
2. Shing Fui On's character has a (nick)name: "Idiot" - he is even referred to in the English subtitles, by Tai Bo's character as "Mr. Idiot" at one point.

Those are the only minor things I picked up from watching this one this afternoon. Everything else appears present and correct on this entry. Superb film, btw, and an eye-opener to see the city of Hong Kong from twenty one years ago in various stages of development. Nice

Mike

One of the greatest joys I get out of contemporary-set Hong Kong cinema is just seeing the city itself, and nowhere do you get a better tour than in the Danny Lee crime thrillers, which zip from location to location with alarming speed.

ROAD WARRIORS, THE LAW ENFORCER, FINAL JUSTICE, AGAINST ALL and many more offer a lot of great location work without distracting, artsy flourishes. Hong Kong's movies are a lasting chronicle of one of the - fastest and ongoing - metropolitan evolutions on earth.

Brian Thibodeau wrote:One of the greatest joys I get out of contemporary-set Hong Kong cinema is just seeing the city itself, and nowhere do you get a better tour than in the Danny Lee crime thrillers, which zip from location to location with alarming speed.

ROAD WARRIORS, THE LAW ENFORCER, FINAL JUSTICE, AGAINST ALL and many more offer a lot of great location work without distracting, artsy flourishes. Hong Kong's movies are a lasting chronicle of one of the - fastest and ongoing - metropolitan evolutions on earth.

Oh the irony! All of the films you have just listed have been the ones I have revisiting of late! I figured I had been away from them too long and it was time to start sitting down and re-exploring numerous features from the region circa the eighties.

What took me about THE LAW WITH TWO PHASES today was the iconic footage of Kowloon, the housing estate flats, and the signature setpiece where Eddie Chan pursues Parkman Wong across the rooftops of a street market nestled in the central courtyard of a housing estate block! If one ventures a little further out from HK into surrounding South East Asian territories, then one can find alarming similarities in architecture and urbanisation in places like the developing regions of Malaysia. LAW also offered that welcome (though lacking these days) ambience of "community" that used to be prevalent in HK cinema -- the only places you see such a thing now is in productions set in outlying regions like Cheung Chau or the New Territories. So yes, I feel the same way -- HK cinema proves a wonderful record of the incredible explosion in development and evolution the region has undergone when visited retrospectively.

I only wish there was some way to backtrack through the parallel development of Shanghai...

When DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY was on tv the other week I explained to my mother that you could date a film to within a year or two by noting what the tallest building on the skyline was :p

MrBooth wrote:When DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY was on tv the other week I explained to my mother that you could date a film to within a year or two by noting what the tallest building on the skyline was :p

Ain't we a funny bunch? Can you imagine if the three of us were sharing seating space at a retro screening of some eighties classics? We'd be the three guys pointing out the skyline in the background, noting how much Kowloon has changed, looking for landmarks and waxing rhapsodic about all the cultural intricacies evident in the background...

...while the rest of the audience would be cheering on Danny Lee's bodycount, or Gordon Lau's martial arts moves, in the foreground. Haha.

Ain't we a funny bunch? Can you imagine if the three of us were sharing seating space at a retro screening of some eighties classics? We'd be the three guys pointing out the skyline in the background, noting how much Kowloon has changed, looking for landmarks and waxing rhapsodic about all the cultural intricacies evident in the background...

I suspect you guys know more about the lay of the land over there than I do, as I've never been there but still hope to visit one day. Still, while I can't always date the skyline to within one or two years, I'd probably be able to nail it to within four or five, which means there might still be some use for me!

Peter Nepstad started a "location database" over at The Illuminated Lantern, but it appears to more of a casual project, hardly surprising in light of the vast bounty of actual locations filmed over the years throughout the city.
http://illuminatedlantern.com/cinema/travel/

I've always said - only partially joking - that every one of Hong Kong's citizens has probably appeared in a Hong Kong movie at some point in their lives, usually without knowing it. Just skimming the background during almost any scene shot outside of a studio environment reveals thousands of "free" extras, many of whom unwittingly lend a wild sense of reality to the scenes they're captured in, particularly action scenes, staged gang fights and even the occasional car chase. America's unionized filmmakers just couldn't buy that kind of naturally-occurring production value.

I think I changed those roles several times

Changed again.

calros wrote:I think I changed those roles several times

Changed again.

Well...now you can rest easy that they are correct.