A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, January 17, 2020

Police Story (Jackie Chan, Chi-Hwa Chen, 1985)

Jackie Chan and Ken Tong in Police Story
Cast: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Kwok-Hung Lam, Bill Tung, Yuen Chor, Charlie Cho, Chi-Wing Lau, Hark-On Fung, Hing-Yin Kam, Mars, Tai-Bo, Ken Tong. Screenplay: Jackie Chan, Edward Tang. Cinematography: Yiu-Tsou Cheung. Production design: Oliver Wong. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Kevin Bassinson.

Jackie Chan's debt to Buster Keaton has never been more fully displayed, or indeed more fully repaid, than in Police Story, which has a Keatonian moment when he latches onto a passing bus with the crook of an umbrella. Chan plays a cop who goes from hero to goat and back again in this story of an almost one-man crusade against a drug lord. The climax involves the near-total destruction of a shopping mall, with one spectacular set-up after another.
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