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

Search This Blog

Saturday, January 31, 2026

School on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1988)

Fennie Yuen in School on Fire
Cast: Fennie Yuen, Sarah Lee, Damian Lau, Lam Ching-ying, Roy Cheung, Terrence Fok Shui-Wah, Joe Chu Kai-Sang, William Ho Ha-Kui, Chan Lap-Ban, Li Kwong-Tim. Screenplay: Nam Yin. Cinematography: Joe Chan. Art direction: Luk Tze-Fung. Film editing: Tony Kwok-Chung Chow. Music: Lowell Lo. 

Ringo Lam's School on Fire is the culmination of a series of "on fire" movies that started with City on Fire (1982) and continued with Prison on Fire (1987). (The 1991 sequel to the latter, Prison on Fire II, was made a response to the popularity of Chow Yun-fat in the first two films.) School on Fire centers on a schoolgirl, Chu Yuen Fong (Fennie Yuen), who is caught up in the infiltration into the schools of a triad headed by Smart (a handsomely sinister Roy Cheung). I think School on Fire is the best of the lot, in part because Lam's concentration on characters as well as action brings in focus his vision of corruption in Hong Kong. Still, nobody does frenzy better than Lam, and he tops himself with the climactic scene of School on Fire in which people and weapons and furniture are whipped into a chaotic conflict that makes you wonder how any of the actors involved in it survived.  
Posted by
Links: , ,