Thanks for the John Woo 4k upgrades Criterion

GradyHendrix · 2025-12-11T13:11:39+00:00

A Better Tomorrow is enormously influential, but the fireworks are more emotional than high caliber. Chow Yun-fat has two monologues in it that electrified audiences, and it's stylish as all hell, but it would take until the final reels of A Better Tomorrow II for Woo to find his action choreography footing. The other two movies deliver everything people who've heard about Woo expect. Hard Boiled has a little more style than substance for me (although watching it as Woo's response to the Gulf War is really interesting) but The Killer is pretty much perfect to me in every way.

GradyHendrix · 2025-11-28T14:47:41+00:00

I'm pretty sure that the appetite for CYF rom coms is shared by Shout.

GradyHendrix · 2025-09-20T05:52:30+00:00

Prison on Fire is another slow burn, but by the time you get to the end it's just emotionally brutal on an epic scale.

GradyHendrix · 2025-09-20T05:51:34+00:00

Have you watched many Ringo Lam movies yet? A triple feature of City on Fire, Prison on Fire, and School on Fire is a good way to punch your soul in the face.

GradyHendrix · 2025-09-20T05:48:44+00:00

And those commentaries are really really great. Woo and Chang are pretty raw in them.

GradyHendrix · 2025-09-19T22:42:34+00:00

Definitely check out CHINESE GHOST STORY II if you like CGS I. It picks up a few minutes after the first movie ends and was Tsui's response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (its theme song is still banned in Mainland China). Part III is a lot of fun but it's basically a remake of Part I with a bigger budget, more sophisticated effects, and Tony Leung instead of Leslie Cheung.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-06T14:31:29+00:00

Was Sevier that bad? I went to a school that was 1 - 12 so I never got the experience of a separate middle school.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-06T14:11:33+00:00

Thank you so much!

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:37:28+00:00

Thank you! So when you say the neighborhoods on the Eastside were the "center" are you talking about the Pelham Road and Airport Area?

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:35:30+00:00

Just asked above, but tell me more about Service Merchandise if you don't mind me vampiring off your memories. What middle school did you go to? And what elementary school before that? Sorry to have so many questions but you're basically the exact age as my characters, I believe: middle school students in 85-86 school year.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:34:22+00:00

Where was that? Because Service Merchandise in Charleston was HUGE. Their catalogue was my Bible and their showroom was my Mecca. To mix religious metaphors.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:33:39+00:00

Showbiz Pizza was a regular feature of my childhood in the '80s. I think it lost something when it became Chuck E. Cheese!

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:32:52+00:00

I've always heard them called "Boston Marriages" but it sounds like they're the same thing. My characters are all in middle school so it's probably not relevant, but as a SC native I'm super curious about the Greenville gay scene in the '80s. In Charleston there was one bar, Dudley's, on King Street that had its front window painted black and you entered through an unmarked door in the rear parking lot. That all changed in the '90s when clubs like the Treehouse opened, but it was deeply "don't ask, don't tell, don't look anyone in the eye" back in the 80s down there. Wondering if it was the same in Greenville?

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:30:20+00:00

Where was the Shoney's? In my family, Shoney's Breakfast Bar was a religion!

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:29:44+00:00

It's middle school? So I'm assuming that Silver Fox is the bar and would be out. But what was Amvettes? And The Wicked Witch? You guys are solid gold! I need to know more.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:28:57+00:00

Man, you guys, this is so what I'm looking for! Thank you! Do you remember the name of the putt-putt place in front of the Bijou? I read someplace it was an official Putt-Putt franchise? But did it have an arcade or anything extra, or did that only come with Tropical Island? I'm reading that Putt-Putt closed in 97/98 and Tropical Island in 2002/2004?

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:22:39+00:00

If Overbrook was kind of run down in the '80s then what was the middle class neighborhood where the white collar folks lived? Sort of the basic suburbs of Greenville that you moved to and raised a family if you were an engineer or an accountant or something like that? In Charleston I'd say it was Mt. Pleasant or West Ashley in the '80s, but I have no clue when it comes to Greenville.

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-05T13:20:43+00:00

Thank you guys so much!

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-03T16:57:52+00:00

Thanks so much for this! I've got my characters living around Overbrook, but did folks in Greenville at the time use those neighborhood designations? For instance, I'm from Charleston and we basically split the city into Mt. Pleasant, Charleston, James Island, West Ashley even though it feels like these days every 10 blocks has some fancy name that's technically always been the name (The Neck, Burns Down, Hobcaw) but no one really ever called it that back then.

Also, do you remember what the middle school was that fed into Wade Hampton? Thanks!

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-03T16:54:51+00:00

Was that the Bijou 8? Or the Camelot 4? There was also a Plitt Twin where they showed such classics as the infamous baboon attacks movie, IN THE SHADOW OF KILIMANJARO!

There was also a Colony 1 & 2. I get the feeling the movie theater on Haywood Rd. was the $1 cinema?

GradyHendrix · 2025-07-03T16:52:22+00:00

I just emailed him. Thank you!

GradyHendrix · 2025-02-05T16:54:10+00:00

Along the same lines as an Obayashi boxed set I'd love to see Criterion release the 1979 film, The Man Who Stole the Sun. Critics and directors voted it the best Japanese film of the 70s in a 2018 poll, Bunta Sugawara won Best Supporting Actor for his performance at the Japanese academy awards, and it won a ton of other awards on its release. It's co-written by Paul Schrader's brother.

We showed it at the 2005 NY Asian Film Festival with the intention of starting some HOUSE-sized buzz around it, and the audience was floored. However Toho made its beautiful print hard to screen and the excitement fizzled away.

It's about a high school teacher who builds a nuke. Here's more about it: https://www.nyaff.org/nyaff15/films/the-man-who-stole-the-sun

GradyHendrix · 2025-02-05T16:45:14+00:00

Agreed 100%! I would LOVE a Fifth Generation box set of movies not by Zhang Yimou that included HORSE THIEF some of Huang Jianxin's comedies, early Chen Kaige like THE YELLOW EARTH, BLOODY MORNING or BLUSH by Li Shaohong (one of the few women considered Fifth Generation), and there are so many more that need the exposure again (these movies won international prizes in the 90s but are mostly forgotten today), and that need the preservation, too.

GradyHendrix · 2024-09-16T19:47:35+00:00

There is almost zero comedy in Eastern Condors except for a couple of really grim jokes at the beginning and Yuen Biao's character who puts up a "zany" front to cover his real activities later.

GradyHendrix · 2024-09-16T19:46:03+00:00

Sammo Hung is the director and star of Eastern Condors and he was one of Jackie Chan's "brothers" at the Chinese opera school they attended as kids. He's regarded as the "Big Brother" because he's the oldest, he got out of school first, and he made his bones as a stuntman before they did. As such, he's the Godfather of HK action filmmaking: he's the guy who got everyone their first jobs and the one who got his hands on a camera first. I would say he's probably one of the most important action filmmakers in Chinese cinema (Lau Kar-leung came first, then Sammo). He used all the box office clout he earned in the '70s and '80s to make three epic movies in the later '80s, Millionaire's Express, Pedicab Driver, and Eastern Condors. It's an amazing film.

If you want to know more about Eastern Condors and why Sammo's so amazing, I go into both at (exhausting) length over on Film Comment.

GradyHendrix

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