Johnny To

I liked The Mission and Breaking News is coming via nicheflix.com pretty soon.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME is great fun. Everyone raves about his similar film FULLTIME KILLER, but I wasn't that big a fan.

Also...

http://www.google.com/custom?domains...D%3A1%3B&hl=en

The Mission.
A Hero Never Dies (A great heroic bloodshed tribute, some hate it but I love it)
PTU.

What everyone before me has said, but if you're looking for older To, may I suggest the ridiculously violent "The Big Heat" ?

A Hero Never Dies- This one splits people down the middle. Like Dragon Ma said, some people hate it. I love it but it's one of those movies that needs to be seen more than once to truly appreciate it, know what I mean?

In terms of mind blowing films, "Throwdown", while good, has nothing on "The Mission" .

Even though he didn't direct them, he produced "The Longest Nite" and "Expect The Unexpected" under his Milkyway Image company. I liked both of those.

This guy is actually my favorite non-U.S. director. My favorite film of his is Throw Down.

Pretty much everything's been recommended that I know, except for Where A Good Man Goes. This is actually as close in tone to Throw Down as any film of his I've seen. Primarily in that most of the film's run time is devoted to character and less on action. Lau Ching Wan is just magnetic, and it's one of my favorite film performances.

Also worth seeing is To's new movie Election, which starts off slow, but goes in directions I hadn't anticipated. The violence in that film seemed very un-To-ish, if that makes any sense. (Especially in the second half). But great acting, and great build to the ending. Kind of like a cross between PTU and the Mission, in terms of its structure.
The only film I really didn't like of his was A Hero Never Dies, which just left me flat.

I loved the use of 'Sukiyaki' and the coin duel was perfection. Lau Ching Wan was such a badass even with that big goofy hat on.

Never been his biggest fan, but The Mission is a great little movie. Very simple, but effective story, but I have to admit I'm not a fan of the score. Paper soccer scene was wonderful though.

And after hearing how great that shootout is in the beginning of Breaking News, I put a lot of effort to get myself a dvd of that film and ended up very disappointed. I don't know what people found so great about it, because to me that scene felt really clumsy. The movie itself was OK, nothing to wite home about.

THE MISSION, for sure.

That's a hard question for me. Obviously it would depend on whom I was recommending the film to; but I think I'd choose Fulltime Killer. While not my favorite film by a longshot (which just has to be Throw Down), it seems like it's pretty immediately accessible.

I love the Mission, but I'd worry whomever I recced the film to would be turned off just by the opening musical theme, which is as distracting and off-putting a piece of music as I've heard in film.

Look out, A Hero Never Dies spoilers a'comin. yeehawww!

I really had issues with the title A Hero Never Dies, as a)There were no heroes in that film, and b)Everyone, but everyone dies, so that seemed like false advertising.

Unless, that was the whole point. Maybe the film was a cautionary tale, so that young children who were vacillating on whether or not to be heroes when they were older would see the film and think, "hmmm, being an asian hitman totally sucks. Maybe I'll be a fireman instead."

can someone explain to me why people find Fulltime Killer to be a good movie? I found it to be an overly pretentious overblown snooze fest. Not even Andy/Andrew (or whatever the hell he wants to go by) Lau's egregiously over the top performance could save it...and seriously flashing lights being his weakness? you gotta be kidding me.

Primarily just the performance of Andy Lau, for one. I thought he was great. Yeah it's an over-the-top performance, but he's playing a pretty out there character.

I also found the action sequences to be quite well done (not so much the last showdown in the warehouse) but the other two. The best is probably the one in the outside hallway of the apartment building, which was just very crisp and well-cut. When he does action scenes, I can't help but get involved. He kind of reminds me of DePalma that way (pre-Mission Impossible DePalma, anyway), with his almost-fetishized use of slo-mo and expressive and dynamics exlploding blood-squibs. That last, abrupt shoot-out in Breaking News is sheer visual poetry. It flows like a dance.

You could argue that the relationship between the cleaning lady and the assasin(s) is cribbed from Wong Kar Wai films, but the tone's so different that didn't really prove to be an issue for me. The build-up in the diner with all the exposition about making an effective toxin out of tobacco? I just love that whole bit. It's just "cool." I know that's a horrible answer to your question, but it's just stylized genre film-making, and the ensuing (albeit one-sided) shoot-out I can watch over and over again.

Certainly it's far from perfect; the pacing bogs down a bit before the showdown (the idyllic drive through the meadow, specifically) and the character development only looks good in comparison to Breaking News or Hero Never Dies, but I enjoyed it for its action and acting and composition. But yeah, certainly not my favorite.

Maybe I should have started a new thread for this, but I figured it would be a little wasteful when there's a perfectly good Johnny To thread already kicking around.

I just finished watching hs film Lifeline, and was quite dismayed at my finding it to be the most unfortunate To viewing experience I've ever had. The film had the worst translation I've seen since Anthony Wong's The Color of Truth, which was so bad that I critically misunderstood the prologue of the film, and thought it had a twist ending which I now know was never intended (this is all very confusing).

I like Ching Wan Lau (especially in where a good man goes), but felt that he really didn't have much to work with here (especially in scenes with his "love" interest (Carman Lee, according to IMDB), who really seemed to be aiming for a Andie-McDowell-Four-Weddings-and-A-Funeral-quality performance, and not even being able to live up to that forlorn plateau of severely diminished expectations.

I think anyone who watches films in a foreigh language has to deal with the complication of separating the translated dialogue (blasting by each frame at a discouraging clip, by the way) from the actor's performance, but Ching Wan Lau's love interest (and her erstwhile boyfriend, whose name I can't be bothered to look up) really perform the majority of their scenes together like sedated Vulcans. Their breakup is really great.

Annie's Hunky Boyfriend: If You don't believe in me, then forget it.

Dr. Annie Chan: What does that mean?

AHB: Since you don't believe in me....

DAC: You mean breaking up?

AHB: You said it!! (I added the exclamation mark to spice up the scene a little). And all of this delivered with the pitch and intensity of me trying to decide whether or not to get the 12 or 18-piece chicken mcabomination meal, with enormous fountain drink.

Not to mention that the almost-oppressive prevalence of slo-mo for what feels like must be the entire last twenty minutes of the film, made Peter Jackson's use of slo-mo in the Lord of the Rings movies seem a paragon of restraint and self-discipline. I loved the little two second cameo by Lam Suet though. I think he must be in just about every To film I ever saw; I think his character in Election was my favorite. It was nice to see him not play the comic relief.

I really love Johnny To's movies, but this one pretty much left me cold. The explosions did look insanely dangerous though. That's one brave and dedicated stunt team. Does this film work better for people who know Chinese? My suspicion is that it's just not one of To's best films.