John Woo

On Sep 15, 11:02 pm, StormChaser <ringpr... DeleteThis @surfglobal.net> wrote:
> What happened to the flashes of brilliance
> displayed in Hard-Boiled and The Killer?
> His subsequent studio movies don't seem
> to have the same fluidity and graceful bloody
> violence.

I may be alone in this, but I thought both FACE/OFF and MISSION
IMPOSSIBLE 2 had great cinematic sequences, teeming with fluidity and
grace. Granted, not the over-the-top violence of his HK films, but
still a display of genre filmmaking artistry that we haven't seen in
Hollywood in years. But then, no one really does violence well in
Hollywood films these days. I think Walter Hill was the last. And Woo
had trouble with HARD TARGET where the ratings board kept threatening
him with an NC-17 because of the intensity of the fighting. So he had
to keep cutting until they were happy. So, it would be hard for him to
include in his Hollywood films the kind of violence he had in his HK
films simply because of the ratings board pressure. I've seen the
director's cut of HARD TARGET and I find it hard to believe they would
have given it an NC-17 simply because of Woo's trademark emptying-a-
gun-clip-into-an-opponent shots. But that's what they threatened.
Casual violence is okay, not emotional violence. Something like that.
I doubt that Peckinpah would have had much of a career in Hollywood
these days. 1969 was ripe for a film like THE WILD BUNCH. But it would
never have gotten made in the 1990s/2000s.
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