BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JULY 31, 2000 ISSUE
BOOKS Chopsocky Tale PLANET HONG KONG Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment By David Bordwell Harvard University -- 329pp -- $65 For some 20 years--from the '70s into the '90s--Hong Kong's film industry was one of the few to beat Hollywood at its own game. In Hong Kong, local films regularly outdrew Hollywood blockbusters. In 1981, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the top-grossing film in America, only made it to No. 16 in Hong Kong, topped by local fare such as The Dead and the Deadly. Production flourished, with anywhere from 90 to 135 mainstream films a year being released from 1977 to 1997. Only India and Iran seemed similarly able to resist Tinseltown. The limited number of screens Hong Kong allotted to U.S. films partly explains the local industry's success. But, as David Bordwell points out in his wide-ranging overview, Planet Hong Kong, ''the quota could not have worked if [the industry] had not offered a fairly competitive product.'' The product in question was a colorful, lightning-fast, sometimes incoherent, and often violent cinema of excess. Among the films best known in the West are John Woo's alternately gun-crazy and lugubriously sentimental male-bonding epics, such as The Killer, and the precisely timed, graceful Jackie Chan stunt-fests, such as Police Story. But these barely scratch the surface of Hong Kong's output: a mad hodgepodge of medieval swordsman dramas, gruesome ghost stories, gangster sagas, and cross-dressing comedies. It's a dauntingly varied landscape, and it's hard to imagine a better book on the subject than Bordwell's. Author of excellent studies of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer and Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, he brings an attentive eye and a sophisticated system of formal analysis, worn lightly and clearly expressed. His comparison of the split-second mechanics of Hong Kong action sequences with their Hollywood counterparts makes the latter seem loud and clumsy. The anecdotes are a great treat for fans: In one, two-fisted masochist Chan declares, ''I live for pain. Even when I was young, I loved pain.'' Planet Hong Kong is also a concise history of an industry that flourished throughout East Asia by tailoring films to regional markets (more action for Taiwan, no good-guy gangsters for Singapore). Vertical integration was key: Major distributors, such as Golden Harvest Entertainment Co., owned theater chains; Cinema City studios was underwritten by a theater chain. Producers, notes Bordwell, ''have built successful enterprises upon narrow margins by borrowing for investment, keeping down wages and overhead, dealing in quantity, and working tirelessly.'' Today, the golden age of Hong Kong cinema is over. Directors such as Woo and stars such as Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-Fat have gone to Hollywood. American blockbusters have gained supremacy even in Hong Kong, as Hollywood has invested in its own multiplexes. And production is less than a third of what it was at its peak. Hong Kong cinema is by no means dead. But lovers of untamed cinema can only mourn the passing of the madly productive glory days. By B. KITE _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS Chopsocky Tale PHOTO: Cover, ``Planet Hong Kong'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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