Fam. You know I love action movies. Live for them. I even turned my urban fantasy novels into action movies with an urban fantasy twist.
I got this love of action movies from James Bond, but in the late eighties and early nineties, my jam was Hong Kong action cinema. These movies were led by bad ass directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, Corey Yuen, Gordon Chan, Johnnie To. These guys revolutionized the action genre with their hard-boiled characters, wire-fu, and bullet ballet.
If you love John Wick, The Matrix, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, or anything by Quentin Tarantino, you’ve seen the influence of these directors on Western cinema.
Hong Kong cinema around that time also brought us a bevy of fantastic action actors, including Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Leslie Cheung, and Tony Leung Ka-fai.
Unfortunately, the distribution rights to most of these movies got caught up in some BS, so the titles have been out of print and hard to find. Of course, I have the Criterion Collection version of Hard Boiled and a few others from the Dragon Dynasty collection. But if I lost those, I’d be screwed!
Thankfully, that’s changing with the new Shout Factory sublabel, Hong Kong Cinema Classics. There are a limited number of physical media releases coming, but I’m sure that number will increase in time.
The first set announced will feature five movies by Jet Li and drops July 29th.
Meanwhile, the lion’s share of material will be available for digital download and on-demand streaming in 4K starting in June with John Woo’s masterpiece, “Hard Boiled.” Other films, directed mainly by Woo, will follow throughout the summer.
