'War Stories'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
OMG! The Killer! I have that on an old videotape. Because it's the only HK melodrama I own, it has a special place as "no, really, it's all a huge joke!" pretend-irony.
I mean, there are OTT moments that are total jokes, and then there are ones that nobody who made the movie was in on at the time.
What was the HK movie that had the villians storing arms and explosives in a hospitall? Where the good guys have to show up at the end to save all the babies?
eta: Most OTT HK movie moment that I've seen....
In the Mood for Limbs.
Oh, arms.
Dude, I have seen that one too! At least with that one, John Woo was in on the joke. Or else he really thinks it's okay to split newborn eardrums with close-range automatic weapons fire.
Actually, having seen Broken Arrow, I think that's possible.
Hard Boiled.
I think OTT-ness is a major part of my love for Asian movies. I like it.
I love the scene of the cop or SWAT-like guy rappelling down the side of the hospital while carrying a baby. Dude gets shot, but he still manages to not drop the baby.
What was the HK movie that had the villians storing arms and explosives in a hospitall? Where the good guys have to show up at the end to save all the babies?
HARD BOILED by John Woo with, hey, Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung. There was enough stuff going on that implied a certain amount of self-awareness on Woo's part in that one, that I figured a lot of the funny stuff was on purpose, whereas THE KILLER seems so damned sincere in its melodrama it's painful in the wrong ways.
Probably x-posted by now.
Yeah, I think The Killer may have been trying to be deliberately OTT, like, they weren't really asking us to take all that stuff seriously, right? I also recall thinking that Chow Yun Fat should really try to get it on with the cute cop instead of the girl, who was like a walking plot-devicey waif. Considering my slash-o-meter sucks ass (and it was pre-fandom, so I didn't even know what slash was that time), the fact that even *I* could see it really means something. I was sure they were gonna start going at it like bunnies right there near the end.
Considering my slash-o-meter
You'd have to be actively beaming anti-slash beams 24/7 at yourself to avoid slash in a John Woo movie. Or at least in his HK stuff.
OTT Woo which was so shocking and cool upon first watching: the bad guy shooting people blocking his way on the elevator just to get them out of the way.
Ultimate Asian OTT: Ricky-O. He pulls somebodys guts out and strangles them with their own viscera.
Black Cat is the HK edition of the La Femme Nikita knockoffs. It's more bleak, but still stylish.