I met my wife in Hong Kong. But my first love there was Jackie Chan. I wasn’t alone in my affection: His movies, released on major holidays, were fun-for-the-family events, and this Caucasian cinephile always felt a little out of place when he showed up at the boxoffice. “This Chinese movie,” the ticket takers patiently explained, to what they took for a clueless foreigner. “You want English movie.” That’s what they thought—who would want an English movie when there was one with Jackie Chan playing?

As a three-year resident of what was then the Crown Colony I was fortunate to get in on the ground floor of Hong Kong cinema, and I experienced first-hand its last golden era, from the late 80s to the early 90s. I took in all the John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, Sammo Hung, Stephen Chow, etc., that I could find, confusing a lot of ticket takers. Hong Kong movies, fast on their feet, quick-witted, and bursting with a crazy urban energy, made the dream factory across the Pacific look fat-assed and lazy. Evidently it agreed: Hollywood picked up some of that stardust and started sprinkling it around. By then, anxiety over the 1997 handover to China had gone from giddy to morose, and the local industry had lost a lot of its drive and ambition. (It was, I think, the feeling of an endpoint looming, a subtext to many Hong Kong films of that period, which gave them that restless, go-for-broke quality.) I’d say the last great movie of that singular, never-to-be-repeated time was Chan’s jaw-dropping martial arts masterpiece Drunken Master II (1994); the harbinger of things to come was his godawful, party’s-over Rumble in the Bronx, made the next year.

Ironically, it was that film that gave Chan his first U.S. hit, after some English-language misses in the 80s. Its unprecedented success led to the popular Rush Hour pictures and the Shanghai Noon/Shanghai Knights two-fer; the Chinese movie and the English movie married and gave birth to Jackie Chan, the crossover phenomenon. They’re light, enjoyable, fairly forgettable movies, as are most of Chan’s Hong Kong-made films since then, which nowadays tend to go straight-to-DVD here. (Have you heard of Rob. B. Hood? No? Well, I wouldn’t bullet it on my Netflix queue.) (more…)