About
“The movies I like to make are very rich and full of passion. Some people see me as an action director, but action is not the only thing in my movies. I always like to show human nature - something deep inside the heart.”
-- John Woo
The Gun Fu Era of Hong Kong Action films
Hong Kong action movies have influenced a lot of new age american and european action films. The first hong kong action movies were based more on the wuxia style, mystic, swordplay and inmpracticle actions. but wuxia films were suppressed and replaced by more realistic fung fu movies in the 1930s. in 1986, John Woo introduced the style of gun fu movies in the hong kong action movie industry. Gun Fu is basically the combination of Gun and Kung Fu. it is a style in which martial arts fights is played out using guns as well. The first film he introduced in the gun fu "genre" was A Better Tomorrow in the 1986 and this genre became the regular feature of other Hong Kong films as well as in American film industry in the 1993.
Since the 1970s, Hong Kong has been home to arguably the world's most energetic, imaginative mass-market film industry. At its peak it surpassed nearly all western countries in number of films released, ruled the east Asian market, and produced movies (ranging from John Woo's action pictures to the comic adventures of Jackie Chan) that have thrilled global audiences an attained cult status in the West.
John woo is one of the most influential person to intoduce the gun fu type of genre into the big screen in his 1986 movie classic. His movies usually consist of martial arts, graceful hand combat and bullet ballet.
Its was written in an article about John Woo and his approach to kung fu and gunplay, “Before 1986, Hong Kong cinema was firmly rooted in two genres: the martial arts film and the comedy. Gunplay was not terribly popular because audiences had considered it boring, compared to fancy kung-fu moves or graceful swordplay of the wu shu epics. What moviegoers needed was a new way to present gunplay—to show it as a skill that could be honed, integrating the acrobatics and grace of the traditional martial arts. And that’s exactly what John Woo did. Woo created beautifully surrealistic action sequences that were a ‘guilty pleasure’ to watch.”
The movie chosen in this film are breakthrough films because the movies contain a gangster life and because of the glorification of Chinese triads, which hurt the feeling of the eastern population but to the western population, when Woo gained recognition in the western countries, due to the lack of knowledge in the aspect of political imbalance in the eastern countries, the western audience felts that the films were mostly for enterainment and were not given much though regarding the phenomenan regarding the movies.