firehawk12 said:
Maybe it's just me, but all the Chinese language stuff (China, HK, Taiwan) seems to be either gangster/cop movies or teen idol romance movies these days with the sprinkling of martial arts (IP MAAAAAAN) and wuxia. It's fairly boring nowadays.
Not entirely, but you can blame the growing mainland chinese market and the SAFT censors. romance and drama never made up that much of the output I'm the region as much as action or crime genres, but it's really the period martial arts and wuxia pictures that is really dominating. It began with Croaching Tiger, but really got started with Heroes. All big budget co-productions between HK and China are variations of wuxi a, including the likes of Red Cliff, with a model of high investment and high returns in the vast Chinese market and using the period setting to avoid sensitive issues and appease the censors. And more recently you have the likes of Ip Man that are set around WWII and fan up nationalistic ideas through Donnie Yen beating up Japanese or westerners in a narrative about how the Chinese are victimized. I'm not saying that these settings can't make good films, even wkw's next film will be about Ip Man, but the way they dominate is astounding.
This has a big impact on HK films in the last ten years as directors and producers try to tap into the mainland money. Big films in the early 2000s like shaolin soccer that haven't realised the need to get through the Chinese sensors missed out on a lot of money and then you have the likes of Infernal affairs and Lust, Caution that had butchered versions of the films in china. Some directors are getting the idea of how to make big budget films interesting in this system though with The Warlords and Bodyguards and Assassins being examples.
Gangster films are on the wane for the same reasons, SAFT doesn't like films about crime or anything where the cops don't win and all the criminals are arrested or dead. Johnnie To is really the only reason HK still has gangster film but that's the genre he uses and operates in and he have had a very productive few years recently.
A parallel trend in HK would the growth of independent films that have very local sensibilities and don't really attempt to get into the Chinese market at all. Echoed of the rainbow, Gallants and Edmund Pang or Ann Hui films are examples of this. And there are signs of new talent emerging in this new regional cinema that I love. Smaller chinese films are occsionally very good too. Of course, they don't try to get distribution abroad unless they've won a a festival or is banned in china so it's unlikely for people in US or Europe to know of these efforts.
What I really miss though is Taiwanese cinema. There isn't much of it and they don't get enough distribution for me to see it.
