Spectacular cinema.

• Author: Oliver, Charles
• Position: Moves

Why Hong Kong movies are beating Hollywood at its own game

THROUGHOUT THE WORLD American cinema reigns supreme. Hollywood movies capture up to 90 percent of the box office in many countries. European film makers cry for protection from American films. They claim that they cannot compete with U.S. movies and note that in some European countries film making has virtually stopped.

But movie makers in Hong Kong aren't complaining about U.S. competition. This city-state continues to turn out more than 100 films a year, films that dominate the box office, despite competition from American films. Hong Kong movies are also popular exports throughout Asia, and they have attracted a small but growing following in the United States and Europe.

Over the past two decades, government-subsidized European film makers have indulged their own increasingly obscure visions. And they have watched their share of their home nations' box office plummet. Meanwhile, American studios have become parts of ever-larger conglomerates, and they have relied more and more upon market surveys to determine which films they should make and upon audience reaction at test screenings to figure out how to edit those films.

But Hong Kong film makers have pursued a third path. Like the Americans, they make movies for a mass audience, but the Hong Kong version of movie capitalism is much more entrepreneurial. Instead of rehashing the old, Hong Kong film makers seem to compete with one another to see who can be the most original, the most daring, the most inventive.

Hong Kong cinema is characterized by incredible energy, dazzling visuals, and inventive action sequences. The word that most often crops up in Western descriptions of Hong Kong cinema is ultra: ultra-violent, ultrasexy, ultragory, ultramelo-dramatic, ultrafast.

As actor-director Samo Hung has said of the Hong Kong approach to stunt work, "I think we are usually more concerned with finding the line of safety...and then seeing how much further we can push it." Hong Kong movies push many of the accepted lines.

ARISTOTLE SAID THAT THE PURPOSE OF tragedy is to arouse pity and terror. Hong Kong film makers may not have read The Poetics, but they seem to have discovered this principle for themselves. Watching those films is like drinking strong whiskey--both deliver a very big kick. But it seems to be what many people want. The popularity of these films is proof that nothing succeeds like excess.

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