Maggie Cheung - The Chinese Cinema

The Chinese Cinema

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Maggie Cheung

A collection of 14 posts

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

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The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

The Heroic Trio and Executioners (Johnnie To & Ching Siu-tung, 1993)

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The Heroic Trio and Executioners (Johnnie To & Ching Siu-tung, 1993)

The Bare-Footed Kid (Johnnie To, 1993)

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The Bare-Footed Kid (Johnnie To, 1993)

It's a Drink! It's a Bomb! (David Chung, 1985)

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It's a Drink! It's a Bomb! (David Chung, 1985)

The Seventh Curse (Lam Nai-choi, 1986)

The Seventh Curse (Lam Nai-choi, 1986)

Maybe the most 1980s Hong Kong movie ever made. Part of the “Don’t Go To Thailand” [https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/don-t-journey-to-the-west-shaw-brothers-horror-at-the-metrograph] horror tradition, wherein an urbane Hong Konger travels to the jungle, does something stupid, and ends up with a horrible magic curse that manifests itself in increasingly

Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)

Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002)

There’s a little making-of featurette on the Miramax DVD of Hero⁠[1] that has some decent interviews with the cast and crew along with some breathless Hollywood narration. Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, and Donnie Yen speak impeccable English, which makes one wonder what might have been if Hollywood wasn’

Project A 2 (Jackie Chan, 1987)

Project A 2 (Jackie Chan, 1987)

The sequel is even more Chan-focused than the first Project A was, as the other Little Fortunes are absent (they were off in the jungle making Eastern Condors) and Jackie is joined by a trio of women played by Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, and Rosamund Kwan, in an apparent nod

The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993)

The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993)

Before becoming a renowned auteur, a favorite of critics and film festivals the world over, Johnnie To was known primarily in the West for the two films he made in 1993 in collaboration with director and action choreographer Ching Siu-tung. The Heroic Trio and Executioners star Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung,

New Dragon Gate Inn (Raymond Lee, 1992)

New Dragon Gate Inn (Raymond Lee, 1992)

This was nominally directed by Raymond Lee, a cog in the Film Workshop machine, working as a planner or nominal director for several Tsui Hark and/or Ching Siu-tung projects. Tsui was pumping out movies like a madman in the early 90s, with 18 producer credits between 1990’s Swordsman

Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan, 1996)

Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan, 1996)

A descendant of Pál Fejős’s 1928 Lonesome, about two people who find love in the urban crowd and then lose it. The crowd here is Hong Kong in 1986 and the people are Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai. Freshly emigrated from Northern China, Lai barely speaks Cantonese or English

The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko & Johnnie To, 1984-1986)

The Happy Ghost Series (Clifton Ko & Johnnie To, 1984-1986)

After the failure of his debut film, The Enigmatic Case, Johnnie To went back to television for several years (where he directed, among other things, an acclaimed adaptation of Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes), not returning to film until 1986, when Raymond Wong hired him to direct

Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)

Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)

Tsui Hark merges the punk outrage of his early films with the lavish, effects-driven wuxia of his later much more financially successful works in this pointed denunciation of the hypocrisies both sexual and racial in China’s religious traditions, the backward superstitional blindness of Taoism and the calcification of Buddhism

Ashes of Time (Redux) (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

Ashes of Time (Redux) (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

As with My Blueberry Nights and 2046, a person trying to escape their own past romantic disappointments becomes witness to the stories of other people, and thus learns to cope with their own issues. Like Chow Mo-wan in In the Mood for Love, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) has lost the

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)

Wong Kar-wai’s second feature is, I think, one of the great films about the post-war generation and the lingering effects the war had on their psyches and their visions of the world. Set in 1960, the main characters would have all been born in the mid to late 30s,