For my Red Lantern cinema chat group, we watched Ringo Lam's City on Fire, a 1987 Hong Kong gangster-cop action film, complete with '80s wailing sax soundtrack.
This film served as inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (either a rip-off or homage, depending on your degree of QT fanboying) and is part of a sub-genre of Hong Kong films called "heroic bloodshed," films where guns replaced martial arts. The seed film for this genre was John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, and Chow Yun Fat was the star whose signature trenchcoat and sunglasses look would inspire Hong Kong youth. There would be feedback loops between the Hong Kong and Hollywood films over the next decade.
In our discussion we talked about the cartoonish tonal shifts between comedy and cynical cop-gangster action, the unfortunately shrill girlfriend subplot, the amount of smoking, and genre favorites of those who had seen these films before. It was suggested that Infernal Affairs might be a good film to see next, and for next week we will watch Johnny To's The Mission. I'm not the target audience for this film but I enjoyed it's propulsive action.
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