John Woo's A Better Tomorrow by Karen Fang

Author:Karen Fang [Fang, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Film Studies
ISBN: 9789888053315
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Afterword: A Better Tomorrow, Today?

Nearly two decades after the first release of A Better Tomorrow, John Woo and Chow Yun-fat find themselves atop the world movie industry, living legends who are globally renowned. Chow, like Bruce Lee before him, has transcended the Hong Kong market to become a male icon to youth throughout America and, unlike Lee, has done so outside an ethnically-specific category such as martial arts. Global superstardom has brought Chow a variety of usual and unusual honors, including serving as an Ambassador for the World Wildlife Federation — and, in 2001, becoming the subject of a valuable set of postage stamps issued by the tiny South American country of Guyana. For John Woo, fame and influence have come so quickly that he is now in the curious position of promoting the older artists and directors who exercised such a strong influence on him — his quote in praise of Le Samouraï now promotes the video version of the 1967 film. Woo has also received the ultimate accolade in directorial status: his signature shot, the cinematographic moment combining a close-up with a rapid rack focus during an action sequence, has been conventionalized in movie industry lingo. This “Woo shot” is now a familiar device for movie-goers and filmmakers alike, and is now, like “Bergman lighting” or “the Peckinpah slow-mo,” a regular term in the technical vocabulary that Woo himself calls “the international language of films.”1 Woo’s description of film grammar as a multicultural and transnational entity illustrates the incipiently global approach in which the director has always worked. For Woo, who feels that “we are all part of the same film family,” the globalization of the Hong Kong film industry, in which he played a crucial role, was an inevitable part of its manifest destiny in the world movie capital of Hollywood.2

A Better Tomorrow, the film that launched the two men to superstardom, only grows in global prominence. The film’s formerly secondary status in the West relative to The Killer, for example, is changing. Anecdotally, it is now far more common to hear critics and fans extol the movie as “the film that started it all,” in a more informed celebration that refers to its originary status in Hong Kong movie history rather than the chronology of the films as they arrived in the West. In terms of consumer demand, home sales of A Better Tomorrow on DVD and VHS are strong. The American company Anchor Bay Entertainment, which also distributes in the UK, recently acquired the title, previously only available as an import from Media Asia. According to the company, A Better Tomorrow remains one of its best sellers.3 Indeed, the film’s prominence in foreign markets as “the film that started it all” is evident in a professional website (www.abtdvd.com), named after the movie, which reports in English on Hong Kong movies newly appearing on DVD. By borrowing the movie title as the name of the website the site expresses the homage at the heart of the

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