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The Best Hong Kong Movies Ever!


Skepparkrans

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1. The Killer

2. Snake in the Eagle's Shadow

3. The One Armed Swordsman

4. Cageman

5. Warriors Two

6. Made in Hong Kong

7. A Better Tomorrow

8. Election 2

9. My Young Auntie

10. City on Fire

11. Wild Search

12. Prison on Fire

13. The Blade

14. Comrades, Almost a Love Story

15. Summer Snow

16. Fallen Angels

17. C'est La Vie, Mon Cheri

18. Too Many Ways to be No.1

19. Happy Together

20. The Bells of Death

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I've only just got around to checking out Love HK Film's top 200 Hong Kong movies.

http://www.lovehkfilm.com/blog/damnyoukozo/2012/12/17/the-best-hong-kong-films-ever-numbers-200-171/

It's a fan vote so nothing 'definitive', but it just shows how rich HK cinema is to have films considered absolute classics by martial arts film fans (and maybe many people's top films) appear so far down the list.

Personally though I was quite surprised to see a favourite of mine Throwdown to do quite well.

(They also did a best performance vote too.)

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Guest Markgway

From my votes....

1. The Killer = 5

2. Bullet in the Head = 13

3. Eastern Condors = 50

4. Police Story = 7

5. Peking Opera Blues = 9

6. Mr. Vampire = 37

7. Fist of Fury = 27

8. Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter = 182(!)

9. Dragons Forever = 96

10. Once Upon a Time in China = 17

11. Once Upon a Time in China II = 23

12. Millionaires' Express = 88

13. A Better Tomorrow = 3

14. Hard-Boiled = 6

15. Wild Search = 115

16. Heroes of the East = 120

17. Killer Constable = Not Ranked

18. The Secret of the Dirk = Not Ranked

19. Temple of the Red Lotus = Not Ranked

20. Mr. Canton & Lady Rose = 134

-Honourable mentions that could have on another day deserved a place on my list...

Red Cliff, Rouge, A Simple Life.

-Chung King Express isn't even Wong Kar-Wai's best film!

-Are we still in love with Infernal Repairs? Apparently.

-If Johnnie To filmed Stephen Chow taking a shit it would've been on that list.

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I admire that some of you guys can easily cough up your all-time faves from 1 to 20 or 100... or even by year! Never been able to do that. Standards, priorities, viewing patterns change over time and alter assessments, critical faculties get slowly recalibrated the more one watches, compares, dips into in-depth film theory and history studies, places one’s prefered cinema into a wider Asian context. What I would have called a stone-cold classic two decades ago might just end up being another generic (but usually still good) piece of cinema after a critical rewatch, etc. Not all that many films age all that well and are able to maintain the searing impact they had on me in the first place. Case in point BULLET IN THE HEAD which totally tore me apart the first time I saw it in 1991 and for almost 20 years of my life I declared it to be the greatest, most stirring movie ever made. Revisited it twice in the last 12 months and, yes, while its still a powerful film and a career-best performance for Jacky Cheung I spotted too many flaws now, too much narrative inconsistency and uneven pacing to still call it the reference flick for my kinda cinema.

Then there’s those that I thought to be just aiight at first sight that took on a whole ‘nother dimension a decade and-a-half later. FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE would qualify as one of those, a film I’d now elevate to the status of an insanely genre-bending (even by HK cinema standards!) masterpiece with a totally captivating dark vibe generated through its casual, unabashed juxtaposition of farcical humour and screechingly abrasive violence. When rewatching it recently I asked myself if people could still afford to make insanely irreverent movies like this, if Chinese security agents could ever be portrayed like this again, hell, if someone like Chow could ever get away with inspired lunacy of this ilk in the days of homogenized political correctness dictates, SARFT tampered-with scripts and a Chinese film economy awash with money and hellbent to emulate the type of formulaic blockbusters that Hollywood shits out.

Anyway, films I would always place in my personal top 20 would include DRUNKEN MASTER 2, THE BLADE, PEKING OPERA BLUES (if for nothing else than making me a lifelong addict to HK cinema!), MAGNIFICENT BUTCHER, HARD BOILED, A HERO NEVER DIES, the two ELECTION films, COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY, CAGEMAN, CRIPPLED AVENGERS and DISCIPLES OF SHAOLIN (then again, looking at the seventy-plus Chang Che flicks on my shelves I could easily select another dozen that are equally brilliant than AVENGERS and DISCIPLES...).

Oh, and INFERNAL AFFAIRS (parts 1 and 2) would probably miss my top 20 now... narrowly!

And takin’ a cue from Yakuza954 I too would have to settle for at least one Derek Yee, one Fruit Chan and one Ann Hui feature.

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Cognoscente

The God of Cookery is one of the best. The movie has yet to be remade by Jim Carrey, and hopefully it won't happen.

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