Hong Kong Popular Culture
The title is an abbreviation of Hong Kong Popular Culture: Worlding Film, Television, and Pop Music. Klavier J. Wang’s 2020 book is required reading for cineastes who would like an in-depth look into how the other worlds of the H.K. entertainment industry affects the decision-making of their film world and vice-versa. The book is a scholar’s dream, which is easy to see why when you consider that she researched by using the facilities afforded to her by the Academy of Hong Kong Studies and the Education University of Hong Kong.
I first happened upon the book when I was looking up Triads during a Google Books search. One of the things that makes Klavier’s book special is that it compares the Taiwanese box office figures with the H.K. figures. She goes out of her way to detail the topic of Taiwanese investment - something that I’ve always been intrigued by. Basically, H.K. relied on Taiwan in the same way that Hollywood used to rely on China. Among plenty other things, she talks about the history of censorship and rock bands - something that’s easy to forget with Cantopop being so commonplace (especially in today’s world where people obsess over J-pop and K-pop).
For the average Westerner, reading the book will be like looking into a mirror. For example, when K.J. Wang explains why most people in H.K. prefer reading TV to reading books. While the TV is on, you can be listening to it while doing chores or dining. As for the music, it’s a wonder that C-pop never took off in the West. It was easy for J-pop to succeed with the popularity of anime and psychological horror films being remade as Hollywood fare (with the sequels being fodder). K-pop succeeded due to the advent of YouTube, but the height of C-pop was in the nineties when there wasn’t much exposure in the West despite some singers touring Western countries.
As a fan of Wong Jing’s movies, a photograph of a H.K. cinema circa 1993 confirmed to me that Perfect Exchange was the original English title for what became primarily known on DVD as The Sting II. I wish that the book had more to say about him since he is one of the industry’s most profitable film-makers and helped the industry stay afloat during its rough patch in the late nineties and early noughties - when most of the significant talent headed West to try their luck in Hollywood. The closest that Wong Jing got to having his hands on Hollywood films was purchasing the H.K. distribution rights. In comparison to other H.K. directors like John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai, not much is known about him to Western scholars. This is a pity since Jing was known for being the main film-maker who Jet Li worked with after the death of his manager: Jim Choi.
Wong Jing was also the director who discovered Maggie Cheung and took her from being a model to an actress. While he didn’t make her best movies, the experience of working with him gave her the opportunity to be regarded as someone to consider casting. It’s like how Lo Wei’s films became a training ground for Jackie Chan so that he could be recognized by a better director like Yuen Woo-Ping. In the case of Maggie, it’s because of Jing that Jackie Chan saw her comedic potential. On a more serious level, Jing represents the dark side of H.K. cinema since so many of his films were produced by the Heung brothers - the H.K. equivalent to England’s Kray twins i.e. the two Heungs, while not being twins, were gangsters.
Back to Klavier Wang’s brilliant book, she mentioned that 1977 was when it became A-OK for H.K. movies to be screened in Mainland China. It might be a coincidence that Jimmy Wang Yu stopped directing in 1977, but it’s not a coincidence that 1978 was when H.K. martial arts cinema kicked into high-gear with the choreography and camerawork being brought up a notch or two. The intricacy was heightened, the undercranking made the techniques sharper even if the choreography wasn’t all that complex at times, and everything just seemed slicker. Everyone was on their game with finely etched characters, finely tuned plots, and directorial storytelling that bordered on the downright avant-garde. I’ve often thought that Kung Fu movies were fairly overlooked in their New Wave values. Ironically, Taiwan was still the number one source of investment with the Mainland being nothing more than a safety net if things didn’t pan out i.e. with some Taiwanese investors not wanting to put out and some who even pull out when they find out that most of the budget is being used to pocket some greedy producers. As Jackie Chan’s character pointed out in Armour of God, H.K. people treat money as their god.
With the Taiwanese pulling rank with their financing, some actors could get away with being rebellious towards H.K. Triads as long as they had Taiwanese Triads backing them up. Jackie never had to pay protection money to Triads in H.K. because Jimmy Wang Yu was a member of Taiwan’s biggest Triad: the United Bamboo Gang. Jimmy is credited as the presenter of Jackie’s Heart of the Dragon (1985) for a reason. Released during the height of Jackie’s popularity, the movie bucked the trend by not being a martial arts comedy. Not many were happy of this decision, so director Sammo Hung needed assurance if not insurance. Despite Australia being Jackie’s second home, he didn’t appear as a stuntman in Jimmy’s The Man from Hong Kong. In fact, Jackie didn’t act in Australia until the mid-nineties where he acted in First Strike circa 1995 and Mr. Nice Guy circa 1996. When you factor in Yuen Woo-Ping working on The Matrix in Australia circa 1998, it’s not a surprise that the country’s first Hong Kong film festival would be held before filming finalized on the Keanu Reeves movie. In August, the festival was divided across Sydney and Melbourne.
Yet C-pop never really capitalized on this. The irony is that H.K. produced singers who were just as good at acting unlike their Hollywood counterparts.
