He also managed to become a top box-office draw in the states, something that only his one-time rival-now friend Jet Li managed to equal. Chan helped usher in a real golden age in Hong Kong cinema (that went from about 1986-to the 1997 reunification with China when many top directors/actors emigrated). He also had a dynamite screen presence, with many calling him the Charlie Chaplin of action-cinema, with his humble, unassuming heroes – a stark contrast to the cooler-than-cool heroics of his contemporaries. As such, he’s pretty much broken every bone in his body at least once, and sports a literal hole in his head thanks to a stunt gone awry on ARMOUR OF GOD, which almost killed him.īut, there was more to Chan than just stunts. Coming along at a time when Hong Kong cinema was desperately looking for its next Bruce Lee, Chan did his own thing, mixing his kung-fu prowess with a Buster Keaton/Harold Lloyd-like death-defying comic style, with him famously having performed his own stunts throughout most of his career. Whatever Chan’s motivations may or may not be, it can’t be denied that in his prime Jackie Chan was one of the great action stars. Perhaps this is all part of Chan trying to play nice with the authorities in order to keep making movies his way (which makes a certain amount of sense as the Chinese audience has exploded) but other actors like Donnie Yen and Chow Yun-Fat are able to work in the system without seeming like conservative hawks. Still, as long as his legit Chinese movies are good, who cares, right? This brings me to my second, real problem with Jackie Chan nowadays, that he’s become an arch-conservative part of the mainland Chinese establishment, going so far as to advocate the death penalty for marijuana dealing, even though his own son Jaycee got busted with the drug (and served time in jail). For one thing, he’s never seemed too interested in a US career, and he’s phoned-in many of his American films, which steadily got worse after the early promise of SHANGHAI NOON and the first RUSH HOUR. While I applaud Jackie Chan for still making action movies well into his sixties, there are things about him now that bug me. Like a few other of these columns, this one comes with an asterisk. This week’s icon is of a more old-school variety, and one of the absolute greats … Last week, we took at look at the career of Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, one of the more promising new icons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |