Mediocre!!! Silent Night Review
#johnwick #johnwoo #johncarpenter
Mediocre!!! Silent Night - Silent Revenge Review
Woo WIKI:
John Woo was born Ng Yǔ-sam in Guangzhou in 1946.[1] In 1951, Woo's family fled communism to Hong Kong and found refuge in the Shek Kip Mei slum (Kowloon), where his father contracted tuberculosis and could not find employment. Woo recalls: "We lived in a tiny shack with a single room for the family of five. There was a lot of crime, brawls, and fights; it was teeming with criminals, gangsters, drug dealers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and gamblers; there was a lot of dirty business."[4] The Shek Kip Mei fire disaster over the Christmas holidays of 1953[5] devastated the entire slum.[6] The Ngs initially lived on the streets before receiving social housing from the British colonial government. However, even in their new accommodation, the teenager Ng Yu-sum continued to face crime and violence in his daily life.[7] Until the age of 16, he attended school, which was financed by an American family through a local Lutheran church.[8]
Woo had originally considered becoming a priest but was rejected by the seminary. In the late 1960s, he entered the film industry, a passion he developed through shared cinema outings with his mother to see films such as The Wizard of Oz. One of his favorite films in his youth was the 1969 western comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*, written by William Goldman and directed by George Roy Hill. In 1969, Woo became a production assistant at Cathay Studios [9] and trained as an assistant director at the Shaw Brothers production company [10] under Chang Cheh [11]. His feature film directorial debut followed in 1973 with the low-budget production *The Young Dragons [12], for which the young Jackie Chan choreographed the fight scenes. After the Ricky Hui vehicle Money Crazy (Kantian: 發錢寒)[13] from 1977, Woo was largely confined to comedies until he delivered an award-winning modern gangster film, City Wolf (1986), starring Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat. In this film, a ruthless gangster betrays a colleague, who embarks on a revenge mission after serving his prison sentence. With the sequel City Wolf II (1987), The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), and Hard Boiled (1992), he produced further films of a similar style, in which he stood out for his aestheticized depictions of violence.[8] In his melancholic gangster ballads, he blended Western influences such as Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Peckinpah, and Martin Scorsese with the elegance of Chinese sword-fighting films.[14]
In the early 1990s, Woo moved with his family to the United States, where he became the first Asian filmmaker to direct a major Hollywood production.[15] He made his US debut in 1993 with the action film Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as an unemployed sailor who uncovers a gang of millionaires who carry out manhunts targeting the homeless. Woo disliked the control exerted in Hollywood over screenwriting, casting, and editing, but did not return to Hong Kong due to the large budgets. “In Hong Kong, we had to make our films with very little money. We were like a fish out of water, just trying to survive. Once you've learned that, you can also make expensive Hollywood films. I never exceed my budget because if you do that too often, you eventually stop getting commissions,” Woo said in a 2000 interview with Stern magazine.[16] During his time in Hong Kong, the filmmaker also worked as a producer, screenwriter, film editor, and actor on his films, in addition to directing.
With further action films such as Broken Arrow (1996) and Face/Off (1997), Woo managed to build on his earlier successes. In the latter film, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage played an FBI agent and an international terrorist, respectively, which earned Woo the Saturn Award for Best Director. His most commercially successful film to date was Mission: Impossible II (2000) starring Tom Cruise, which grossed $215 million at the box office. According to the film service, Woo proved once again that he is currently the most innovative and interesting action director.[17] The subsequent war film Windtalkers (2002), again starring Nicolas Cage, and the science fiction thriller Paycheck (2003) with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman did not reach the same level of success as Mission: Impossible II. In the following years, Woo returned to Asia and directed several feature films there.