The New One and Only Stephen Chow Thread
08-12-02 | 07:10 AM
#51
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DVD Talk Legend
There's actually 5 movies from HK called Winner Takes All... All for the Winner is a different movie. I just said "I didn't know that" to the person because I didn't want to dispute the claim in case it was true. I suppose there could be some bootleg or random obscure release of All for the Winner on DVD in Mandarin only somewhere out there... but as far as I know, there isn't.
09-13-02 | 12:25 PM
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I have NO IDEA if All For The Winner on DVD is legit or not. I've come across several Mandarin only versions of Stephen Chow comedies from Mainland China, Thailand, etc... I suspect some are pirate DVDs ripped from VCDs, but don't know if all of them are. I'm not curious or rich enough to buy them all and find out. Stephen Chow dubbed is terrible, legal or not. Hopefully someday, we can get more of this stuff (the legal disks) cataloged in the Asian DVD Guide.
09-21-02 | 08:05 AM
#55
DVD Talk Legend
The Sunday Sep 22 edition of the NY TIMES includes a special magazine section (Men's Fashions) that features Stephen Chow on the cover, and has a 4-page article with several additional color photos. Interesting article, great photos.
Last edited by marty888; 09-21-02 at 08:07 AM.
09-23-02 | 12:02 PM
#57
DVD Talk Special Edition
I just saw King of Beggars.
amazing movie.
if you liked Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery, you'll like this movie. except that it has a more classic Chinese kung fu storyline and plot.
among my best
amazing movie.
if you liked Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery, you'll like this movie. except that it has a more classic Chinese kung fu storyline and plot.
among my best
09-29-02 | 07:22 AM
#58
DVD Talk Special Edition
Chow Time
By KARL TARO GREENFELD (NY TIMES)
From his expansive balcony, Stephen Chow looks out over Hong Kong and retraces each step of his career as fondly as a general recounting a victorious campaign. There, across the harbor in Kowloon, is the government housing project where he grew up. The TVB studios, where he caught his first break, are over there, near the old airport. And down the hill are the two apartments he bought after his breakthrough success a decade ago. Chow's view from the Peak, Hong Kong's toniest district, is of a city conquered, an entertainment industry vanquished and in his thrall. There are no more worlds for this show-biz Alexander to conquer.
Well, at 40, Chow is too old for Alexander comparisons. So, how about this: Chow's standing on his concrete balcony just taking in the view, the soft mist rolling in. He isn't sentimental about his past, but pragmatic. He insists he learns from his mistakes, even from his critics. That's why he likes to look out over the city and savor the view: it reminds him of his long journey up here to the top. We sit down on deck chairs, next to a heated swimming pool. That housing project? That 300-square-foot flat where he grew up with two sisters, his mother and grandmother, the hallways so narrow that they had to turn sideways to pass -- how often does he think of that? Is poverty what drove him to succeed? The reason he clawed and scr*ped and killed to be on top?
He looks at me as if I'm an idiot. The apartment was small, he admits, but then, most Hong Kongers lived in such miniature accommodation. He was lucky, he tells me, very lucky. Sometimes he doesn't know if it was a matter of luck or skill. Some days, he says, he feels more lucky than good. Then he says something typically Chinese that I've never heard any Chinese person say before: ''It's better to be lucky than good.''
Miramax, having spent $2 million for distribution rights to ''Shaolin Soccer,'' Chow's 50th movie, is betting that his luck will hold when the film opens in America next year. The film, a kung fu-meets-soccer comedy, has grossed $8 million in Hong Kong, $21 million in Japan, nearly $40 million throughout Asia. Jackie Chan. Bruce Lee. Chow Yun Fat. None of Chow's crossover predecessors, he says, ever made money like that in Asia. As he ticks off the numbers, Chow raps the table with barely restrained enthusiasm. The glass rattles. Our cups of tea slosh. But lest I get the impression he is taken by his own pecuniary success, he assures me his interest is a matter of wanting to get it right, not to impress me.
Chow's humility is palpable and as welcoming as his buffalo-colored eyes. He greeted me at the back door to this four-bedroom house in an old T-shirt, sweats and black loafers. His hair was grayer than I'd seen it on screen. For a moment, I didn't recognize him. Was he the butler? But here was the boyish star of films like ''All for the Winner,'' ''The God of Cookery'' and ''Fight Back to School.'' The Asian Jim Carrey, he's been called. But that's glib. Chow's career hasn't been built on mugging and eye rolling. Instead, he has played a consummate Asian everyman, a bowl-cut Jimmy Stewart, a barefoot Tom Hanks. His comedy is all break-beat timing and misdirection: bumming change mid-punch-up or slurping noodles in the courtroom.
''Chow is one of the funniest comedians in cinema,'' says the Hong Kong film aficionado Quentin Tarantino. ''Add to that the fact that he's also Hong Kong's best actor.''
Unlike Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, the two martial-arts stars with whom he is sometimes compared and against whom he will soon be measured in the minds of American moviegoers, Chow is not equal parts performer and athlete. Chan, for example, carries himself with an athlete's aplomb, a confidence about how his body moves through space. Even when he is sitting down, his barbed pectorals and ripped stomach are bobbing, like a snake that can't get coiled. Chow's presence is less imposing. His steps are smaller, slower, softer. He doesn't have an action hero's physicality. His delicate feet, small bones and feminine hands are more child star than action star. When he speaks, he ducks his head and widens his eyes. He doesn't intimidate so much as ingratiate. That's the technique that's worked since he first appeared 20 years ago on local network children's shows. He doesn't bludgeon the viewer into submission; he simply works his way into your good favor.
Yet he is slated to become an action hero. Another kung fu fighter. This year's Jackie Chan. Chow shrugs at that. If Miramax wants him to be an action star, he explains, then he'll become an action star. ''If that's what gets me before an American audience, then call me an action hero,'' he says. ''I am ready.''
He certainly lacks the compulsive gym routine of an action star. His idea of a workout is getting up around 11 a.m., breakfasting on a glass of Trappist milk and a banana and riding his Cannondale mountain bike up Plantation Road and then down Lugard Path. Or he works out on a punching bag in his Kowloon office. He's been practicing wing chun kung fu for 20 years, he says, though he quickly adds that he's not a master. ''Bruce Lee was a master, a master of masters,'' he says of one of his heroes. ''I am just a practitioner.''
Yet he plays a master in ''Shaolin Soccer,'' a Shaolin monk turned garbage man who yearns to teach the world his sacred strain of kung fu. After befriending a drunken ex-soccer player, Chow stumbles upon the idea of applying kung fu to the beautiful game and assembles the most lovable band of soccer-playing misfits since Sylvester Stallone and Pele dazzled in ''Victory.'' After entering a tournament and gaining the finals against the favored Evil Team, Chow and his buddies must win a phantasmagoric shootout that has more to do with Harry Potter than Ronaldo. Revealing who wins would be giving away the ending, but I'll do it anyway: his team is defeated by the Evil Team, and Chow goes back to a life of picking up redeemables, his dream of imparting kung fu to the world quashed. He dies a broken man.
Sorry, I made that up! That would be the wind-down of a feel-bad movie, and Chow, for all the years he's been in show business, has barely ever shot a feel-bad scene. And ''Shaolin Soccer'' is a Cinnabon of a picture, a cloyingly sweet movie that succeeds because of perfectly measured overdoses of starch and sugar. The sneaky referee in league with the bad guys, each injury to a key player and the inevitable moment of goalkeeping peril all arrive like clockwork. But rather than being annoying in its predictability and sentiment, the film is a reassuring assertion that all is right with the world, that feel-good movies really do feel good. Chow, who co-wrote, co-directed and produced as well as starred in the picture, is one of the few filmmakers who could have pulled this off. The whole movie rests on his slight shoulders, on his ability to simultaneously be a tough-as-nails martial artist and a retiring everyman. He'd rather chat than fight, bargain than throw a punch, joke than choke. That reluctance to resort to the way of the fist is what wins you over.
Chow conceived the picture during what he calls his darkest season in show business: the long winter of 2000, when he was coming off the flop ''The King of Comedy'' (no relation to the American film of the same name), his fourth box-office dud in a row. For the first time in his career, he wondered if his precocious success in pictures like ''Fight Back to School'' or ''All for the Winner'' really had been dumb luck. Had those early films -- he'd been one of Hong Kong's most successful actors during the early 90's -- been flukes? As he wandered around his austerely furnished Kennedy Road flat, peering out the wide windows at a less spectacular view than he now enjoys, he felt, for the first time, his own show-biz mortality. Everyone was saying he had lost it.
''I was thinking, I'm so stupid, I'm so dumb. Why can't I make movies anymore that people like?'' Chow says. ''But I needed to be knocked down a peg. I had to strip away my ego, my pride. I had to get back to basics.'' That was when he conceived the most basic movie he could: ''Shaolin Soccer.'' ''So simple,'' he says. ''So easy. Everybody likes it.''
Has coming back at age 40, re-emerging as Asia's biggest movie star, surprised him? He puts his hand on his hips, throws his head back and laughs a deep, hearty, evil laugh that echoes down the hillside and through Hong Kong's concrete canyons, his breath itself becoming the wind that roils the seas and sinks a dozen junks. ''Once again, I am huge, I am gigantic, I am a cinematic deity,'' he says in his dragon's roar. ''This city cannot contain me.'' Yeah, right. He modestly sips his cup of tea and merely smiles.
Karl Taro Greenfeld is the editor of Time Asia and author of ''Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia.''
By KARL TARO GREENFELD (NY TIMES)
From his expansive balcony, Stephen Chow looks out over Hong Kong and retraces each step of his career as fondly as a general recounting a victorious campaign. There, across the harbor in Kowloon, is the government housing project where he grew up. The TVB studios, where he caught his first break, are over there, near the old airport. And down the hill are the two apartments he bought after his breakthrough success a decade ago. Chow's view from the Peak, Hong Kong's toniest district, is of a city conquered, an entertainment industry vanquished and in his thrall. There are no more worlds for this show-biz Alexander to conquer.
Well, at 40, Chow is too old for Alexander comparisons. So, how about this: Chow's standing on his concrete balcony just taking in the view, the soft mist rolling in. He isn't sentimental about his past, but pragmatic. He insists he learns from his mistakes, even from his critics. That's why he likes to look out over the city and savor the view: it reminds him of his long journey up here to the top. We sit down on deck chairs, next to a heated swimming pool. That housing project? That 300-square-foot flat where he grew up with two sisters, his mother and grandmother, the hallways so narrow that they had to turn sideways to pass -- how often does he think of that? Is poverty what drove him to succeed? The reason he clawed and scr*ped and killed to be on top?
He looks at me as if I'm an idiot. The apartment was small, he admits, but then, most Hong Kongers lived in such miniature accommodation. He was lucky, he tells me, very lucky. Sometimes he doesn't know if it was a matter of luck or skill. Some days, he says, he feels more lucky than good. Then he says something typically Chinese that I've never heard any Chinese person say before: ''It's better to be lucky than good.''
Miramax, having spent $2 million for distribution rights to ''Shaolin Soccer,'' Chow's 50th movie, is betting that his luck will hold when the film opens in America next year. The film, a kung fu-meets-soccer comedy, has grossed $8 million in Hong Kong, $21 million in Japan, nearly $40 million throughout Asia. Jackie Chan. Bruce Lee. Chow Yun Fat. None of Chow's crossover predecessors, he says, ever made money like that in Asia. As he ticks off the numbers, Chow raps the table with barely restrained enthusiasm. The glass rattles. Our cups of tea slosh. But lest I get the impression he is taken by his own pecuniary success, he assures me his interest is a matter of wanting to get it right, not to impress me.
Chow's humility is palpable and as welcoming as his buffalo-colored eyes. He greeted me at the back door to this four-bedroom house in an old T-shirt, sweats and black loafers. His hair was grayer than I'd seen it on screen. For a moment, I didn't recognize him. Was he the butler? But here was the boyish star of films like ''All for the Winner,'' ''The God of Cookery'' and ''Fight Back to School.'' The Asian Jim Carrey, he's been called. But that's glib. Chow's career hasn't been built on mugging and eye rolling. Instead, he has played a consummate Asian everyman, a bowl-cut Jimmy Stewart, a barefoot Tom Hanks. His comedy is all break-beat timing and misdirection: bumming change mid-punch-up or slurping noodles in the courtroom.
''Chow is one of the funniest comedians in cinema,'' says the Hong Kong film aficionado Quentin Tarantino. ''Add to that the fact that he's also Hong Kong's best actor.''
Unlike Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, the two martial-arts stars with whom he is sometimes compared and against whom he will soon be measured in the minds of American moviegoers, Chow is not equal parts performer and athlete. Chan, for example, carries himself with an athlete's aplomb, a confidence about how his body moves through space. Even when he is sitting down, his barbed pectorals and ripped stomach are bobbing, like a snake that can't get coiled. Chow's presence is less imposing. His steps are smaller, slower, softer. He doesn't have an action hero's physicality. His delicate feet, small bones and feminine hands are more child star than action star. When he speaks, he ducks his head and widens his eyes. He doesn't intimidate so much as ingratiate. That's the technique that's worked since he first appeared 20 years ago on local network children's shows. He doesn't bludgeon the viewer into submission; he simply works his way into your good favor.
Yet he is slated to become an action hero. Another kung fu fighter. This year's Jackie Chan. Chow shrugs at that. If Miramax wants him to be an action star, he explains, then he'll become an action star. ''If that's what gets me before an American audience, then call me an action hero,'' he says. ''I am ready.''
He certainly lacks the compulsive gym routine of an action star. His idea of a workout is getting up around 11 a.m., breakfasting on a glass of Trappist milk and a banana and riding his Cannondale mountain bike up Plantation Road and then down Lugard Path. Or he works out on a punching bag in his Kowloon office. He's been practicing wing chun kung fu for 20 years, he says, though he quickly adds that he's not a master. ''Bruce Lee was a master, a master of masters,'' he says of one of his heroes. ''I am just a practitioner.''
Yet he plays a master in ''Shaolin Soccer,'' a Shaolin monk turned garbage man who yearns to teach the world his sacred strain of kung fu. After befriending a drunken ex-soccer player, Chow stumbles upon the idea of applying kung fu to the beautiful game and assembles the most lovable band of soccer-playing misfits since Sylvester Stallone and Pele dazzled in ''Victory.'' After entering a tournament and gaining the finals against the favored Evil Team, Chow and his buddies must win a phantasmagoric shootout that has more to do with Harry Potter than Ronaldo. Revealing who wins would be giving away the ending, but I'll do it anyway: his team is defeated by the Evil Team, and Chow goes back to a life of picking up redeemables, his dream of imparting kung fu to the world quashed. He dies a broken man.
Sorry, I made that up! That would be the wind-down of a feel-bad movie, and Chow, for all the years he's been in show business, has barely ever shot a feel-bad scene. And ''Shaolin Soccer'' is a Cinnabon of a picture, a cloyingly sweet movie that succeeds because of perfectly measured overdoses of starch and sugar. The sneaky referee in league with the bad guys, each injury to a key player and the inevitable moment of goalkeeping peril all arrive like clockwork. But rather than being annoying in its predictability and sentiment, the film is a reassuring assertion that all is right with the world, that feel-good movies really do feel good. Chow, who co-wrote, co-directed and produced as well as starred in the picture, is one of the few filmmakers who could have pulled this off. The whole movie rests on his slight shoulders, on his ability to simultaneously be a tough-as-nails martial artist and a retiring everyman. He'd rather chat than fight, bargain than throw a punch, joke than choke. That reluctance to resort to the way of the fist is what wins you over.
Chow conceived the picture during what he calls his darkest season in show business: the long winter of 2000, when he was coming off the flop ''The King of Comedy'' (no relation to the American film of the same name), his fourth box-office dud in a row. For the first time in his career, he wondered if his precocious success in pictures like ''Fight Back to School'' or ''All for the Winner'' really had been dumb luck. Had those early films -- he'd been one of Hong Kong's most successful actors during the early 90's -- been flukes? As he wandered around his austerely furnished Kennedy Road flat, peering out the wide windows at a less spectacular view than he now enjoys, he felt, for the first time, his own show-biz mortality. Everyone was saying he had lost it.
''I was thinking, I'm so stupid, I'm so dumb. Why can't I make movies anymore that people like?'' Chow says. ''But I needed to be knocked down a peg. I had to strip away my ego, my pride. I had to get back to basics.'' That was when he conceived the most basic movie he could: ''Shaolin Soccer.'' ''So simple,'' he says. ''So easy. Everybody likes it.''
Has coming back at age 40, re-emerging as Asia's biggest movie star, surprised him? He puts his hand on his hips, throws his head back and laughs a deep, hearty, evil laugh that echoes down the hillside and through Hong Kong's concrete canyons, his breath itself becoming the wind that roils the seas and sinks a dozen junks. ''Once again, I am huge, I am gigantic, I am a cinematic deity,'' he says in his dragon's roar. ''This city cannot contain me.'' Yeah, right. He modestly sips his cup of tea and merely smiles.
Karl Taro Greenfeld is the editor of Time Asia and author of ''Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia.''
09-29-02 | 03:50 PM
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i didn't know "king of comedy" was a flop in hk. that's one of my favorite films of his. when it played in san francisco, back in the day, it was packed and everybody was going crazy for it. one of the best movie going experiences i've ever had. i've never seen so many people laugh so hard all together at once before.
well i wonder if shaolin soccer coming out in the states soon is why chinesse odyssey has gotten released? hopefully they'll start re-doing and re-releasing more. espcially all for the winner. it would be great to get some commentaries from him too, if they'd be so kind as to sub them for us in english.
paNTS
well i wonder if shaolin soccer coming out in the states soon is why chinesse odyssey has gotten released? hopefully they'll start re-doing and re-releasing more. espcially all for the winner. it would be great to get some commentaries from him too, if they'd be so kind as to sub them for us in english.
paNTS
09-29-02 | 06:10 PM
#62
DVD Talk Special Edition
i actually bought a copy of King of Comedy recently, an original vcd from hong kong, but it didn't play well on my dvd player. it came out in black and white, and the subtitles were out of the screen. I would like to say it is a defective vcd, but i think it has more to do with the output of my player. I think my player can play it, but my tv can't show it 
oh well. i hope it works on my computer at least.
oh well. i hope it works on my computer at least.
Last edited by joeydaninja; 09-29-02 at 06:17 PM.
09-29-02 | 10:29 PM
#63
A post in another forum called "Temple of the Unknown"
Actor/Comedian Steven Chow Sing Chi of SHAOLIN SOCCER fame and others plans to produce and direct a tribute film in honor of the man who inspired him to act in the first place....Bruce Lee. The actor who portrayed the Bruce Lee-like goalee in SHAOLIN SOCCER will be again playing the Lee-like hero. Chow is currently preparing this film and a sequel to SHAOLIN SOCCER which he received many awards for. More news to follow as soon as I get a title and more info on the storyline of the tribute film. Chow has paid homage to Bruce in as much as 4 of his hit comedy films in Hong Kong. One of the first being 'Fist of Fury 1990' and the recent 'SHAOLIN SOCCER' which has been dubbed and edited for English consumption.
Actor/Comedian Steven Chow Sing Chi of SHAOLIN SOCCER fame and others plans to produce and direct a tribute film in honor of the man who inspired him to act in the first place....Bruce Lee. The actor who portrayed the Bruce Lee-like goalee in SHAOLIN SOCCER will be again playing the Lee-like hero. Chow is currently preparing this film and a sequel to SHAOLIN SOCCER which he received many awards for. More news to follow as soon as I get a title and more info on the storyline of the tribute film. Chow has paid homage to Bruce in as much as 4 of his hit comedy films in Hong Kong. One of the first being 'Fist of Fury 1990' and the recent 'SHAOLIN SOCCER' which has been dubbed and edited for English consumption.
09-30-02 | 08:57 PM
#64
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From: Silicon Valley, CA
Re: -
Originally posted by no pants
i didn't know "king of comedy" was a flop in hk. that's one of my favorite films of his. when it played in san francisco, back in the day, it was packed and everybody was going crazy for it. one of the best movie going experiences i've ever had. i've never seen so many people laugh so hard all together at once before.
paNTS
i didn't know "king of comedy" was a flop in hk. that's one of my favorite films of his. when it played in san francisco, back in the day, it was packed and everybody was going crazy for it. one of the best movie going experiences i've ever had. i've never seen so many people laugh so hard all together at once before.
paNTS
10-02-02 | 10:11 AM
#65
Hey Yellow Hammer,
I noticed that your in the bay area. Do you know of any local shops that sell HK DVDs at a decent price? I usually go up to Chinatown but am I looking in the Silicon Valley for an alternative 'cause I hate driving up to S.F.
Thanks.
I noticed that your in the bay area. Do you know of any local shops that sell HK DVDs at a decent price? I usually go up to Chinatown but am I looking in the Silicon Valley for an alternative 'cause I hate driving up to S.F.
Thanks.
10-02-02 | 11:01 AM
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From: South Barrington, IL
I watched King of Comedy last night and can understand why it may have flopped. I thought it was kind of slow with only a few good laughs. It doesn't compare with Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery which I thought were both very funny.
10-02-02 | 02:05 PM
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From: Silicon Valley, CA
Originally posted by mrhan
Hey Yellow Hammer,
I noticed that your in the bay area. Do you know of any local shops that sell HK DVDs at a decent price? I usually go up to Chinatown but am I looking in the Silicon Valley for an alternative 'cause I hate driving up to S.F.
Thanks.
Hey Yellow Hammer,
I noticed that your in the bay area. Do you know of any local shops that sell HK DVDs at a decent price? I usually go up to Chinatown but am I looking in the Silicon Valley for an alternative 'cause I hate driving up to S.F.
Thanks.
Aside from them, most of the other store places in the South Bay are either rental-only places, or primarily only sell VCDs. The Taiseng mafia is located nearby unfortunately and most places don't even bother anymore (just a hunch).
10-02-02 | 10:09 PM
#68
Yeah, I've been to Louie's house. Didn't they open up a store? I haven't been there yet, though. Laserland is too damn expensive. I use to have a friend that worked there and it was cheap, but now that she isn't working there anymore I don't even bother with the place. I think I'll check out the Ranch 99 in U.C. and Asiandiscs.com. Thanks.
10-04-02 | 12:51 PM
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From: Vancouver, BC
LOL
I remember him being in the local newspapers here a few years ago.
He was trying to immigrate to Canada and Immigration said no and he appealed and they said no again!!!
I remember him being in the local newspapers here a few years ago.
He was trying to immigrate to Canada and Immigration said no and he appealed and they said no again!!!
