>For those unhappy souls who couldn't go listen to Michael Hoover & Lisa
>Stokes in New York, here's Lou's report. Fore more on HK cinema, read
>_City on Fire_. Yoshie
Responding to Lou's post I wrote:
> >Oh, I laughed between squirms too. The violence was so extraordinary
> >it was hard to know how to take it. The gender politics of the movie
> >were quite strange - there were only two women of any consequence in
> >the cast, and both were near-mute ciphers; Sally, the singer, gets
> >hauled around by the antiheroes as a near-corpse after she's shot in
> >the gut by a major gangster honcho. And the men bond with each other
> >through their guns - the relation between men becomes the relation
> >between their weapons. In a scene towards the end, one of the major
> >characters shoots his long-time friend (and of course we get to see
> >the formation of the exit wound in full bloodspray detail) to put him
> >out of his misery because he had a bullet in his head that was placed
> >there by another of the main characters, the greedy-evil Paul.
> >Amazing stuff.
To which Yoshie responded:
>
>In most action films made anywhere, female characters are simply vehicles
>for representations of male rivalry/male bonding/homosocial desire. (What
>Eve Sedgiwick said in _Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
>Desire_ applies to HK cinema as well.) Some HK films have a quite
>interesting sex/gender politics of representation, however: Wong Kar-wai's
>_Chungking Express_ and _Happy Together_, for instance. And how about
>Peter Chan's _He's a Woman, She's a Man_ and _Who's the Woman, Who's the
>Man_? And check out Brigitte Lin's performance in Ronny Yu's _The Bride
>with White Hair_.
What can I say, I don't see many action films. So I don't know if the guns are as phallicized in most action movies as they seemed in this one. Or maybe I should say their phalluses were gun-i-cized. Commentary from connoisseurs would be welcome.
Doug