Latest news with #HardBoiled
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Inside the Painstaking Restoration of John Woo's ‘Hard Boiled' Set for Cannes Classics Spotlight (EXCLUSIVE)
Chow Yun-fat's bullet ballet is reloaded and ready to fire again on the Croisette. As John Woo's landmark 1992 action spectacle 'Hard Boiled' prepares for its spotlight screening at this year's Cannes Classics, Variety has uncovered the blood, sweat and digital wizardry behind saving the bullet-riddled masterpiece from cinematic extinction. More from Variety Kristen Stewart's Latvian Partner Forma Pro Films Ups Co-Pro Stakes (EXCLUSIVE) New Genre Label Chroma Launches, Partners With Fantastic Fest on Fantastic Pitches, Offering $100,000 to Winning Pitch Team (EXCLUSIVE) Filmax Rolls Out Cesc Gay's 'My Friend Eva,' Closing Italy, Germany (EXCLUSIVE) The Chow Yun-fat starrer, which had long been unavailable due to rights issues, comes to the Croisette with new revelations about the technical challenges faced during its meticulous preservation. In the film, a hard-boiled cop (Chow) who loses his partner in a shoot-out with gun smugglers goes on a mission to catch them. To get closer to the ring leaders, he joins forces with an undercover cop (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who's working as a gangster hitman. Together, they use all means of excessive force to find them. The film also stars Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Philip Kwok, and Anthony Wong. ''Hard Boiled' and all 156 films in the Golden Princess library have been largely unavailable outside of Asia because those rights have long been owned by Hong Kong property developer Kowloon Development Company,' explains Jordan Fields, senior VP acquisitions and originals at Shout! Studios, which spearheaded the restoration effort. 'KDC was not focused on the film business after the demise of Golden Princess Film Production in 1995.' Now, for the first time, restoration specialists have detailed the extensive work required to bring this cornerstone of action cinema back to its intended glory. The original negative, sourced from the Hong Kong Film Archive and digitized by Interface Video Production Ltd in Hong Kong, presented significant challenges. 'It was in poor condition, showing significant signs of age and wear,' reveals Michael Coronado, film restoration specialist at Duplitech. 'The most noticeable damage included frequent film tears throughout multiple reels. The iconic one-take hospital action sequence was notably marred by accumulated dust and deep vertical scratches that disrupted the visual clarity and intensity of the scene.' 'The element exhibited noticeable frame shifts and occasional warping, due to shrinkage,' he adds. The restoration team employed a sophisticated combination of Filmworkz Phoenix and Pixel Farm's PF Clean technologies. The process began with Phoenix DVO Frame Lock to stabilize the image before addressing flicker and warping issues. Among the most illuminating revelations is the extent of manual intervention required. 'One of the challenges in restoring 'Hard Boiled' was the film's intense action sequences characterized by explosions, gunfire, and rapid motion, which significantly limited automated dirt removal,' Coronado notes. 'These scenes required careful, frame-by-frame manual restoration.' A particularly challenging section emerged at the end of the fourth reel. 'Our team encountered a significant tear that had split the image across the frame,' Coronado discloses. 'To restore this section, our skilled restoration artists used clone-painting techniques by overlaying adjacent frames to repair the damaged footage.' The color grading process presented its own set of challenges. ''Hard Boiled' contains over 2900 shots throughout its 128 minute runtime, including many optical shots that had to be corrected with dynamic keyframes,' reveals supervising colorist Blake David-Blasingame of Duplitech. 'The negative was very inconsistent and had to be re-timed scene by scene, sometimes shot by shot, to maintain consistency.' The restoration culminated in a Dolby Vision HDR master, with all versions, including the P3 Digital Cinema version that will screen at Cannes, derived from this source. Henry Weintraub, restoration supervisor at Shout! Studios, describes the emotional investment in the project. 'Restoring the film was both a challenge and a labor of love,' he says. ''Hard Boiled' means a lot to so many people, myself included, and I wanted to be sure we did it justice. It was important to preserve the original look and sound design of the era, while also enhancing both to bring out their full potential.' Director John Woo has already given his stamp of approval. 'He said he was very happy with the restoration — which was incredibly rewarding to hear, especially given how personal the film is to him,' Weintraub confirms. The restoration's selection for Cannes Classics represents a fitting homecoming for a film widely considered one of the greatest action movies ever made, finally allowing new audiences to experience Woo's balletic violence and technical virtuosity on the big screen as originally intended. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
At the Japanese bathhouse, the lens comes off and ‘everything feels more beautiful'
A woman listens to her CD player as she soaks in the bathtub. Another checks the temperature of her bathwater as she eats a juicy piece of stone fruit. Two lovers embrace at the edge of a hot tub. Women wash their feet, women soak their feet. A woman lotions her legs in the locker room, cream dripping down her shins like smoke and pooling in a puddle beneath her. There are images of bathing throughout painter Zoé Blue M.'s early oeuvre, but in her latest exhibition, 'Hard Boiled,' M.'s first solo show at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, the Japanese bathhouse is at the center. More specifically, 'Hard Boiled' features scenes from the takkyu onsen — a Japanese phrase that translates to 'table tennis bathhouse.' For M., the takkyu onsen is a space that is both real and imaginary. While many modern bathhouses feature areas for table tennis, the way M. merges the sport with the spa in her paintings is more personal. She is a fixture at Little Tokyo Table Tennis — the pingpong club, clothing brand and cultural community founded by her brother, Jiro Maestu — and a fan of Grand Spa and Beverly Hot Springs. Whether she's slipping into a hot tub or slapping a pingpong ball with her paddle, the artist cherishes both environments for helping her to hyper-focus into her own breath and body. Her paintings come from these pauses. In this as-told-to interview, the L.A. native discusses creating 'Hard Boiled'and the way caring for her body has become a part of her practice as a painter. I'm fascinated with bathing as a ritual. It's almost like you live your life with a lens on and then it's removed in the bathhouse. You focus on the beauty of the body, the beauty of femininity. Everything feels more beautiful in the bathhouse. Every style of body feels so beautiful. I'm most interested in existence within these spaces, and seeing in these spaces. Allowing the body, aging bodies, different types of bodies, to become part of one's visual landscape. There's no better education than just seeing, at least to start. I was also thinking about bathhouses as these places used to fetishize women in Japanese pop culture and manga. [I was looking at] the beauty of this space, while keeping in mind how people have used images of it in a fetishistic way. But if we can't look at things in more than one way, how are we ever going to reframe anything? In this painting ['Butterfly'], she has a big back tattoo, which wouldn't traditionally be allowed in a bathhouse. I made it a butterfly because the show is about these bathhouses that have pingpong, and Butterfly is a really famous table tennis brand. This painting is actually a repurposed image from a traditional Japanese bathhouse. It's an amalgamation of a lot of different things, but it's based on an image of an actual bathroom I saw. Architecturally, it's very similar to the bathroom in the photo, I just changed all of the tiling and other things about it. I freaked it. I started doing the same face for everything because in Japanese ukiyo-e prints, the figuration is always the same — like every girl in a print will have the exact same face but have different outfits. In terms of anime, it's often the same template of a face, and then everything else changes around it. I was also into religious narratives, like frescoes, where it's the same person doing something over the course of time in one frame. So it's all of those ideas in one style of figuration. I'm very focused on breaking down the hierarchy of what figurative painting is. In theory, a portrait would be a figurative painting in the sense that the painting is about that figure. But I'm more interested in painting that utilizes figuration, where there's no longer that hierarchy. Everything has value to it at an equal level. Or sometimes, the architecture has more value than the figure. In a lot of Impressionist paintings, nature is actually the main character and the figures kind of get absorbed into it. I'm trying to utilize that in my paintings. I don't want them to be as much about the figure as the color, the temperature in the space, the wind or the water. All of these things are just as important. Within a bathhouse, there are so many different rooms, with their own temperatures, made out of different things. Obviously, these paintings move a lot, but they're also oddly still. A while ago, I discovered this thing in Kabuki theater called mie. It's when, within the play, the actor strikes this really dramatic pose. It's a tool the actor uses to draw the attention of the viewer to an important moment. It's a very dramatic pose with a very dramatic facial expression, but done with complete stillness. When I discovered this concept, I knew that's what I wanted my paintings to be like. I wanted my figures to be midjump, but still. Within that moment of stopping, there's all of this information. That's what stopping does a lot of the time. The minute you stop and think [is] the minute you can parse things out. My paintings come from this moment of stopping, where within stopping there is movement. It's interesting to think about hyper-focusing into an action for a moment. In pingpong, all you're thinking about is the ball. How do I hit it this time? Getting in the cold plunge is all about paying attention to your breath in the cold. A lot of my work is hyper-focusing into one moment. But then, in these paintings, there's a lot of these little moments happening at the same time. I went through years of being the most deeply unhealthy person, in relation to my practice and my life. About a year ago, my body was pretty much deteriorating. My hands weren't good. My back was killing me. I wasn't exercising. Everything was in the way of my time in the studio. Once I met [my boyfriend] Allek, whose whole thing is health and preservation, I learned a lot about longevity and sustainability. How do I keep painting? In the duration of making this body of work, I nailed down how to reframe my whole lifestyle to make this sustainable for me. How can I do this for the rest of my life? For a long time, I thought it was so much cooler and punk to always be in the studio. Rip Adderall. Never sleep. Have 45 Red Bulls a day. Paint my head off. Also, being bipolar, I was really into mania. I was down with the highs and lows; I thought that was the price. I was used to it, I liked it, and I thought I needed it. There's also something about growing up in a place that feels like being on the precipice of the end of the world more than other places. I have a romantic relationship to that. I always felt scared growing up. It's part of the paintings. Everything is on the precipice of disaster, and it might never come, but we're always aware of it. It's how mental illness feels. There's an energetic field to that. In that way, I just have this relationship with L.A. that I love. I find my work deeply ingrained in L.A. My mom is deeply L.A. We're deeply Japanese American, from L.A., from Little Tokyo. We have a lot of roots here. That's so much a part of my work. I don't need to preach L.A. to anyone, but I'm definitely a diehard L.A. girly. I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. Tierney Finster is a writer, editor and artist whose work has appeared in Dazed and Confused, the Face, MEL, Playboy, Pin-up and others. She was born in the Valley and loves L.A.
Independent Singapore
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Independent Singapore
Tony Leung and Chow Yun Fat reunited for director's birthday celebration
HONG KONG: As reported by VnExpress, iconic Hong Kong superstars Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung made a rare public appearance to celebrate director Johnnie To's birthday. The Star reported that the party, held at a restaurant in Hong Kong's Central District , saw them both join Leung's wife, actress Carina Lau, for a memorable picture, which Lau later posted on her Instagram account. Photo: Instagram/Carina Lau Leung, Chow, and Lau acted together way back in 1985 in the police drama ' Police Cadet ', a nd Chow and Leung didn't team up in another movie until 1992, when they did the intense action flick, ' Hard Boiled '.That was the last time the two starred in a film together. Long friendship The gathering for To's birthday seemed like a blast. Actor Anthony Wong and singer-actress Sammi Cheng also attended the party. Lau also reflected on their long friendship by sharing a photo of herself, Leung, To, and To's wife, Wong Po Ling. In 1982, Leung, 63, debuted as an actor. He is considered as one of Asia's most renowned and internationally acclaimed actors. His partnerships with Wong Kar-wai are especially well-known. They worked in seven films together, including ' In the Mood for Love ,' for which he won the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor prize. Humble beginnings Seventy-year-old Chow started from humble beginnings. Prior to joining the Hong Kong show business with TVB in 1974, Chow worked a variety of jobs, including shoeshine boy, office assistant, parcel delivery worker, hotel staff, and taxi driver. It was those TVB shows that made Chow a star. Think of hits like ' The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly ' and ' The Bund ' – everyone was watching them back then. Chow has had an incredible career, and he has the awards to prove it. He has snagged a couple of Golden Horse Awards for being the best actor and even three Hong Kong Film Awards. In 2023, they named him the Asian Filmmaker of the Year at the Busan Film Fest. He's only the second Hong Kong actor to get that, after Tony Leung. A big deal Lau, who's 60 now, started acting way back in 1984. She became a huge star pretty fast in the '80s with all those drama series everyone was watching. It was not just limited to local stuff. On top of all that movie fame, the international stuff with films like Wong Kar-wai's ' 2046 ' and the ' Infernal Affairs ' sequels put her on the map globally. She's a big deal! Oh, and something else interesting – back in 2008, she married Leung. Successful director At 17, To started his career as a messenger for TVB. He later went on to be an executive producer and director for TV shows starting in 1973. To began his career at age 17 as a messenger for TVB, later advancing to executive producer and director for TV shows starting in 1973. He made his debut as a film director in 1978, but he didn't stop working in television. In 1983, the director To actually helmed and helped write this super famous TV show called ' The Legend of the Condor Heroes .' Apparently, it was based on this martial arts book by Jin Yong—sounds pretty epic, right? Years later, in May 2011, he was even on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival! Then, his movie ' Life Without Principle ' was a big deal too—it was even picked to represent Hong Kong at the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film.
