Ringo Lam

That's a Shout Factory release.

It's an Asian film directed by Ringo Lam.

And... starring finny yoon i'm not really familiar with this title but it's i think it's from the same studio that did a lot of the john woo films they've signed a licensing agreement there so anyway uh anything to say about any of those titles

well let's see well both both sestras both sisters love night of the comet um which we've been fans of since it came out in the 80s and that's It's not a completely unique thing.

You had Shaw Brothers still churning out movies.

You had Golden Harvest, a few independents, and you had the mighty Cinema City, which was home to the likes of John Woo, Ringo Lam, Choi Hark, and many others.

Really rather plain opening credits.

There's Matt Garr, the comic actor from AC's Go Places series and the producer.

So I'll talk some more about that a bit later.

And here we are.

In Hong Kong, and Hong Kong really a character in this film, this movie that really established both the career of Ringo Lam and also established another aspect of the heroic bloodshed genre, which is heroic bloodshed basically is the Hong Kong gangster movies, what we call in Japanese movies are called Chanbara, what in America we call gangster films.

Here we are in Mong Kok.

Hello and welcome, everybody.

This is City on Fire, directed by Ringo Lam.

My name's F.J. DeSanto.

I'm a writer, producer, and Hong Kong movie fanatic, and I'm here with the dean of Hong Kong cinema himself, Frank Jang, who's gonna take us through this amazing, action-packed, movie that is so influential that it can't even be understated hi

And this entire sequence are pretty much shot without any permission.

These cops are actually supposedly real cops.

You know, Ringo Lam is known for shooting his street scenes and basically all the chases without permission because you can just never get permission from the Hong Kong government.

This is, of course, Elvis Tsai, Che Kam Kong, who would later become the king of Category 3 films as the undercover cop who eventually got murdered Now, this is, of course, the 80s, so you can still, you know, the days before mobile phones.

I don't know how I did this.

I confused Troy Hark with Ringo Lam.

[laughs] And then I was explaining, like, how, like, oh, Troy Hark was, like, a more grittier John Woo.

But no, that was Ringo Lam.

Troy Hark was, was, is more like a just tr- traditional martial arts guy.

Everyone, everyone was in the comments going, "This fucker doesn't know the difference between whatever those-

It's called Full Alert, in case I didn't mention.

It's directed by Ringo Lam, who directed City on Fire.

I don't know if you've ever seen that movie.

And I don't even know if I've seen that movie.

Now, again, it's not the same in its darkness.

of tone for the most part and this movie is very much a fun action movie in many ways but yeah there's just the underpinnings of this fundamentally adds and changes to what you see and the other thing that really breathes energy and flair to every scene.

It's just how good of a director this guy Ringo Lam is.

There's a scene on the highway where there's a car chase.