Digital Asia
One of the greatest Hong Kong films arrives on DVD, and a recent Bollywood dazzler makes it to Blu-ray
By Andy Klein
Hong Kong action fans can check another long-awaited DVD release off their “Why isn’t this out?” lists: This week, Dragon Dynasty will release King Hu’s 1966 Come Drink with Me, starring the great Cheng Pei-Pei, who decades later found her broadest audience as the villainous Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
In Hu’s breakthrough hit, the 19-year-old Cheng plays Golden Swallow, a female martial artist, who works together with a drunken, retired swordsman (Yueh Hua) to free her brother from kidnappers. The movie has that joyous, inescapable sense of a cinema artist discovering his true voice in one blinding flash of energy. Even after his career went into eclipse in the ’80s, Hu remained the greatest influence on the generation of “New Wave” Hong Kong filmmakers who became popular in America. (The notable exception is John Woo, who cites Chang Cheh as his mentor.)
When Celestial Films started rolling out the massive Shaw Bros. catalog on DVD in 2002, Come Drink with Me was unsurprisingly their first release. For me (and at least a half-dozen friends), this Region 3 Hong Kong disc was the final impetus for buying a region-free player. Dragon Dynasty, having bought the American video rights, didn’t include it in their first batch, but now it’s arrived in a terrific edition.
Unlike the HK transfer, the image on the new release is properly presented “enhanced for widescreen TVs,” so, on newer sets, it fills the entire width of the screen, where the earlier version showed it shrunken in the middle of the screen, with thick black bands on all four sides. (On old-style standard TVs, both discs display the same way.) And it seems to preserve a tiny bit more of the originally intended widescreen image on the sides, perhaps 5-10%. The extras include interviews with Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China) (14 minutes), Cheng Pei-Pei (16 minutes), and Yueh Hua (17 minutes), as well as A Classic Remembered: A Retrospective with Hong Kong Cinema Expert Bey Logan (18 minutes). Most of these sound like repackagings of many of the extras on the Celestial, but in fact all are from brand new interviews and in English, where their equivalents on the older disc were primarily in Chinese, with English subtitles.
More importantly, there is a new commentary track from Logan and Cheng. The commentary on the older release was a technical disaster; Logan and Cheng were joined by the latter’s daughter, the talented American-born actress Eugenia Yuan (Charlotte Sometimes). Unfortunately, Yuan must have been the closest to the mike and her mother the farthest, because every time she giggled, she totally drowned out Cheng and Logan. This time around, Cheng and Logan are properly balanced; they repeat much of the same info, but (obviously) more audibly, including, once again, a refutation of the rumor that the
12-year-old Jackie Chan
appears in the film’s
chorus of children.
Come Drink with Me is so visually striking that I wish it had received a high-definition Blu-ray release as well, but we’ll have to wait with fingers crossed for that one. In the meanwhile, Sony has issued one of the first Bollywood Blu-rays – last year’s spectacular Saawariya from director Sanjay Leela Bhansali (Devdas).
I have my problems with Saawariya’s story – adapted from Tolstoy, no less – but the neon/candy production design and cinematography are dazzling, among the most gorgeous I’ve yet seen in hi-def ... Moulin Rouge times two. Ranbir Kapoor, from the latest generation of one of the leading Bollywood families, makes a simply terrific debut, with instant star quality.
The extras are trivial: These two 20-minute shorts – one about the music, the other about the big premiere – actually include a lot of the same footage.
Come Drink with Me. Directed by King Hu. Written by King Hu and Yang Erh. With Cheng Pei-Pei, Yueh Hua, and Chen Hung Lieh. Genius/Weinstein/Dragon Dynasty, $19.99.
Saawariya. Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Written by Prakash Kapadia & Sanjay Leela Bhansali; based on the story White Nights by Leo Tolstoy. Original music by Monty Sharma. With Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee, Zohra Sehgal, and Salman Khan. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, DVD, $26.96; Blu-Ray Disc, $38.96.
Published: 05/21/2008
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Guys -
That is NOT Eugenia Yuan, it is her sister Marsha...