John Woo: Annotated Bibliography Fu,

John Woo: Annotated Bibliography

Fu, P. "Hong Kong Cinema: Colonizer, Motherland and Self. By Yingchi Chu. [London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. xxi+184 pp. £55.00. ISBN 0-7007-1746-3.]. "The

China Quarterly 177 (2004): 241-243. ABI/INFORM Global, ProQuest. Web.

This article is a review of a book on Hong Kong cinema. The article offers extensive background on director John Woo's social context. The article's overview describes Woo's cinematic artistry as a specific cultural product of Hong Kong's national consciousnesses, arguing that Woo reflects a fundamental anxiety within Hong Kong as a nation. Hong Kong is depicted as being located betwixt and between Chinese and British culture. This divided sensibility "spread rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s as anxiety over the future of the colony increased," and created a "national cinema" and sensibility as a way of dealing with this anxiety (Fu 242). This anxiety also produced the violence and alienation so characteristic of Woo's films. Woo's violence, far from being gratuitous, is a social symptom of Hong Kong's unique culture and place in Chinese history.

Enns, Anthony. "The spectacle of disabled masculinity in John Woo's "heroic bloodshed"

films." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17.2 (2000): 137. Platinum Periodicals, ProQuest. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

John Woo's films frequently begin with a state of affairs where 'good' men are paralyzed, either physically or morally. Violence functions as a kind of social bloodletting that restores society back to its original state of order. However, the new Woo masculinity is not stereotypical: Enns notes the frequency of disability in Woo's films and suggests that Woo attempts to create a new man who can be both tender and physically able. Enns links Woo's radical critique with the crisis sparked by Hong Kong's reunification with China.

Gates, Philippa. "The man's film: Woo and the pleasures of male melodrama." Journal of Popular Culture 35.1 (2001): 59-79. Platinum Periodicals, ProQuest. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

The careless attitude towards human life and graphic violence of John Woo's The Killer has caused many critics to classify the director as a fundamentally 'male' director, creating for a male audience. Philippa Gates argues, however, that Woo's plots are fundamentally melodramatic and not typical action movie sequences solely dependant upon violence: the films do strive to tug at the heartstrings. Quoting David Bordwell, she writes "The Killer is a triumph of sheer romanticism, recycling cliches with unabashed conviction: the blinded beloved who needs an operation, the innocents wounded in the crossfire, the crook who must pull one last job, the cop who becomes fascinated with his quarry, the aging professional who recovers his dignity in a final act of courage. Each element is pushed to the limit, steeped in sentiment, swathed in dreamy hyperbolic (Gates 106). Gates argues for a subversively pro-woman, even feminist agenda in The Killer.

Mulhall, Stephen. "The Impersonation of Personality: Film as Philosophy in Mission:

Impossible. "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 97. Platinum Periodicals, ProQuest. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

Given that director John Woo is often credited with being the inspiration for the fragmented, postmodern style of American filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Woo is often characterized as postmodern filmmaker himself. In other words, he is assumed to "deploy cinematic techniques with great skill, but in ways that are essentially unrelated to cinema's artistic, moral, and human ends, as established by the great cinematic works of the past" (Mulhall 99). However, Stephen Mulhall argues that Woo's portrait of a degraded Hong Kong environment and also his American-made Mission Impossible II is fundamentally modernist: a portrait of an impersonal world that seems cold not because morality is a social construction, but because real meaning has become fragmented and bankrupt. The movie mourns a loss of morality in a way that is modern rather than postmodern.

Suid, Lawrence H. "Windtalkers sends wrong message." Naval History,

16.5 (2002): 36. Research Library, ProQuest. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

Lawrence H. Suid critiques the portrayal of Navajo code talkers in Woo's Windtalkers, arguing that Woo's film makes use of stereotypical representations of Native Americans typical of American cinema. The dramatic focus of Woo's film is on the white bodyguard of the Native American 'code talker' not the Navajo soldier, and the film implicitly defends the commanders's orders to kill the Native American "to keep the Japanese from capturing him and obtaining the code." Suid states that "Woo simply used the Pacific war as a stage on which to create generic scenes of violence that have become his trademark," and tries to avoid complex moral dilemmas.