Police Story (1985) (Jackie Chan)
The Hollywood career of Jackie Chan has been pretty depressing for anyone who has seen how talented the man really is. If you’re the type of person who answers “Rush Hour” when you’re asked to name your favourite Jackie Chan film, see Police Story to see how funny and reckless he was at the height of his powers. The plot – Jackie must protect a valuable witness from bad guys – is pretty standard stuff, but the action scenes are arguably the best that Jackie has ever filmed. SEE! Jackie clinging onto a moving bus with only an umbrella! SEE! Jackie pull Maggie Cheung off a moving motorcycle! SEE! A bus come to a halting stop, with three stuntmen crashing out of the upper-deck windows and falling head-first onto the pavement!
Police Story ends with the stunt that many consider his best. Chan, looking down a shopping mall atrium as the bad guy is running away several floors down, jumps onto a pole in the atrium and slides down…crashing through a glass-and-wood partition and dozens of light bulbs on the way down. The stunt is especially amazing considering that 1) Chan didn’t think to wear gloves to protect his hands from burns, and 2) Someone plugged the light bulbs into real electrical sockets.
According to his autobiography, Chan badly hurt his back during this stunt, nearly
breaking the seventh and eighth vertebrae (had they been broken, he would have been paralysed). He also suffered second-degree burns on his hands and had shards of double-strength candyglass stuck in his legs and torso.
And all that for his audience. What an entertainer!

Fetishes (1996) (Nick Broomfield)
Nick Broomfield (whose Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer was written about in a previous column entry) spent several weeks at Pandora’s Box, a high-priced S&M parlor in New York’s Fifth Avenue where wealthy businessmen would routinely come to be whipped, verbally abused, and generally humiliated for their sexual and psychological satisfaction (although no sex allegedly took place in the parlor). Broomfield shoots many of the encounters, and the results are sometimes disturbing – a black man fantasizing about being a slave, a Jewish man pretending to be a victim in an SS camp, and other equally aberrant situations. Fetishes, which is more of a fly-on-the-wall documentary than most of Broomfield’s other work, is valuable, not to mention scary, in its unflinching depiction of a deviant sexual underworld.
(NOTE: A DVD of Fetishes was released in the early years of the format, but is currently unavailable. I saw it by renting a VHS copy from Suspect Video).

Election (2005) (Johnnie To)
The Hong Kong film industry, once one of the most productive and innovative in the entire world, has fallen on hard times recently because of the rise of bootlegging in Asia and the general lack of interesting new talent. Just about everyone agrees that the Hong Kong film industry cannot be completely dismissed, however, because of one man: Johnnie To, the prolific director whose recent films have included critical and financial successes like Breaking News, Exiled, Fulltime Killer, and Throwdown.
His ambitious film Election is a convincing and engrossing depiction of the events surrounding the election of a head of a Chinese triad organization. It’s Simon Yam vs. Tony Leung Ka-fai, and their campaign strategies may be even less ethical than the ones used in legitimate politics. The story is complex but always fascinating, and Johnnie To and company really seem to understand the goings-on of the Triad subculture. This film won four Hong Kong Oscars, including Best Picture, and spawned the sequel Election II, recently released in North America as Triad Election.

Hollywoodland (2006) (Allen Coulter)
I think it’s time for our society to give Ben Affleck another chance. Yes, he squandered a lot of goodwill by appearing in every bad action movie ever made between 1998 and 2003, as well as a certain vanity project with Jennifer Lopez that need not be named. Still, the last four years have humbled the man, and he’s slowly beginning to prove that he can actually act.
In Hollywoodland, he stars as George Reeves, who children of the 1950s will remember as TV’s lumpy, out-of-shape Superman. The film follows a low-rent private investigator (Adrien Brody) as he investigates Reeves’ suicide, and begins to suspect that there may be more to the story than has been reported. Granted, JFK-type conspiracy theories might be a little pretentious for a film about the guy who played Superman, but Hollywoodland is worthwhile for its scenes recounting the life of Reeves himself, in which Affleck is very convincing.
Hollywoodland was released in September of last year and there was some quiet talk of Affleck being considered for an Oscar nomination. Though he won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, an Oscar nod was not forthcoming after the film fizzled at the box office. But see Hollywoodland, and see why Ben Affleck may not be the antichrist we thought he was back in 2003.