Thursday, August 7 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center — 164 N State Street
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
TIME AND TIDE
Directed by Tsui Hark • 2000
In Cantonese with English subtitles
Fresh off a disappointing stint in Hollywood, where he’d made two great (but underperforming) Jean-Claude Van Damme action flicks, the prolific Tsui Hark returned to Hong Kong ready to reimagine his filmmaking and what contemporary cinema could be. The result was Time and Tide, Tsui’s celebration of renewal and birth. In the film, Tyler Yim (Nicholas Tse), a naïve young man on the precipice of a new career as a bodyguard, attempts to embrace unexpected fatherhood. Nine months after the drunken tryst that changed his life, he befriends Jack (Wu Bai), an assassin and fellow father-to-be, though they eventually end up on opposite sides of an all-out gang war. The freewheeling film attempts to seize the helm of 21st century action cinema, taking the choreography of Tsui’s earlier wuxia films to a new and more hyperreal level, drawing inspiration from the work of his Hong Kong New Wave contemporaries and emulating the dynamic movement of video game characters. The film’s relentlessly frenetic and inventive style features a constantly moving camera, curiously quiet gunfights, gonzo editing, and maximalist set pieces. Twenty-five years into the new millennium, there have been few action sequences to surpass Time and Tide‘s apartment complex shootout centerpiece or what might be cinema’s greatest gunfight scene involving a baby. (This is in no way meant as a slight towards John Woo’s Hard Boiled.) Most of all, this movie is cool. It’s the type of film where taking a bathroom break is dangerous, because you might miss a new way to evade death during an explosion. (RIN)
116 min • Columbia Pictures Film Productions Asia • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Preceded by: Tsui Hark Hollywood trailer reel – 5 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: Films by Jordan Belson on August 13 at Constellation