Kudos for you recomending this books, it is a great collection, I have the Ashes of Time, Happy Together, A Better Tomorrow and Zu, ones I bought most of them from the broadway cinematheque, I have just browsed trough them but they are quite good, highly recomended.

About writing this kind of books, oh, that would be amazing, I did my college dissertation on Wong Kar Wai, and I actually contacted the editor of HK University Press in 2006 (can´t remember his name tough, sorry) and he told me they where open to proposals for books, and if I could write a proposal for a book with an original angle on WKW, I could submit it and they would consider it.

Unfortunatly after reading all I could about WKW, and writing my dissertation I felt I didn´t have anything original to say at the time.

But maybe one day, I would write about HK cinema not necesarily on WKW.

And if the people are interested, probably they are still open for it.

All the best

Focusing on the more egalitarian gender imaginary in Daoist and Buddhist thought, the author argues against Freudian and Lacanian frameworks regarding sexual difference as the basis of signification in favor of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘becoming’ through which the author tracks the narratological process of cinematic storytelling and the emergence of (female) subject positions in Wing Chun.”

I kid can’t wait for your book

A team effort would definitely be helpful, especially on these long-running HK film series. A collaborative effort on something thing like Young and Dangerous would be great, because each person could spotlight an individual film and offer their own take. And as it’s not a so-called “serious film,” it would be a lot more fun.

Once I finish my QEs and have completed/gotten really far with my dissertation, I’d definitely love to take a crack at at least one Hong Kong movie.

He’s a Woman, She’s a Man:

http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789622099708

John Woo’s A Bullet in the Head:

http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789622099685

It’d be awesome if someone did a book-length study on (the phenomenon of) CAT III films.

I think a book on THE WAY WE ARE would be a fabulous read. Especially if it ties in the movie with Hong Kong and Hong Kong culture.

I like where you head is at with the notion of writing a book on a movie like MY NAME IS 18. Something off track and not from the usual suspects like Wong Kar-Wai or Johnnie To. If I had the time and someone offered me some money, I’d do a book on a movie like ON FIRE.

LoveHKFilm review link: http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews/on_fire.htm

I think it’d be very instructive of the way HK cinema worked during the boom years. You’ve got a really bad movie combining commercial elements like the “It Girl” (Francoise Yip), the up-and-comer (Louis Koo) and the recognizable guy (Ng Man-Tat from the Stephen Chow movies). Then you’ve got other interesting elements like misogyny, fan worship, off screen shenanigans and so on. I think it’d be an interesting film to delve into despite the fact that only twelve other people besides me will remember it.

I’m currently progressing slowly through Rey Chow’s Sentimental Fabulations which does have a decent chapter on Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

I would love to see a book attempt to broadly map HK’s use of humor and melodrama; the mixture of these two elements make HK films my favorite form of pure cinema entertainment (not that they can’t appeal to more intellectual sensibilities as well).

Specific films I’d currently want to read more about include Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody and WKW’s Fallen Angels. I’m sure in a month’s time (and ten movies later) this will change.

Thanks for alerting me to the existence of this critical series!