Women-led Action Films of 2023 - A Thread

Action films with a female protagonist that came out this year. Titles/info in thread.

Music by @XENNONofficial The list is in the same order as in the video. This is not a ranking. There are others too, I will mention them further down the thread. Some 2022 films that only became available this year are included.

Was there ever a better time than 80s/90s Hong Kong cinema for women action stars? Featured:
Elaine Lui vs Mondi Yau - GHOST PUNTING
Michelle Yeoh - YES MADAM
Almost the whole cast - TOP SQUAD
Yue Hong vs Yan Chi - 21 RED LIST
Yukari Oshima - OUTLAW BROTHERS
Rothrock vs Shepard - RIGHTING WRONGS
Godenzi vs Aurelio - SHE SHOOTS STRAIGHT
Moon Lee -NOCTURNAL DEMON

THE MILLIONAIRES' EXPRESS just came out on Blu-ray from @Eurekavideo, so why not break one of my favourite scenes down: Sammo Hung vs Yuen Biao, western kung fu pian-style!

Sammo wants to play with us and what we know populates both genres: face-offs. The shot/reverse-shot trope and its subversion therefore becomes the core component on which the director builds the scene. We start on a visually unusual low-angle vs low ground shot announcing...

RIP Richard Donner, whose approach to filmmaking typified American mainstream action movies in the 80s and 90s. He was gifted in eliciting a sense of danger and excitement by leveraging cinematic language to circumvent limitations.

The climatic fight of LETHAL WEAPON is a good example of that: not always fluid or perfectly legible, but continuously stimulating. See the first few punches between Riggs and Joshua, they're rather confusing, blurry close-ups. But Donner quickly switches gears and alternates...

30 shots:

14 inserts
7 close-ups
5 medium to close shots
3 cutaways
1 wide shot

Distilled action can work. No master shot, overlapping editing, stretched out timeline. And yet, still awesome because:
-Clear causality
-Sustained visual momentum
-John Woo The only wide shot here is used because Woo needs to pass on new spatial information. One character has changed position relative to the others, which leads to an action that would be incomprehensible without a shot establishing that fact. Less than a second long is enough.

You could take almost any 10-second segment from PROJECT A's action scenes and make it an example for how well it works. Here for instance, we have at least 5 lessons in dynamic directing/editing in a row that feel organic and enhance audience engagement/viewing pleasure. The... ...clip opens on a zoom out while the camera readjusts its position. It's actually something we see a lot of in HK action movies of the period, and not a trick that has travelled much abroad in spite of its benefits in terms of dynamism and syncing of movements with actors....

The very first fight of RUROUNI KENSHIN (2012) is important because it serves two purposes: to introduce us to the Hitokiri Battōsai, and to serve as a reference to create contrast with later scenes. Therefore it must: showcase the hero's power, and instantly be seared to memory. The fight opens with a close-up of the protagonist. It keeps things mysterious and intriguing, and tells the audience: this is who you must keep your eyes on. Pay attention to him. He then exits the frame from the right hand side. His movement marks the start of the battle.

HIGHLANDER holds a special place because of Mulcahy's fearless visuals. Critics said he made "an everlasting music video"... So what? That's *precisely* why the film endures, it tore the veil between two art forms. Look at this scene. Never a dull moment:

For Mulcahy, HIGHLANDER was an opportunity to continue what he’d done on his videos on a bigger scale, with less oversight. Cinema is a rich medium, and juxtaposing moving pictures can be done to achieve various affects. Sometimes the musicality of images overrides visual logic.

I love how DIE HARD wastes no time in establishing its tone, hero, and plot. Takes only 15 shots (≈7 setups) and 90 sec to:
-Establish classic Hollywood codes
-Introduce three major character traits
-Introduce one major plot point

Let's go through them:
The first shot is that of an arrival, which is a common trope of classic Hollywood movies. It's no accident that the last shot will show a departure. McTiernan bookends his film like this to create the sense of being welcomed into the story. We feel at ease. We feel at home.

What makes Hong Kong action movies so compelling? Why do we feel supercharged after watching them? To me, it's a combination of musical editing, impact-focused images, and the constant renewal of camera set-ups. Let's take a short example from YES, MADAM! (Corey Yuen, 1985): The visual phrase dedicated to Cynthia Rothrock's fight ends with her impressive back kick to Dick Wei's face. With Corey Yuen, when a visual phrase ends, contrast is used to kick-start the following one. We left Cynthia on a horizontal slo-mo shot, meaning we jump to Michelle...

The Chateau fight scene from MATRIX RELOADED remains one of the most impressively crafted pieces of action cinema I've ever seen: exciting, precise, meaningful, kinetic. Every detail in this scene is important. Its place in the story, its set, its props, its direction. Thread ⬇️ I remember some friends at the time complaining that this scene was pointless: at this stage in the series, Neo is omnipotent, invincible. Why show us a fight against nameless fighters? The answer lies in the images themselves. In the matrix, the colour red is associated with...

Late to the party so sorry if it's been said before but the Bruce Lee scene in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is shot as a one take until the very moment Cliff throws Lee into the car. Plus, the set suddenly becomes empty for no reason. It could suggest unreliable recollection or perhaps the fact that the scene suddenly becomes a fantasy, an imagined outcome to this encounter. Why would everyone but one extra disappear from the scene after the one take ends? That makes no sense story-wise, so the reason must be something else. Maybe Cliff convinced...

In PARASITE Bong Joon-ho uses carefully storyboarded shots to involve the viewer every step of the way. I believe the film clicks w/ many people because it makes complete sense on a sensory level. Its visual language flows better than most other films'. Let's thread an example:👇 Consider the recurring series of "car scenes". Bong uses primarily 3 types of shots, and gives them various weight/meaning through editing and other techniques:

1/ The Master shot, which shows both characters at the same time, one in foreground, one in background.

Hollywood fights are often shot by several cameramen catching action as best they can. Scenes are assembled by alternating long shots w/ closer ones. In HK, no camera position is repeated. Here each image is composed around a specific action and other actions require other setups Brilliant break down of the scene by David Bordwell:

"The handcuffing phase of the scene gives us eighteen shots in only twenty-four seconds, making this passage as rapid-fire as any edit- happy Hollywood director might wish. Yet each shot is absolutely legible."

What are your favourite action scenes of the decade? Here are a few of mine:

SPL 2: A TIME FOR CONSEQUENCES (Soi Cheang, 2015)

Perhaps the most eloquent example of 'non-verbal dialogue' of recent memory, where each move is made in response to another. Grandiose in every aspect. BAAHUBALI 2: THE CONCLUSION (S. S. Rajamouli, 2017)

A testament to India's willingness and ability to create subjugating cinema through images that forever seared themselves to my memory. Everything is possible, as long as it serves the spectacle.

THE BLADE (1995) features one of my favourite fight sequences. Through cinematic devices, Tsui Hark takes apart and reconfigures the wuxia pian. He creates a hybrid form of action/'cinéma vérité' where the camera has a hard time keeping up with the fighters. That's because... ...the world he creates in still in its primal years. It's a wuxia pian without jiang hu, or at least without the fully formed, heroic jiang hu that defines the genre. There is no honour, no bravery, no chivalry. That is, until this moment, the final fight, when Ding On becomes..

On Chinese New Year, THE WANDERING EARTH, the first full-scale big budget space science-fiction film from China, will open in theatres. There will be many more to come. So here's a thread about previous and proto-SF Chinese movies, to try and wait (im)patiently. It started in Hong Kong, then a British colony. Hong Kong films were mainly produced by private funds, with little to no money (and less control) from the state. The first Chinese-speaking sci-fi film was RIOTS IN OUTER SPACE (Wong Tin-lam, 1959).