Enter the Fat Dragon!

[Royal Dragon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCV1Q...elated&search=

[Su Lin]

Yay!!! Sammo is th3 d34dly!!!

[Wu-Tan-Nan]

That was a great clip!

[jigahus]

lol those pigs never had a chance against Sammo

[jethro]

Sammo was my favorite Bruce Lee imitator. Seriously.

[Faruq]

Yay!!! Sammo is th3 d34dly!!!

Uh, excuse me, I think you mispelled that. Besides, Sammo is the deadly what?

[GeneChing]

From Chasing to Enter the Fat

Donnie Yen out to prove he's not bad at acting in Chasing The Dragon


Andy Lau (left) and Donnie Yen at the premiere of Chasing The Dragon in Hong Kong last month.PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION

PUBLISHEDOCT 4, 2017, 5:00 AM SGT

For crime biopic Chasing The Dragon, Donnie Yen learns to speak like the Teochew drug lord he plays and wears prosthetics to look more authentic in the role
Foong Woei Wan In Hong Kong

He burnished his cult reputation as an action man with slugfests such as SPL: Sha Po Lang (2005), ascended to superstardom as gongfu legend Ip Man and leapt into the global pop-culture stratosphere with last year's Star Wars film Rogue One.

Yet, Donnie Yen was hungry for more - for a "chance to show the audience I'm really not bad at acting", says the action movie star.

To this end, he has taken the plunge and transformed himself into the limping, Teochew-spewing drug lord, Crippled Ho, in the rollicking Hong Kong crime biopic Chasing The Dragon.

The movie, which opens in Singapore tomorrow, is director Wong Jing's two-in-one reboot of the 1991 gangland dramas To Be Number One and Lee Rock.

Drawn from the true stories of drug trafficker Ng Sik Ho, alias Limpy Ho, and police officer Lui Lok, alias the "500 Million Dollar Sergeant", Chasing The Dragon is a trip through Hong Kong's colonial past, when vice was allowed to flourish so long as corrupt cops could feed off the profits.

In particular, the film tracks the rise and fall of Crippled Ho (Yen), an illegal immigrant from Swatow, China, as he joins the drug trade under pressure and joins forces with Lui Lok (Andy Lau, returning in the same role he played in Lee Rock, but with a differently spelled name), a fellow enterprising Teochew who is rising through the ranks in the Hong Kong police force.

In an interview, Yen recalls he had reservations about playing an anti-hero in Chasing The Dragon. Although he had played villains, it was "many years ago", before his career-defining role as Bruce Lee's teacher in the Ip Man movies (2008 to 2015) elevated him to role-model status.

"I'm a family man," says Yen, 54, who has three children from two marriages. "I don't want my kids' classmates to be like, 'Why's Uncle Donnie playing such a role?'"

But the prospect of proving himself to be a good actor was too tempting to pass up and he decided to go for it. "We action actors have to make double the effort for the audience to feel you can act," he says. "Actually, it's not fair to me. Actually, I think I'm not bad at acting."

To Be Number One, starring Ray Lui as a crime boss called Crippled Ho, won Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1992, months after Ng, who inspired the movie but did not authorise it, died of liver cancer. (Lee Rock, produced by Wong and starring Lau in the title role as a corrupt policeman, won a prize on the same night, Best Supporting Actor for Kwan Hoi San.)

Yen says he did his own research to create a Crippled Ho different from the one played by his "good friend" Lui. "I found that Ray Lui had copied Godfather, you know, gained weight. If I play it like Ray Lui, I'll be copying him, which I feel is meaningless."

Lui's Crippled Ho also spoke perfect Cantonese, unlike the actual Limpy Ho, so Yen chose to go in the direction of biological truth.

"I had to speak Teochew," says Yen, a native of Guangzhou, China, who has lived in the United States and is also fluent in English. "But more difficult than Teochew was Teochew-accented Cantonese. This was so hard, so hard."

Teochew training for Chasing The Dragon began when he was still on the set of Rogue One in England.

Yen recalls he flew a language professor out there to "whisper in my ear every day". They also had to - Yen pauses and demonstrates - "gan yeun gong yeh", or speak like this, in Cantonese with a nasal Teochew accent and sound like tycoon Li Ka Shing. (Unfortunately, Yen's accent work has been dubbed over, into Mandarin, for theatrical release in Singapore.)

Besides talking the talk, Yen walked the walk. He practised a limp and had his nose widened and lips thickened with prosthetic make-up to look Teochew.

Also, he came on board as a producer to take creative control of the film.

Coming clean about his doubts about Wong, who has had an erratic career, Yen says: "I was a bit afraid to make a movie with him. Maybe, you know, he's not serious enough. How is the movie gonna turn out?"

Lau, 56, who signed up at the outset to produce Chasing The Dragon, pronounces: "This is a quality production."

He goes back a long way with Wong, who has directed him in movies from the 1989 hit God Of Gamblers to the 2016 dud Mission Milano.

The superstar says of Wong: "He's a neglected director and then because of this neglect, he's even given up on himself. So I always say to him, 'You can't, you really can't.'"

Chasing The Dragon was a twinkle in Wong's eye when Mission Milano was still in production and Lau recalls: "I said, 'Do a good job with this movie, don't think so much about other things', but he didn't do a good job (with Mission Milano)."

This time, Lau was worried in the beginning, when it was not clear who would star as Crippled Ho in Chasing The Dragon. "Maybe everyone's confidence in Wong Jing wasn't strong for this genre and many important actors weren't confirmed."

The project is quite a departure for Wong, who wrote the screenplay and directed it with cinematographer Jason Kwan.

The period extravaganza that follows Crippled Ho and Lui Lok, two men on different sides of the law, would appear to be up the alley of Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs, 2002), for instance, rather than Wong.

So Lau began planning postproduction work, including setting aside enough time for the addition and refinement of visual effects. He also reminded Wong that, as part of pre-production, a replica of the Kowloon Walled City, the fabled lawless fortress that is a centrepiece of the film, would have to be built properly.

Eventually, Kwan - "a director I very much believe in", Lau says - oversaw the construction of the replica and Yen also agreed to star in and produce the movie.

"I was surprised he acted so well," Lau says of Yen, before quipping: "But he was under pressure because I was there and I was formidable too."

Yen strikes a more modest note when he speaks of his performance. "I'll let the audience judge. It's hard for me to say, 'I acted well, didn't you see?'"

But he hopes Crippled Ho will be another character associated with him, after Ip Man. "Then I'll feel I've succeeded."

Meanwhile, in a sure sign that Wong has won Yen over, they are next teaming up for an action comedy, Enter The Fat Dragon.

•Chasing The Dragon opens in Singapore tomorrow .

Enter the Fat Dragon (1978) is one of my fav Sammo flicks. Sammo slays it.

[GeneChing]

This now deserves its own indie thread. I luv the original and Donnie's work, but I can't see him best Sammo's work in the role.

DONNIE YEN To Star In The Remake Of ENTER THE FAT DRAGON Directed By WONG JING. UPDATE: Poster


UPDATE: Check out the first Poster above!

UPDATE: Leading man DONNIE YEN recently spoke to the SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST revealing that the film is not necessarily a remake. The plot will see Yen playing “a great fighter who becomes overweight as a consequence of emotional issues, before lending his martial arts prowess to an unlikely career in crimebusting”.



Director WONG JING stated: “The title doesn’t really matter. Many film titles could be recycled for new projects. A True Mob Story (1998), which I made with Andy Lau, also shared the Chinese title of the Brandon Lee film Legacy of Rage (1986).”

‘Enter The Fat Dragon’ is expected to start shooting by the end of the year.

SOURCE: South China Morning Post

Director WONG JING (Chasing The Dragon) and martial arts superstar DONNIE YEN (Ip Man) is set to team up once again in the remake of ENTER THE FAT DRAGON.



The classic 1978 martial arts comedy starred Sammon Hung as “Lung, an apprentice pig farmer sent to the big city to help his family, only to find himself confronted by a gang of thugs trashing the grocery stand where he works. Lung’s hero is Bruce Lee, and he’s carefully studied Lee’s martial arts techniques; however, he also weighs a good hundred pounds more than Bruce, which makes him look like a less than threatening opponent.”

Yen will take on the role in a full on fat suit, which he has done before in the hilarious 2015 commercial below.



Yen channeling Sammo channeling Bruce Lee…in a FAT SUIT? This should be fun. Count me in.

Stay tuned for more details.

Here's the original film thread: Enter the Fat Dragon!

[GeneChing]

I figured I'd review this because I rewatched it recently and am planning to go see Donnie's redux tonight.

Sammo's impersonation of Lee is still amazing, but it's horribly dated and stilted. It's basically Return of the Dragon but instead of Bruce going to Italy, it's Sammo going to HK. Sammo is a pig farming country boy, and yes, I think some animals were harmed to make this film. Sammo's uncle has a restaurant, well, more of a food stall in the back of a ghetto alley, and they get terrorized by gangsters. Sammo must fend them off, the twist being he's an uber Bruce fanboy and always tries to mimic him. But he fights well, and even nails many of Lee's subtle gestures.

Yuen Biao appears in an opening credit scene fight. Chiu Chi Ling has a small fight scene where he gets the crap beaten out of himself, quickly, like usual. That always makes me happy. The mighty Lee Hoi-Sang is a Hakgwai - a 'black ghost'. Yeah, in black face with a fro, red bell bottoms, gold chains and a purple satin shirt - horribly racist by today's standards but pretty commonplace representation of black peeps in Kung Fu flicks of this era.

Sammo sustains his Lee impersonation until the final fight with another Chinese Kung Fu fighter, and then he goes classic Kung Fu movie fightin style. The final fight is that dude, the Hakgwai and an evil Gwailo boxer in a warehouse full of Marlboro boxes, and rather mysteriously, kung fu staffs and fighting metal rings. It's weak comedy Kung Fu but typical of the period.

I enjoyed it for what it was, and I'm glad to have seen it with Donnie's upcoming redux, which looks completely different. FWIW, Sammo is not at his fattest here, quite the opposite he's as trim as he ever was, and his Kung Fu is, as always, superb.

It's still worth the watch but my memory rose-tinted it far more than it should have. Sometimes I think I should never go back for these things because it might spoil my fond memories, even if they are false memories.