"So busy being a gangster, I don't know which one is real"

Watching Asian gangster movies is fun. They are so much more fun than American gangster movies. American gangster movies have this thing called plot. This thing called plot can often get in the way of the good old fashioned gunplay and lord knows we need more gunplay in the gangster movies. I am, at present, watching Hardboiled. The great John Woo film; it was his last before he came to America to make films like the Replacement Killers and Mission Impossible II. The Replacement Killers being the better of the two.

Last night I watched the movie The Killers, again by John Woo. The cool thing about Asian gangster movies is this: they don't reload. Ever. They just shoot and shoot and shoot and nary a once do they reload. I dare you watch an Asian gangers film and see them reload. I think that's in the rule book for Asian gangster film: rule 1: no reloading.

The first time I ever saw an Asian gangster movie was in college. There wer two Vietnamese dudes that lived down the hall from me. They would sit around, eat noodles and watch gangster movies. I don't think they did much else than that. Well, from time to time they would through in some porno flick, but they usually did the Asian gangster film. It was always fun to watch the AGF with them for a couple reasons. The first was they would chatter back and forth at each other in Vietnamese. I wasn't quite sure if they were talkinga bout the movie or me, but that didn't matter. The second was that I learned some Vietnamese. I learned two words. One word was "Gongat" and the other was "Dumbwah." Now this being a family friendly blog I really can't translate them, but let's just say that they are swear words that do in fact get to the heart of the matter when something really cool or awsome happens on the screen.

THe other thing that is cool about the AGF is this: the music. It reall does work well, it gets the point across. In Hardboiled its a combination of Jazz, native music and techno. Its a weird auditory stew.

Oh, gotta go. Gunplay!