Throw Down (2004)

Frank Chen (0:03)

Hello, and welcome to the audio commentary for Johnny Toe's Throw Down. My name is Frank Chen. I used to work for the largest Hong Kong film entertainment distributor in the US called Tai Sing Entertainment. I was the marketing person for 12 years. My main responsibility was to remaster some of the more quality Hong Kong films and present them to the Western audiences. I also worked at the New York Asian Film Festival at 2010 and 2015 to 2017 I was the interpreter and also handled guest relations. I've actually done an audio commentary for this film before with Ric Meyers, who you can also hear on this Blu-ray. So this is a brand new commentary that's actually done almost, I would say almost 15 years after the one that I did with Ric. So I purposely didn't listen to the old one, even though I remember that was one of the best one that I've done with him. So if there are any overlaps between my commentary and that one, I apologize in advance. I tried to give a little more perspective on this commentary. I think before we did a lot of information on the actors and various other things here. I'll try to dissect the film a little bit more, talk about the themes and talk about the background behind, you know, Johnny Toh making this film. This was Johnny Toh's homage to Arkira Kurosawa, his favorite film maker, and also his, this is also his, he's always considered this to be his favorite film. And you can see the homage right away in the opening credits, the style of the opening credits, the wind sound in the background, which you often hear in Kurosawa films, the wide aspect ratio, the 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, which was also used in many Kurosawa films. Some of the personnel that I would like to emphasize here, the music by Peter Kam, the editing by David Richardson, the cinematography, cinematographer Chan Tzu-Kun, and of course, Yun Ban being the action director. This was shot in May 2004 and released two months later in July. And at that time, Hong Kong was still reeling from the financial and economical devastation as a result of SARS that ravaged Hong Kong in 2003 So the film's central theme of a never-succumbing failure and persistence in pursuing one's dream kind of echoed Director Toh's love of the films of Akira Kurosawa. So this was his personal tribute to the Japanese auteur. Notice his use of widescreen composition, like I mentioned before, and also you will see at the film progressers the insistence on long takes in one single camera shot and the reference to the character of Sanchiro Sugada from Kurosawa's very first film. You saw in the opening scene veteran TV actor Lo Hoi Pang as the old judo master practicing among the grass. You can hear the Sanchiro Sugada theme song from the Japanese TV series being sung by his son, Jing, who is mentally challenged. And also the film's Chinese title, Yau Dou Long Fu Bong, which literally means judo list of supreme fighters. It's the same as the Chinese title for the Japanese TV series when it was shown in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. We'll talk about the 1970 references a bit more later. Notice the darkened dojo with no students, the empty board, the past glory gone, and also a representative of Hong Kong in decline after SARS.

Now we see the introduction of the Tony Leung character. Sorry, not Tony Leung. Aaron Kwok character whose name is Tony in the film. Aaron Kwok was a TV actor. He actually started out as a dancer in the Hong Kong network TVB, and then he later went, he was making commercials, and then he went to Taiwan and make a name for himself with various albums. But his acting remained his favorite, you know, passion. So he was a singer for almost ten years, but then he returned to Hong Kong and started his acting career. To him, this film represented his kind of like the turning point of his acting, because he won a lot of accolades for this film.

Notice the judo, that was the first, we had just had a brief judo fight. To preserve the believability and the realism of the art of judo, all the judo fight action in the film were performed with no use of wires, stunt doubles, or injury-preventing pads by the actors themselves. Here we see the introduction of Louis Koo's character, Sito Bo. Notice how lights are used to distinguish the two leads. You know, notice that Sito Bo is always in the dark, in the shade, the shadows, while Tony is in the light. Because like Sito Bo before, he's been enlightened by judo. They're playing the so-called 1520 game, like a hand-gambling kind of game. And this game will be very familiar to the older Hong Kong folks who grew up in the 60s and 70s. Notice also the use of the blue color palette and the Johnny Toe trademark. So like Aaron Kwok, Louis Koo also started his TV career in TVB and as an actor. He didn't start making films until 1994 in Organized Crime and Tri-Abril, the Kirk Wong action, police action drama. And then he became really popular when he did the Condor Hero TV series for TVB in 1995 And then he also started doing a lot of films by then. Most notably the Troublesome Night Horror series. Because when he first started, he's actually his skin color is actually very white, like light, but he likes the fact that darkening his skin can actually allow him to play more different characters. So that's why his skin color, his skin tone became much darker from 1997 onwards. So his highest popularity was back in 2001, when he made the TVB series Escape to the Past, where he played a Chin Dynasty warrior. And after that, he started making a ton of romantic comedies and finally the various films, including Throw Down, which was made in 2004 He's also a huge Star Wars fan. He's a toy collector. He actually has his own warehouse devoted to his huge toy collection.