Word: chan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Chan regrets the situation: "The video rights are handled by Golden Harvest, the distribution company I work for. They don't really concentrate on videos in America." But even in this video murk, Chan's personality shines through. He has a star quality that doesn't get lost in translation...
...Chan's study of the silent masters taught him the universal language of film: action and passion, humor and heart. His movies are so simple, so fluid, so exuberant that they are easily understood by people who don't speak Cantonese. Just ask the Jackie fans who track down his movies in the Chinatowns of U.S. cities or visit specialized video stores. "Jackie Chan's work is as popular with our customers as anything by Orson Welles or Francis Coppola," says Meg Johnson, buyer for Videots, a smart Santa Monica outlet. Finding a Chan film under its multiplicity of titles...
...films provide instant replays from different angles. Under the closing credits are outtakes showing blown stunts, with comic or near tragic results. Executing a fairly routine jump in Yugoslavia for The Armour of God, he missed a tree branch, hit his head on a rock and almost died. Chan has a memento of the accident: a thimble-size hole in the right side of his head. If you ask nicely, he'll let you put your finger...
...visual stylist, Chan can be brisk or suave. His 1989 Miracle (also known as The Chinese Godfather and Mr. Canton and Lady Rose), a kind of remake of Frank Capra's Lady for a Day, revels in supple tracking shots, elegant montages and a witty use of the wide screen. An American viewer may find the slapstick interludes overdone, but they are no harder to take than the scenes between dance routines in Astaire-Rogers movies. And it's in his production numbers-those double-time, intricately de-signed ballets of fists and feet-that Chan is unique, as star...
Hollywood is missing out on a great thing: an ingratiating actor who makes hit movies and speaks better English than a few action heroes we could name. In the early '80s Chan gave U.S. films a try (in Burt Reynolds' Cannonball Run capers and two other wooden showcases), then returned to Hong Kong. For Chan there's no place like home. "In Asia I'm kind of like E.T.," he says. "Everybody comes to see my films. There are billions of people in Asia, and they're my first audience. If I get an American audience, O.K., that...