Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today these one-time Hollywood studs are only occasionally doing action films, or they are working in the direct-to-DVD subbasement, or they have retired to government service. And Chan, 30 years after he became an East Asian star with Drunken Master, still has a two-continent career: Cantonese-language films at home, the Rush Hour movies here. Li, who became a Hong Kong superstar with the Once upon a Time in China series, segued to the West with hit movies in Hollywood (Romeo Must Die) and France (Fearless...
...actors whom Chan and Li most closely resemble are the comedy stars of early Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, all onstage since youth. In films full of physical derring-do, they prided themselves on executing their own graceful maneuvers and extravagant stunts. The other big silent-action hero, Douglas Fairbanks, was famous for his perilous leaps between high structures. His reckless agility, as much as his radiant smile, made him a worldwide sensation...
When sound came in, Hollywood substituted talk for action. And when action films returned in the '70s (in part because of the success of Bruce Lee's Hong Kong epics), the stuntman system was firmly in place. Most stars of today's Hollywood action pictures, cosseted in visual effects, barely need to exert themselves...
...present was too puny a place to confine him. But put him in a toga or a military uniform from any millennium, or strip him to the waist to reveal that finely muscled torso, then let his tense, intense baritone voice articulate a noble notion, and you had Hollywood's ideal of Mensa beefcake. In the era of the movie epic, he was the iconic hero, adding to these films millions in revenue, plenty of muscle and 10 IQ points. The movie Heston was almost his own species: Epic...
Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha...