Word: prequel
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...VIBE: Funny and frank (John Travolta is too "old and overweight" for a Pulp Fiction prequel), this director's diary is a hoax. But it's so clever even his publicist approves. RATING...
Within a year of its 2002 release, the film, directed by Andrew Lau (no relation to Andy) and Mak, had spawned a prequel and a sequel that underlined its similarity to the Godfather films. (The Infernal Affairs trilogy will be shown Oct. 10 as part of the New York Film Festival.) But the first is the best, the densest, the most tightly coiled. Sam's drug deal and the cops' tracking of it make for a beautifully orchestrated 20min. set piece. The camera is ever on the prowl, but discreetly, observantly, like a cat burglar casing his victim's digs...
Ringu spawned a sequel and a prequel in Japan and remakes in South Korea and the U.S. It also generated a genre, whose motto might have been "I see dead people, and they want me to join them." The stories of implacable ghosts developed their own cliches--closets full of ghosts and corpses, girls with long hair hiding their malevolent faces, dotty old ladies, child zombies caked in white--all of which you can expect to see in the Hollywood remakes...
...infiltrated the same triads. Infernal Affairs raised the bar for what a Hong Kong film could be, and its commercial success guaranteed sequels?a slight problem given that most of the cast is killed off in the original. Instead, co-directors Alan Mak and Andrew Lau decided to go prequel for the first sequel (the third film will take place after the original), bringing on inexperienced actors/idols Edison Chen and Shawn Yue to play young versions of Ming and Yan, respectively. The co-directors also abandoned the rigidly structured cat-and-mouse formula that gave the original its paranoid charge...
...story is true, as far as it goes. But even stranger is the "prequel": the lives of Chan's parents, Charles and Lily, on their perilous journeys to Hong Kong. The absorbing documentary Traces of the Dragon: Jackie Chan & His Lost Family, which premiered at last month's Berlin Film Festival, reveals the extended Chan clan as a microcosm of China's turbulent 20th century history. It's a riveting yarn, too, replete with guns, gore, drugs, thugs and romance...