HARD BOILED Criterion LBX CAV 3LD Very Rare FAC-SEALED! LOADED Director-Approved SE w/Unique Extras, OOP on DVD Start Price USD 49.95 Current Price USD 49.95 Time Left - Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Monday, December 01, 2008 End Time Monday, December 08, 2008 Location LA, CA See more about 'HARD BOILED Criterion LBX CAV 3LD Very Rare FAC-SEALED!' Description  HARD BOILED Very Rare Factory-Sealed Deluxe Criterion Collection Triple Laserdisc Set of John Woo's Action Classic Director-Approved Special Edition * New Widescreen Digital Transfer * Definitive Picture and Sound Mastering * Color * Letterboxed * 126 minutes * 3 Discs * Full-Featured CAV Format * Cantonese with Improved English Subtitles * English Dubbed Soundtrack Option on Second Audio Track Audio Commentary by John Woo and Terence Chang * Exclusive Supplementary Features * Contains the Original Theatrical Trailer * Out-of-Print in All Formats! Beat the Bootleggers!  Buy Laserdisc! Directed by John Woo * Screenplay by Barry Wong * Starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Anthony Wong, Kwan Hoi-Shan, Bowie Lam * Originally Released 1992 #18 (!)   Hard Boiled's impressive position on Entertainment Weekly's List of the "Top 50 Cult Movies of All Time" (5/23/03 issue)   A detective and a deep-cover operative unite to depose a crime lord.  Simple, right?  But in John Woo's hands, Hard-Boiled is an action dream that takes the cop thriller and gives it bloody new life.  The guns-and-guts set pieces -- the opening teahouse, the warehouse, and the climactic hospital -- alone serve as blueprints for how to blow things up with grace.  Signature Line: "There's no room for failure now.  The innocent must die!"  Blame It For: Every movie gunfighter with a blazing pistol in each hand.     Stylish, ultra-violent story of police inspector (Chow Yun-Fat) who teams up with a mysterious hit man (Tony Leung) to stop a gang of arms dealers. Standard plot of revenge and male bonding is springboard for unbelievable action sequences that are bloody, comic, and hypnotic. Yun-Fat is a perfectly assured hero, and director John Woo (who wrote the original story) appears as a bartender.   --- Leonard Maltin     Hard-Boiled is the last film directed by Hong Kong action auteur John Woo before his arrival in the U.S. This 1992 thriller, along with The Killer, is widely seen as one of his best from his Hong Kong days. Every ingredient of the quintessential Woo thriller is present, including his ever-present anti-hero (Chow Yun-Fat). Yun-Fat portrays a maverick, clarinet-playing cop nicknamed "Tequila" whose partner is killed in the dizzying chaos of a restaurant gunfight with a small army of gangsters. It is soon revealed that one of the mob's high-ranking assassins is Tony (Tony Leung), an undercover cop who, despite his badge, is dangerously close to the edge. Tequila and Tony must team up in a tense partnership, and their common pursuit of a vicious crime lord results in a brilliantly elaborate climax in a hospital, where the heroes must rescue newborn babies from the maternity ward while fighting off dozens of mob soldiers. The characters Tequila and Tony are two sides of the same coin, another trademark theme of Woo's films that would later be most fully realized with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta in the American hit Face/Off.   --- Jonathan E. Laxamana     Masterful Hong Kong action director John Woo (The Killer, Face/Off) turns in this exciting and pyrotechnic tale of warring gangsters and shifting loyalties. Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacement Killers) plays a take-no-prisoners cop on the trail of the triad, the Hong Kong Mafia, when his partner is killed during a gun battle. His guilt propels him into an all-out war against the gang, including an up-and-coming soldier in the mob (Tony Leung) who turns out to be an undercover cop. The two men must come to terms with their allegiance to the force and their loyalty to each other as they try to take down the gangsters. A stunning feast of hyperbolic action sequences (including a climactic sequence in an entire hospital taken hostage), Hard-Boiled is a rare treat for fans of the action genre, with sequences as thrilling and intense as any ever committed to film.   --- Robert Lane     Superstar action director John Woo attempted to go himself one better in Hard-Boiled, his last Hong Kong film before he headed for Hollywood. In a spectacular opening sequence that's imitated in The Corruptor, among other films, tough cop Tequila (international action star Chow Yun-Fat, in smart-ass mode) destroys nearly every piece of crockery in a teahouse when a police raid goes wrong. The balletic elegance of the incredible carnage in this scene is a Woo hallmark; the obligatory shot of Chow sliding across the floor, two guns blazing like he's dropped into a spaghetti Western, is cinematic poetry. While the ensuing plot is vintage Woo -- Tequila discovers that the assassin he's gunning for is actually an undercover cop, played with grim determination by Tony Leung -- the chemistry between the two actors as their characters develop an uneasy alliance makes the whole thing believable, even when it's discovered that the bad guys have chosen to hide their smuggled arsenal in a hospital basement, and the ensuing shootout probably cost more bullets than Terminator 2.   --- Genevieve Williams     John Woo creates the most poetic, lyrical, technologically impossible, rhythmic, orgasmic, skillfully edited, widely imitated action sequences in the history of filmmaking.  His work is a singular amalgam of classic cinema, primal bloodletting, emotional volatility, and cheesy cornball.  Underlying the nonstop carnage is the unmistakable soul of an artist who chooses to express himself, on all issues and levels of profundity or its absence, in cinematic violence.  The philosophical/moral/cosmic intricacies that Ingmar Bergman expressed by Death playing chess on the beach, John Woo discovers in the muzzle flash of a Glock-19.   The plot moves quickly but makes little sense.  Chow Yun-Fat, the Hong Kong heartthrob leading man of most Woo pictures, plays a hotheaded cop in the Dirty Harry mode.  Tony Leung plays either a psycho gunrunning assassin or a psycho undercover cop pretending all too convincingly to be a gunrunning assassin.  Yun-Fat and Leung chase each other around while killing everyone in sight, they they team up and kill everyone who was in hiding.   In the final sequence, Yun-Fat and Leung take on the evil head gunrunner, killing an army of gunmen while the bad guy blows up a hospital.  This nonstop action sequence takes almost forty-five minutes.  It grows continually more inventive and insane until the picture -- and you, most likely -- climax.  It's the last ten minutes of Zabriskie Point meets Die Hard (a movie greatly influenced by earlier Woo work) meets The Wild Bunch (a major influence on Woo) meets the Hong Kong kung-fu aesthetic transferred to modern weaponry.   Amid the explosions, car crashes, and escalating body count are Woo's trademark sappy romance, weird homoeroticism, fetishistic love of lethal hardware, artistic slow motion, and mind-blowing editing.   Woo, a Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese by birth, finds his inspiration in the cinema of the West.  This is the last film he directed in Hong Kong before emigrating to the U.S.  It's certainly his most "Western"; some see it as his audition for Hollywood.  It features the most extended and complete (but least meaningful in a moral sense) of all his shoot-outs.  The violence in Woo's pictures functions not only as his expression of the cinematic arts, but also, always, as metaphor.  These astounding sequences announce the end of an era; Woo's mirror to the rising violence and chaos in Hong Kong as the Communist takeover of 1997 looms.   Despite the presumably limited range of colors in his palette, John Woo is not only a major and seldom-credited influence on every visual stylist who shoots an action sequence (not least among his admitted copiers: Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino) but, to put it simply, a great and enduring artist.  His understanding of pure cinema -- that which can be expressed emotionally by a camera movement of an edit or a shift in motion speeds -- has no equal among Western directors for all of their obsessions with meaning.   Woo doesn't give two hoots for meaning, cogent narrative, or even rational sense.  He wants emotion, and violence is how he gets it.   --- David N. Meyer, The 100 Best Films to Rent You've Never Heard Of     Having struck gold with their wonderful Criterion Collection edition of John Woo's The Killer (Oct 93), the Voyager Company does it again with a follow up Criterion Collection production of Woo's Hard Boiled (CC1397L, $125). Less overflowing in emotions than Woo's other well known Hong Kong films, Hard Boiled has elements of the James Bond movies in its elaborate stunts and sets, but the action is exhilarating and, as Voyager's audio commentary and supplement verify, the movie's emotions haven't been so much taken away as simply suppressed, adding further to the tension and the excitement. We reviewed a Hong Kong import of the film in Sep 94. While we found that disc quite enjoyable, Voyager's transfer improves the film's entertainment and relevance significantly. About two cops, one undercover and one ostracized by his department, who are working to break a gun smuggling ring, the film has some fairly serious themes, but it is the big stunt sequences that make Hard Boiled so addictive. Especially memorable are the opening sequence, a gunfight set in a crowded restaurant where bodies go flying and bullets go bursting in a wild yet lyrical frenzy, and the half hour finale, set in a hospital where, at one point, the hero helps to evacuate the maternity ward amid flying bullets and explosive fires. To make one other point of praise -- where, in American films, the hero's superior is often depicted as impotent or foolish, here he happens to be several steps ahead and they clash only when it comes to the somewhat sloppy methods the hero employs in executing his duties. The film is a thrill and so is the disc. The picture looks super. Naturally, the colors aren't as rich as they would be in a Hollywood production, but the transfer is spotless and the quality of the image never detracts from the flow of the drama. The presentation is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1. The audio is monaural and is presented in Cantonese on the digital track with English subtitles appearing on the picture. One of the analog tracks, however, carries the film's dialog in English and is otherwise comparable in quality to the Cantonese track. The film runs 126 minutes and is spread to five sides in CAV, providing an opportunity to analyze Woo's technique on a frame-by-frame basis. The disc was produced by Mark Rance. The disc is presented in a triptych jacket. Rounding out side five is a Cantonese theatrical trailer, more footage from behind the scenes of Woo shooting the warehouse sequence in Hard Target (other footage appeared on The Killer), essays about Woo and the film, and a veritable shopping list of Hong Kong gangster films that you'll likely be submitting to your favorite Hong Kong disc importer once you've finished the program. The audio commentary is an improvement over that of The Killer, providing a more focused discussion about Woo's filmmaking and the meanings of Hard Boiled. Appearing are Woo, producer Terence Chang, American director Roger Avery, who is working on a film with Woo, and film critic David Kehr. Kehr, for example, provides just enough insight to orient the viewer to the film's themes without stating the obvious, and his contribution is one of the better pieces of pure criticism Voyager has produced. Woo, Chang, and Avery provide different viewpoints, giving the listener a well-rounded view of Woo's working methods (though there continue to be cryptic references to his temper on the set) and increasing an understanding of what, besides great gun battles, the film is accomplishing. That the film has a solid dramatic foundation is admirable, and the narrative enables the film to sustain multiple viewings and even improve with them, but from a disc standpoint it probably wouldn't matter if the movie had any story at all. Woo's action scenes, which he apparently makes up as he goes along, like a jazz trumpeter improvising with 16th or 32nd notes, are what laser discs are all about, and the ability to speed them up, slow them down, or just play them over and over will sustain fans until Voyager sees fit to produce another Woo masterpiece (there are plenty more) or until Woo's American career gets up steam. --- Douglas Pratt, The Laser Disc Newsletter Voyager's legendary deluxe Criterion laserdisc editions of John Woo's The Killer and Hard Boiled were released in 1993 and 1994, respectively, and they played a vital role in fueling the wave of Woomania that swept across the American film landscape in the mid-1990s.  The moment was right.  The Killer had enjoyed moderate success on the art-house circuit in late 1990, and Quentin Tarantino, his own star then rapidly ascending, had been talking up the Hong Kong auteur to anyone who would listen for a couple of years.  A devoted cult following was forming around the director in the big US cities, where his films were playing to sizable crowds at revival houses and at festivals.  And by this time Woo himself was in the house, having made the move to Hollywood in 1992 to helm the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target.  Alas, the director had been forced to trim much of his patented ultraviolence from Hard Target to garner the all-important R rating that Universal demanded -- the compromised version that was released in the summer of 1993 didn't really impress anyone.  "Why all the fuss over this guy Woo?" The release of these ambitious Criterion packages ensured that movie lovers everywhere would finally have access to Woo's two most celebrated and accessible works for home viewing.  "Ah, now I see what all the fuss was about."  Boasting clean CAV transfers and packed with commentaries and bonus features, the laserdiscs would become flagship titles in The Criterion Collection -- the sales figures for the sets were impressive, all the more so because they retailed for a cool $125 each.  And so Woomania inexorably gathered momentum while the director got his sea legs in Hollywood, stumbling again with the mediocre Broken Arrow in 1996, but then delivering exactly the kind of Hollywood film that his devotees had been hoping for with Face/Off in 1997. The Killer and Hard-Boiled were two of the first titles that Voyager made available as Criterion DVDs, where they continued to sell well even as the laserdisc versions went out of print with the demise of the medium.  Unfortunately, the rights to both films would eventually revert back to Fox/Lorber, forcing the Criterion DVDs out of print as well.  Unable to come to terms with Voyager on a licensing agreement for the supplementary materials, Fox/Lorber recorded their own commentary tracks with Woo and producer Terence Chang and put the movies out on DVD in what are widely felt to be inferior transfers.  Meanwhile, the Criterion DVD's skyrocketed in price on the collector's market, sometimes fetching $150 or more -- these figures inspired legions of unscrupulous bootleggers to produce ingenious copycat discs, and you have to be very careful when purchasing either title on DVD nowadays to ensure that you are getting a legit product.  In a final cruel twist, even the Fox/Lorber versions have gone out of print and at present the film is unavailable in any format whatsoever.  What's going on? Fortunately, I have never heard of anyone bootlegging a laserdisc.  So for those of us who kept our players or have taken the plunge and purchased one on the used market, these packages permit us to see the original landmark Criterion versions at their best.  The Hard Boiled set boasts a spotless widescreen picture transfer made from a newly-struck 35mm interpositive; the sound (rich, full, and warm, thanks to the laserdisc format's superior audio fidelity capabilities) was mastered from the original 3-track magnetic mono master.  There are new, easy-to-read subtitles, though you can switch over to an English-dubbed soundtrack on a second audio track should you so choose.  The entire film is presented in the full-featured CAV format (hence the three discs), which allows for matchlessly detailed still frame perusal, with none of the messy digital artifacting problems associated with the DVDs.  This is especially valuable when analyzing a John Woo film, since his action sequences are extraordinarily intricate montages comprised of explosions of quick cuts and jumbles of fragmented images, the likes of which haven't been seen since The Wild Bunch, obviously the most direct cinematic influence on Woo's technique (Woo remains, along with Walter Hill, one of the very few filmmakers who has been able to grapple successfully with the troubling, maddening, irrepressible legacy of genius Peckinpah, who has cast a long shadow over the action film genre for over 30 years). The supplemental materials are a gas.  Woo and Chang, abetted by filmmaker (and Tarantino collaborator) Roger Avery, deliver an excellent and informative commentary track, with film critic Dave Kehr tying it all together with his pithy insights.  There's also behind-the-scenes footage of Woo working (and looking frustrated) on the set of Hard Target, as well as Hard Boiled's original Cantonese theatrical trailer, essays on the film and on Woo by David Chute, and a nifty and informative guide to the cream of Hong Kong crime films.  All of this is enclosed in a beautifully designed triple-gatefold jacket with liner notes from Chicago film scholar Barbara Scharres (quoted below). This particular copy of Hard-Boiled is that rarest of rare finds nowadays -- it is still factory-sealed in its original shrink wrap and has never been opened or played. PAYMENT AND SHIPPING DETAILS I accept PayPal and money orders -- personal checks are fine but will generally take a few days to clear.    Domestic shipping for this (heavy) 3-disc set will cost $5.50 for USPS Media Mail with Delivery Confirmation.  Shipping additional titles will cost only $1.25 extra each (excluding box sets, which weigh more and need to be calculated separately).  Priority Mail is also available but will cost more -- the cost will depend on your zip code.  I pack all of my laserdiscs carefully and so far haven't experienced much in the way of shipping problems, but postal insurance is nonetheless generally recommended since the post office has been known to screw up on occasion and I can't be responsible for lost or damaged packages.   Postal insurance is calculated at $2.00 per $50.00 of merchandise. Refunds are available for defective product only.  Please read the description carefully to ensure that you know what you are purchasing!  This is a laserdisc set, not a DVD, and it will most emphatically not play in your DVD player.  You will need a laserdisc player (readily available as used items on eBay these days) to play it. I am more than happy to entertain bids from international eBayers -- please contact me for the shipping costs. If you have zero feedbacks or extensive negative feedback, please contact me first before bidding; I am willing to work with you if you are sincere about completing your purchase. Thanks so much for checking out my listing!     I WILL ALWAYS COMBINE SHIPPING CHARGES AT A SIGNIFICANT DISCOUNT FOR MULTIPLE PURCHASES (DETAILS ABOVE) -- PLEASE CHECK OUT MY EBAY STORE FOR OTHER QUALITY RARE LASERDISCS, INCLUDING MANY MORE FACTORY-SEALED CRITERION TITLES      THE LAST WORD... That Hard Boiled would be action director John Woo’s last film made in Hong Kong before his emigration to the U.S. in 1992 resonates throughout the picture. While he may shoot in Hong Kong again, Woo will never again make a film like this, conceived from the perspective of a man who perceives the support systems and institutions of his society changing radically and comes to the painful decision, like tens of thousands of Hong Kong citizens before him, to bail out rather than risk an uncertain future for his family.Understanding something of the unsettled state of Hong Kong then—where the public mood with regard to the future after 1997 fluctuated between an unfounded giddy optimism and abject fear—is part of the key to unlocking the richness and complexity of the metaphors that Woo employs in Hard Boiled. So is realizing the difference between Hong Kong’s surface, an intensely law-abiding city where gun ownership is strictly prohibited, and its underworld, where fortunes are said to be made in arms sales, and where the gangster Triads infiltrate every industry, including the film industry, allegedly in league with powerful cities in mainland China.While Woo’s work in films—including The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and A Better Tomorrow—is celebrated for its passion, Hard Boiled is relatively distanced emotionally. It is filled with images of departure and closure, of impending death, fear of the unknown, and regret for what is not to be. In terms of the bravura with which Woo stages the action, the film is unparalleled in its fiery invention and technical virtuosity, a fact which points out all the more that for the first time in one of his films the relationship between the central characters—the cop Tequila, and his compromised undercover counterpart Tony—is one of wariness and grudging respect rather than all-out trust. With their barely intersecting fates, Tequila and Tony know each other too little and too late for total bonding, and as passionate friendship is the way to redemption in a Woo film, the ending of Hard Boiled brings the bitter knowledge that there may finally be peace for his characters, but there is no redemption.Tony, played with a sensitivity that is characteristic of the actor Tony Leung, but a steeliness that is new to him, is often isolated emblematically by Woo in a virtually empty frame. Cruising in an open convertible, shrouded in swirling fog, or sunk in a blue-tinged reverie alone with his origami cranes, he projects inner emptiness and frozen emotions, best symbolized by his whimsical dream to live at the South Pole. Tequila, on the other hand, is an impulsive hothead whom Chow Yun-fat plays with ready humor and an only slightly submerged simmering anger. That his heroic demeanor seems an all-too-human mix of genuine courage and macho foolhardiness is a credit to the subtlety of Chow’s interpretation.Woo choreographs a hellish arsenal against his characters, and there is both beauty and exquisite Zenlike detachment in the way so much chaos is unleashed with limitless diabolical precision, seemingly for its own sake. Unlike The Killer, the mood conveyed through this excess is one of futility, even when Woo’s heroes are winning. Woo takes the conflicts far beyond the personal level, and Tequila and Tony each function in a world in which they are entirely expendable, also something new for a Woo film. Tequila rails against a system that would sacrifice him to preserve bureaucratic order, while Tony’s soul has already been trashed in the line of duty.As 1997 approached, Hong Kong audiences seemed to crave images of violation. Action films became more raw and graphic, and several truly grotesque, slasher-derived sub-genres became popular. Woo moves with the spirit of the times, but his treatment of the theme of violation in Hard Boiled takes the elegantly metaphysical strategy of posing a series of lines to be crossed, each involving honor, loyalty or simple human decency. In his extended finale, a hospital under siege by legions of gangsters becomes a metaphor for Hong Kong itself. As the institution intended to nurture life is transformed into a deadly and perilous environment, for those trapped inside the choice is to remain and die or to escape and live. Revealing quite possibly his own state of mind at the time, Woo’s final image in the film is one of escape, but an escape that is weighted for the viewer with all the burden of memory.   --- Barbara Scharres On Dec-01-08 at 13:46:05 PST, seller added the following information: Use the FREE Counters 1 million sellers do - Vendio! Place a Bid!