Stephen Teo

Decent historical overview, garbage analysis. Author is very clearly a fanboy who wanted to write a book on the subject and felt he needed to justify it as a scholarly monograph by doing a cursory, clumsy, shallow survey of the existing work on the topic. He could have written a much better book if he had just admitted he was a wuxia fan and wanted to write an overview of the genre's history and talk about his favorite movies (he is not shy about letting the reader know which movies he show more thinks are best and how much he likes them). show less

Stephen Teo is a very capable writer on the subject of Hong Kong cinema and here turns to analyse that territory's most famous director.

As ever, Teo's prose is easy to read and he's extremely well informed, coming from the territory as he does (unlike many who write about WKW from a European or North American perspective), all of which provides a useful perspective comepared to other works on the director.

The book strikes a nice balance between between easy to read and also inciteful, all show more without becoming too techinical or needlessly clever for the sake of it. show less