There’s an article over at pitchfork by Tom ‘freakytrigger’ Ewing that’s worth checking out (2000AD + Pop music theorising = yay).

I mention it here because whilst watching Dirty Ho last night I realised a lot of my love of Hong Kong cinema can be put down to the idea of ‘thrill power’ (if you don’t know what I’m on about probably best for you to read the article) and the conditions that produce thrill power as Mr. Ewing sees it mirror those conditions under which much classic HK film goodness was produced (with the added frisson of Triads breathing down your neck).

Here are the conditions …

You have a vast demand for material and very little time to produce it. You have a system that rewards speed and quantity over craft and artistic expression. You have output that is being judged entirely on its commercial performance. You have an audience that demands more intense material than you’re actually able to give it. And you have all this market and time pressure being brought to bear on immensely creative, talented individuals, who are too overworked to really be individuals, and who just feed their ideas and talent into the robot bulldozer machine. No doubt it’s a bloody horrible way to make a living– but what it can produce is magnificent.

the fact that it’s a horrible way to make a living pretty much guarantees that this kind of stuff only gets produced in immature creative industries see also: Computer games of the pre-Playstation era.