Sunday Surprise: dark beauty in green & red with dragons

[ by Charles Cameron — the color of green cards, the color of blood ]

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I was watching Revenge of the Green Dragons, since Scorsese produced, and had very little idea of what I was going to see — the film is an amalgam of Hong Kong action flick and New York City crime thriller, based on a New Yorker aticle about Chinatown gangs in the 1980s and 90s — but the opening titles were run under a brief voice-over account of Ellis Island, and included this shot of some early “green cards” —

followed by this one of Mahjong tiles, definitively green, and roughly equivalent to cards in western gameplay —

and this, showing the same tiles face-up —

by which point, the greenness, cardness and gameness had my full attention, and at which point I went back and started putting together a series of screencaps, like this one, showing a different but related form of green —

with a switch to red, green’s complementary color, and the violent theme of the movie —

and finally, the film’s title, in red against green.

I was beginning to like this film.

**

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