History favors a clean, simple narrative, which can sometimes mean shuffling contemporaries to the back in order to bring a Great Man to the fore. But last week, the great Chinese filmmaker Lam Ling-tung — better known by his chosen name, Ringo — died at age 63 , giving sad occasion to revisit the work of a true genius never granted the crossover popularity of his peers. He, too, told stories of cops and criminals with a stylized, hyperviolent aesthetic that made him an idol to Quentin Tarantino and the generation of genre obsessives that followed in his wake. His work is singly his own, however, generally eschewing the dove-flutters and flying-pistol-kicks of the gun fu school pioneered by Woo. Lam situated himself one small notch closer to reality, couching a cynical perspective on inner-city society and law enforcement within an often outrageous style informed by his background in comedy and early training as an actor.

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