After the blockbuster boom of the 70s and 80s, corporations found that there is good money to be made in the movie industry. With this realization came a different way of producing movies; with very large budgets and big stars. Then the popularity of home video brought forth a need for more product for the new audience. In this article titled Declaration of Independents, the new market is described, “For the cable subscribers and home video omnivores, cheap genre films would do the trick. For the more selective few there was a different sort of movie altogether, something more intimate, more driven by character than by plot or spectacle, and (inevitably) more downbeat” (Dga.org).

With the need for product came extremely low budget films and directors like Jim Jarmusch. One of Jarmusch’s low budget films was Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a mafia film focusing on one hitman who studies a book called The Book of the Samurai. Set in the modern day, Jarmusch puts together an interesting concept of a man living in a run-down city with an ability to come and go without being seen, hence the name “Ghost Dog,” who has sworn loyalty to a mob-boss for once saving his life.

What’s interesting about this movie is that there are no loud action scenes at all. As you can see in the trailer, there are a few shooting scenes but all were done in an execution style, with no bullets flying back. Most of the movie is spent developing the Ghost Dog character, with many scenes reciting ancient philosophies to display the honor he feels even though he is a contracted killer. Other scenes like the one below simply set a mood of meditated and prepared even though the effects might make you dizzy. It all accrues into what this Sequart article describes as a movie “imbruing that Zen-like surface quality with a sense of instability and mania” (Sequart.org).

A complete contrast to the slowed-down, Zen-like Ghost Dog is a film out of Hong Kong, Hard Boiled directed by John Woo. Just by watching the trailer below you will understand that every scene in the movie is going to have a crazy shootout with explosions and the whole nine yards. These kinds of crazy action films coming from Hong Kong were certainly inspired but then kicked up a few notches to then inspire others. Like this review states, “The glorious excess of Woo’s Hong Kong films, with their unimpeachable deadpan cool and ornately choreographed violence—borrowed in themselves from Jean-Pierre Melville and Sam Peckinpah, respectively—have now simply become the accepted language of action movies” (film.avclub.com). Before Woo, all the hits involved martial arts and intense showdowns, but Woo changed the game by nixing the fists and introducing the bullet flying, slow-motion effects aside some humor to make a great movie.

These two movies are pretty opposite one another. One a slow-paced mafia film with a lot of philosophy and a few not-so-violent executions, and the other with constant shootouts and violent death. That said, the slow-moving Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai would definitely be considered an unconventional film. It had a budget of 2 million in 1999, with no big stars, no happy ending, and a character-based story rather than one centered around the plot. Alternatively, Hard Boiled is fairly conventional with a budget of 4.5 million (5.5 with inflation to 1999), fairly known actors at the time (due to John Woo using the same actors as his previous big-sellers), and a solid plot full of intense, sporadic action (see below for the interesting idea to add a baby to the shootout) all followed by a happy ending.