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My initiation into the world of Woo came just over a year later - in the fall of 1993 - during the 72-hour film fest that my undergraduate school held during finals week each semester. The Killer and (oddly enough) Reservoir Dogs were scheduled back-to-back beginning at 5:45 a.m. on the first full day. I would have just enough time after The Killer to grab breakfast and head off to my Introductory Calculus I final (which by the way, I bombed, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with John Woo, thankfully.) One of my friends joined me for the film and our verbatim real-time reaction to the bullets, the doves, the operatic insanity that is The Killer consisted of variations on "Holy shit!" We were quite impressed and delirious and happy with the world, as only teenage boys who have witnessed mind-blowing amounts of choreographed mayhem, perhaps, can be. This high was almost undone 24 hours later with an ill-advised midnight screening of the director's cut of Caligula, a film I wish upon not even exes or enemies, a film that is not redeemed by starring a 30-something Helen Mirren, though perhaps only she alone could have emerged with her reputation and career intact and on track.

During the summer of 1994, one of the bastions of independent cinema in Portland, a theater named Cinema 21, was having a Woo double feature for three days: A Better Tomorrow II and Hard Boiled. Never mind that I had never seen A Better Tomorrow and so feared that I might be lost in plot nuances and obscure references (yes, I know, I needed to calm down). Being as that I was home from school for the summer and not permanently encamped in Portland, this entailed Mom and me making a three hour drive back to the big city. All I knew of the films going in was what I had seen of ABTII in True Romance (it's one of the two films that Alabama is watching on TV while Clarence is messing it up with Drexel) and that Hard Boiled's finale featured a hospital on fire and Chow Yun Fat saving babies while blowing away bad guys. Mom actually sat through both films and enjoyed herself. I was still in awe that Woo could top himself with action sequences of such audacity and ridiculousness (at least from my chronological viewing experience). I eventually caught up with A Better Tomorrow and Woo's 1990 war opus Bullet in the Head on bootlegged videotapes before my college years were over.

Watching both ABT and ABTII back to back recently proved two things to me: First, that there is a lot to be gained, from an emotional standpoint, from seeing both in close proximity. Two of the main characters recur and their relationship does alter considerably from one end to the other. Second, it is absolutely not necessary to see the first film because ABTII gives you all the flashbacks you need to fill in the blanks in the opening three minutes and because it contains five scenes worth the price of admission including a gonzo finale that 15 years on has lost none of its ability to plaster a big old ridiculous grin on my face. I'll break those scenes out in a little while.

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