I am Jackie Chan : my life in action / 1st Mass Market ed.
作者： Jackie Chan, with Jeff Yang.
出版社：
简介：
Book Description
As one of the biggest stars to burst into U.S. theaters, Jackie Chan has wowed audiences with death-defying stunts. But who really is this lightning-fast Charlie Chaplin of martial arts moviemaking? Now, in I Am Jackie Chan, he tells the fascinating, harrowing, ultimately triumphant story of his life: How the rebellious son of refugees in tumultuous 1950s Hong Kong became the disciplined disciple of a Chinese Opera Master. How the dying art of Chinese opera led Jackie to the movie business. And how he broke into Hollywood big time by breaking almost every bone in his body.
Amazon.com
Since his first role in 1962 at the age of 8, Jackie Chan has appeared in more than 70 movies. For more than 20 years, he has been the biggest star in Asia, but in the West he remained a secret, his movies passed around on tape and his fame growing by word of mouth alone. In the '90s, with the success of crossover movies like Rush Hour and the support of a new generation of filmmakers who grew up watching Jackie Chan videotapes, his star finally rose in the West. But where did he come from, and how did he achieve so much?
His autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, answers those questions in an engaging, almost novelistic style. When his father moves to Australia to take up a new job, the young Jackie is placed in Hong Kong's China Drama Academy under the tutelage of Master Yu Jim-yuen. For the next 10 years he is trained in martial arts, dance, acrobatics, singing, and comedy, while suffering extraordinary hardships, including regular beatings and near-starvation. Yet he can look back on this period of his life with considerable affection, not least because it taught him the skills, and provided him with the network of friends, that would sustain his film career for decades. Chan has always earned the respect of his fans by committing himself wholeheartedly to creating the most death-defying stunts possible. His achievements seem even more remarkable when set against the struggles described in this book. In the Drama School, as a young stuntman, in his first troubled attempts to make movies in America--Chan's personality shines through, and I Am Jackie Chan can only enhance his reputation as one of the most likable and admirable movie stars in the world. The book also includes Jackie's comments on all of his movies, lists of his favorite stunts and fights, and an astonishing catalog of all his major injuries. Can you imagine what it must feel like to dislocate your cheekbone?
-Simon Leake
Amazon.co.uk
Jackie Chan is not only the biggest martial arts star in the world; due to his massive fame in the Far East he is probably the most popular movie star on the planet. This authorised biography tells a classic rags-to-riches story of how he got there. Born in Hong Kong to a poor Migrant family, Chan was sent to Chinese Opera school to study under a disciplinarian teacher. He acquired a solid grounding in physical expression and left aged 16 to become a stuntman in the Hong King film industry. By sheer force of personality, tenacity and some genuinely impressive stunts, he quickly became a box-office favourite and a star. Chan is just starting to break through in Hollywood and this is obviously where his considerable energies are now being directed. "I've been on Letterman and Jay Leno", he proudly claims, "I've gotten an award on MTV. Lionel Richie came to visit me on the set". But despite his new friends Chan has never forgotten how far he has come and ends the book with a poetic statement of his achievement. "I was a useless child./ A ragged boy./ A reckless teen./ And now --/ Look who I am now!".
--Nick Wroe
From Publishers Weekly
One of Asia's most popular film stars, Chan has helped reinvent the Hong Kong action genre by blending hyperkinetic stunts with a self-deprecating humor and a freewheeling flamboyance reminiscent of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. His autobiography, unfortunately, contains few of these elements. In minute detail, he chronicles his punishing childhood in the Chinese Opera Research Institute and his rise to superstardom. From age seven to 17, under the severe discipline?some might even call it child abuse?of his Opera Master, Chan was trained for theater and film work. After the death of Bruce Lee (Chan was a stuntman in Lee's Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon), his studio, Golden Harvest, attempted to turn him into a Lee clone. But Chan's film persona finally gelled when he began to emulate his silent-movie heroes and to punctuate his films with what he calls "the superstunt"?high-risk feats of derring-do that he performs himself. Chan takes himself to task for neglecting his family (indeed, his wife and 14-year-old son are only briefly mentioned), and offers a candid look at the gangs, called Triads, that retain a powerful grip on the Hong Kong film industry. But despite such glimpses behind the actor's Teflon veneer, and his punchy anecdotes, this surprisingly tame, sometimes plodding memoir fails to deliver the heady thrills one has come to expect of a Jackie Chan production. FYI: I Am Jackie Chan is published to coincide with the release of his first American film in 13 years, Rush Hour.
From Booklist
Hong Kong superstar Chan has long been Asia's top box-office attraction. Now that his films are being released stateside, he is acquiring the trappings of Hollywood celebrity--this slickly packaged autobiography, for instance. The presence of the ghostwriter is more evident here than in similar works, and fans familiar with Chan's modest English won't much detect his voice. But they may overlook that gap in verisimilitude in view of Chan's harrowing, genuine rags-to-riches life story. His father turned him, then only 7, over to a Chinese opera-school master whose brutal but effective training gave Chan the basic skills for becoming a world-class martial artist and, eventually, the greatest stunt performer the movies have ever seen. Chan tells how he resisted studio efforts to turn him into "the next Bruce Lee" and instead developed the self-effacing screen persona and the combination of thrills and comedy that make his movies recall those of Keaton and Lloyd as much as those of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Nothing here much soils Chan's squeaky-clean image, although the beans are spilled about some long-past romances (including one with the late pop-singer Teresa Teng, who was as famous in Asia as Chan), and Chan finally admits to having been secretly married for 15 years. Chan's fans will demand this memoir, but even the uninitiated will enjoy his compelling account of an astonishing career.
Gordon Flagg
From Library Journal
Fans of action cinema will be thrilled with this autobiography. The star of films like Drunken Master (1978), Police Story (1985), and Supercop (1992) recounts his life in short, machine-gun-burst chapters. Beginning with his formative days as the acolyte of an opera master at the Chinese Drama Academy, Chan dives into his Hong Kong stuntman apprenticeship and career as a worldwide kung fu, shoot-'em-up idol. The staccato narrative ends with his U.S. breakthrough, Rumble in the Bronx (1994). Chan afterward divulges his "top ten stunts," "top ten fights," and his accrued bodily "aches and pains" in separate appendixes. A section called "Jackie's Films" affords a whirlwind survey of Chan's oeuvre. Written with noted Asian American journalist Yang, this volume makes for thorough, two-fisted coverage and should be read in tandem with Jeff Rovin's The Essential Jackie Chan Sourcebook (Pocket, 1997). Recommended for public libraries.
Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN
Kirkus Reviews
Hong Kong action star Chan tells his story to journalist Yang (Eastern Standard Time, not reviewed), and a colorful rags-to-riches tale it is. Chan is best-known as a man who does all his own stunts, no matter how insanely dangerous or harrowing, a genuinely likeable Everyman figure who is summed up by the title of his most recent American release: Mr. Nice Guy. Although he is a master of kung fu, his film persona is that of the ordinary guy who feels pain, who loses fights occasionally, and who survives by his wits and agility rather than superhuman strength. Delightfully enough, that is the same personality that emerges from this surprisingly artful as-told-to. Chan focuses on his childhood and early career struggles for most of the book, only reaching his present level of stardom (hes the biggest box-office draw in Asia, and rapidly approaching similar status everywhere else) in the last 75 pages. His childhood story is offbeat, perhaps well known to his fans but a glimpse into a very different world for everyone else. When he was seven, his parents handed him over to the China Drama Academy, where he ate, slept, and lived for ten years, studying the arts of the Chinese opera under Dickensian conditions. Chan recounts this story of 12-hour days, beatings, and other punishments with a finely judged sense of right and wrong, without a grandstanding sense of outrage, and with considerable humor. The rest of his story is told with appealing modesty as well. The book concludes with a very detailed filmography and lists of his ten most dangerous stunts and favorite fight scenes. An entertaining tale, well enough told that it should be of interest even to those who have never seen a Jackie Chan film, if any such people still exist. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w photos)
About Author
Jackie has written this book with Jeff Yang, the founder and publisher of A. Magazine and the coauthor of Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence in American Culture.
Book Dimension :
length: (cm)18.3 width:(cm)11
