Jackie Chan names his four favourite movies: “There are so many”
Is there anything Jackie Chan can’t do? A massive movie star and death-defying stuntman, he’s also an excellent singer, having trained at the Peking Opera School as a boy. He has contributed songs to several of his films and provided vocals for several Chinese dubs of Western films, most notably the track ‘I’ll Make a Man Out of You’ for the Disney film Mulan. He’s also a dean at the Wuhan Institute of Design and Sciences, where the film and TV department is named after him. He has even served as an anti-drugs spokesperson in China and raised millions of dollars for various charitable causes.
It turns out that one thing he does struggle with, though, is picking his favourite films. At the premiere of his latest release, Karate Kid: Legends, Chan was pounced on by Letterboxd, who cornered him with their much-feared ‘Four Favourites’ question. First of all, he claimed not to know what the site was, saying, “I’m old! There’s so many technologies, I don’t know, so many apps!” Finally, he calmed down long enough to actually give his answers.
“Wow, there are so many,” he exclaimed, this time referring to films rather than ‘technologies’. He named his first pick as Rocky, the legendary boxing film starring and directed by Sylvester Stallone. Given both men’s status as action movie pillars and Chan’s fondness for combat, this pick doesn’t come as much of a shock.
His next selection might have come as a bit of a surprise, had you not already read the first part of this article. Chan’s second choice was The Sound of Music, one of the most famous musicals of all time. There isn’t much in the way of martial arts or stunts in this one, but, as we established earlier, the Rush Hour star is also very musical. He has previously spoken of his love for the Julie Andrews vehicle, claiming he fell in love with it before he even learned to speak English. There were even rumours at one point that he was working on turning his autobiography into a musical of its own.
Up next, the interviewee opted for a film that fellow Letterboxd victims have chosen countless times, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Interestingly, in 1989, he appeared in a Hong Kong movie called Miracles. In certain territories, including Australia and the UK, this movie was called ‘The Canton Godfather’. Alas, this was actually a remake of the films Lady for a Day and Pocketful of Miracles. We’re still waiting to see Chan running around an orchard with an orange slice in his mouth.
Finally, he broke the cardinal rule of ‘Four Favourites’ by putting Police Story, a film he was in, on his list. The first instalment in a long-running action-comedy series, this movie was released in 1985 and features Chan as Sergeant Chan Ka-Kui, a detective who gets accused of murder after making a major drugs bust. Police Story is notable for its insane stunt sequences, one of which almost killed its star.
So there you have it. It turns out that what Jackie Chan looks for in a movie is boxing, singing nuns, gangsters, and himself. To give him some credit, he didn’t even know what the app was before they approached him, so he probably just said the first four films that popped into his head so he could leave as quickly as possible.
