Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies

Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies

by jeep 12/26/2004, 8:18pm PST

FABIO wrote:

Are you not sick of wire-fu yet?

Did you think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon would be even better if the "art" factor was upped ten times?

Are you the kind of person who loves anime and whose favorite parts are when characters deliver long monologues with tons of cherry/lotus blossoms falling in the background?

Every time I see this in a film, I picture Ataru beating the Cherry Blossom God's poem with meaningless babble. I can't remember what episode of Urusei Yatsura it was, or even the content of the poems, but it had to have been something about hot girls dressing scantily for spring. Anyway, every time I see one of these premature denouements
I imagine some Sarariman walking in and asking which chick wants to take their shirt off for 15 yen.

If you answered yes to all of these, you'll love this movie. Otherwise, no.

This movie is a good example of the different perspectives people can take away from the same film. I don't mean within a film itself, but within the viewer: if you walked in expecting to see a [url="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108281/"]completely average[/url] wudan-type film, you got a smarter story and may have been impressed. If you expected Crouching Tiger, you forgot that movie was co-written by an American and made by a by-then americanized director from Taiwan.

Previews make it looks like one man's quest for vengence after his village gets wiped out by a storm of arrows from evil soldiers, culminating in him storming some sort of castle. This is not that movie.

The marketing of the film was not accurate, there are fewer combat scenes and more talking than you expect from a film compared to Crouching Tiger, when really the only things they had in common were the hot actress my gossiping chinese colleague derisively calls "Little Li Gong" for fucking every director she's worked with and the 2 impossibly boring arguing-in-the-desert scenes.

I would say this movie was a worthy rental, but really not good enough for the kind of baby marketing blitz Miramax gave it. Perhaps they realized there's just enough of a market for these movies that they're like the SNL cast 'genre', spend less than $6M (ie. pennies) making a movie out of weird cameos built around someone with a following who'll guarantee you $30M in domestic ticket sales and a long, predictable shelf life at Blockbuster. In this case, spend less than $6M importing it, slap Tarantino's seal of approval on it, and try to trick the wire-fu fans into seeing it. They got my $8.50.

/jeep/