Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies

Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies

by Lurker Shoomoser 12/26/2004, 9:31pm PST

jeep wrote:

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.

Crouching Tiger Hidden dragon actually was based on a Chinese fiction written of the same name in the 50s. How Americanised is the movie version I don't know, because I have never read the original, but *surely* not much.

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.

You mean Gong Li? Gong Li used to work to Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero. Zhang Yimou like to have Gong Li in almost every one of his pre-sell out pre-Hero arty-farty movies (Raise the Red Lantern etc.), until she got married to some rich guy (another Cinderella story). This guy is a sell out because his new movie, "House of the Flying Dagger" or something, is also some kind of martial art movie set in ancient China, along the lines of Hero, only the story is so much weaker. In fact the new movie is a pool of alcohol induced vomit.

He also used the "Hot Actress", Zhang Ziyi, just like he used to cast Gong Li consistently in the pre-sellout days, hence "Little Gong Li" (but I think she is prettier than Gong Li, ahem.)

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/

Actually Miramax spent some of its own money on Hero, it partnered with some Chinese film studio. In total they spent ~$30m ($240 Hong Kong Dollars), the most expensive film in the entire Chinese cinema history. What a fucking waste. The second half of the movie would have made you believe that it is a love story, but the first half is more like some wi-fu rehash with a dash of political intrigue. It is pretty disjointed.