Red Cliff Part I & II Blu-ray

For fans of John Woo's Hong Kong films of the late 1980sA China Film Group Corp. (in China)/Avex Entertainment (in Japan)/CMC Entertainment, 20th Century Fox (in Taiwan)/Showbox (in South Korea) release of a China Film Group, Chengtian Entertainment Intl. Holdings (China)/Avex Entertainment (Japan)/CMC Entertainment (Taiwan)/Showbox (South Korea)/John Woo presentation of a Lion Rock production. (International sales: Summit Entertainment, Los Angeles.) Produced by Terence Chang, Woo. Executive producers, Han Sanping, Masato Matsuura, Wu Kebo, Ryuhei Chiba, Dennis Wu, Ryu Jeong-hun, Woo. Co-producers, Anne Woo, Zhang Daxing, Yeh Ru-feng, David Tang, Wang Wei, Cheri Yeung. Directed by John Woo. Screenplay, Woo, Khan Chan, Kuo Cheng, Sheng Heyu. and early 90s, enamored with the choreographed "gun-fu" of A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, the director's subsequent career in the U.S. has been, if not outright disappointing, at least underwhelming. Sure, Face/Off was fun and Mission: Impossible II had its share of ridiculously over-the-top action set pieces, but Mr. Woo's Hollywood output in general has seemed disinterested, unoriginal, and even tame. Need I mention Paycheck, perhaps the most aptly titled film in the director's commercial canon? Well, ladies and gentlemen, after nearly twenty years of slumming it through dull actioners for the big Los Angeles studios, John Woo has returned to China to make his best film since 1992's Hard Boiled. Strictly speaking, Red Cliff isn't exactly a return to form—there's no frenetic gangster vs. cop gunplay in Hong Kong's seedy underbelly—but it is a return to passionate filmmaking and turning toward a new form for Woo: the historical wuxia epic, China's answer to the sword 'n' sandal genre. Released in two parts, the nearly five-hour Red Cliff was the highest budgeted and highest grossing Chinese film ever, even box-office besting Titanic and The Dark Knight in several Asian territories. A truncated version of the film, edited down to two and a half hours for U.S. audiences, also appeared stateside in selected cities, generating strong reviews. Magnolia Home Entertainment has seen fit to release both cuts on Blu-ray—we'll have a review of the single-disc U.S. theatrical edition up shortly—but this two-disc "Original International Version" is the one you'll want.The battle of Red Cliff is as well known to Chinese audiences as Gettysburg is in the U.S., but let's stop the comparison right there. For one, we're talking about warfare on a scale that's almost unimaginable, and two, it all happened nearly 2,000 years ago. Part one opens in 208 AD, as Chancellor Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) leads the imperial army on a search and destroy outing to quell the rebel southern warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). As in Star Wars, the rebels are the good guys here, and Cao Cao—a friendless, vindictive, and overly ambitious upstart—is on the warpath to further his own power-hungry agenda. Liu Bei sends his smart-as-a-whip military advisor, Zhu-ge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro, House of Flying Daggers) to reluctant leader Sun Quan's court to request an alliance, and under the leadership of Viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung, In the Mood for Love)—getting overwhelmed with names yet?—Liu Bei and Sun Quan's small armies amass at Red Cliff, on the bank of the Yangtze River, prepared to repel Cao Cao's 800,000 soldiers. After a massive land battle filled with tactical trickery and enough arterial bloodletting to overflow several Olympic-sized pools, part one comes to a cliffhanger conclusion as Cao Cao readies his navy and Sun Quan's spunky tomboy sister (Zhao Wei) sneaks into the enemy encampment on a self-ordered spy mission.With all the whos, whats, and whys established, part two progresses toward the end-game in a series of increasingly clever chess moves by strategist Zhu-ge Liang, who is so attuned with nature that he can forecast an incoming fog bank by feeling for the sweat on the underside of a turtle. (Move over, Al Roker.) As a whole, the film is like watching a cinematic version of a game of Risk—at almost five hours, it's just as long—between a good player and a great player. Cao Cao's brawn-over-brains attacks are no match for Zhu-ge Liang's preternatural intuition, and John Woo devises several satisfying comeuppance sequences that are as smart as they are brutal. Shields with mirrored backsides are used to blind incoming cavalry charges, the supposedly outdated "tortoise" formation becomes a mousetrap for Cao Cao's minions, and a fiery naval battle turns on Liang's predicted change in the wind. In his most brilliantly outsmarting maneuver, Liang figures out a way for the undersupplied rebel alliance to "harvest" arrows from the enemy, using little more than some sly, military sleight of hand. The frequent battle scenes are frenetic and sometimes a little overwhelming, but unlike other directors, who might've given the material the overused, shakey-cam, I can barely tell what the hell is going on approach, Woo stages the action with his characteristic gracefulness, a blood ballet where we can make sense of the dancers' moves. It's not a faultless presentation, as I've yet to see one of these epic warfare films that doesn't succumb to what I like to call "Braveheart Syndrome"—extras waving their swords around willy-nilly in the background—but if you can suspend your disbelief, Woo and his 100,000 soldiers on loan from the present-day Chinese army will have you thinking you're in the middle of a truly epic ancient conflict.While he can't quite muster the poetry and pathos of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or House of Flying Daggers—he's working with way too many characters—John Woo knows that in a film of this scale, the human drama has to be just as important as the action. To this end, he has Cao Cao motivated by an obsession over Viceroy Zhou Yu's tender and beautiful wife Xiao Qiao (Lin Chi-ling), who easily bests Helen of Troy with a face that launches over 2,000 ships. Our modern sensibilities tell us that it's completely insane for countless foot soldiers to die over one man's desire to steal another man's wife—stealing another country's oil is a whole different matter—but we're in the realm of the epic romance here, and it doesn't play as falsely as you might think. Woo also convincingly brews the friendships that develop between the characters, especially the mutual respect and admiration shared by Zhou Yu and Zhu-ge Liang. Though they were the dual protagonists of Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung didn't share any real screentime, so it's good to see them leading the cast and formulating tactics together in Red Cliff. Both actors play off of one another marvelously, giving subtle and commanding performances that draw on reserves of quiet power. Even at a hefty 288 minutes, Red Cliff rarely sags, buoyed by some of the most massive action scenes ever set to celluloid and a David vs. Goliath drama with relatable themes of honor and courage. Woo frames the battle's conclusion in a Simply the second half of an almost five-hour movie rather than a self-contained pic in its own right, John Woo's costume actioner "Red Cliff II" delivers in spades for auds left hungry for more by last summer's first seg. With characters already established, this half is expectedly heavier on action, though nimble editing and charismatic perfs still pack beaucoup human interest prior to the final hour's barnstorming battle. Pic opened bracingly in China Jan. 7 and fans out this month through major Asian markets (with Japan in April), where biz should rank with that of "Red Cliff."
Given the success of Woo's high-stakes undertaking -- at $80 million, the most expensive Chinese-language movie ever -- it remains a crying shame that the two films may never be seen outside Asia on the bigscreen. (For hardcore buffs, the first pic is already available on DVD in Asia.) Non-Asian auds are meant to be content with a planned 2ฝ-hour "international version," which cannot hope to replicate the impressive detail and sheer epic sweep of the 280-minute original.
Rapid, two-minute recap of "Red Cliff" (beneath the main titles) serves more to get auds' pulses racing again than to educate newcomers. The year is 208 A.D., near the end of the 400-year-old Han Dynasty, and the opposing forces of prime-minister-cum-general Cao Cao (mainland vet Zhang Fengyi), repping the Emperor in the north, and a relatively small coalition led by Zhou Yu (Hong Kong idol Tony Leung Chiu-wai), repping "rebellious" southern warlords, are about to face off in a decisive battle at Red Cliff on the Yangtze River."there's no victor in war" message, but it's clear that with the famed director back in top form, we, the audience, are the real winners.

Wonderful World Blu-ray Review

The Man is a ball buster and a back breaker. From the balcony of his penthouse suite in a steel and glass tower, he throws bricks of misfortune down at schmucks like us, cackling all the while like an overweight oil baron and smoking a cigar made of $100 bills. We're the replaceable cogs in his corporate machine, the serfs in his feudal consumerist kingdom. His grip on us is like a Chinese finger trap—the more we struggle, the tighter it gets. He's a white-collar pickpocket, a black-suited extortionist, and we're all basically paying with our lives for the honor of shining his $3,000 patent leather shoes. To belabor the point with one more metaphor, The Man has our souls to his grindstone, and he's…slowly…wearing…us…down. That's one view, anyway. The other would be that The Man is just a scapegoat, an excuse for our unhappiness and lack of ambition, a made-up justification for our regrets, the falsified pretext for our tar-black cynicism. Wonderful World, a little redemption fable of a film by first-time director Joshua Goldin, is all about examining both sides of the coin. Even the title is a kind of litmus test. Is it Wonderful World, or "Wonderful" World?

Matthew Broderick plays Ben Singer, a perhaps too aptly named former children's folk singer who put away his guitar for good eight years ago after his record company royally screwed him over. Since then, he's been slumming through a dead-end job as a legal proofreader—"At least I don't delude myself with hopes and dreams," he says, too tired to sneer—and he's developed a ceaselessly misanthropic attitude. He's the very definition of a sad sack, an embittered ex-artist who had his passion squelched by a culture of corporate greed. At night, his brain fogged with marijuana smoke, he carries on Socratic, hallucinated conversations with The Man himself, personified here by Philip Baker Hall. Ben is divorced from his wife, he rarely sees his precocious young daughter (Jodelle Ferland), and his only real friend is his roommate Ibou (The Wire's Michael K. Williams), a dangerously diabetic Senegalese immigrant. When Ibou falls into a coma because Ben can't get him to the hospital on time—conveniently for the plot, a city tow truck hauls Ben's car away right when Ibou starts to feel faint—his sister Khadi (Sanaa Lathan) arrives from Africa to pull the dark-tinted glasses off of Ben's worldview. What follows is a jumble of romance and misread intentions, as Ben grapples with his own cynicism even as he begins to fall in love.For all of Ben's weary sarcasm and defeatist quips, Wonderful World is an almost painfully earnest film, the kind of well-intentioned indie drama that isn't out to make a buck or garner awards, but rather, seems content to tell its small story with a totally unassuming tone. No matter what its faults may be—and we'll get to those in a second—this isn't the sort of film that you can endlessly rag on or passionately hate. It's like that super friendly but ultimately uninteresting guy who lived on your floor in college, the one whose name you can't remember. He might not have been the kind of person you'd necessarily want to be friends with, but he was impossible to dislike. That's Wonderful World, a good-natured low-budget film that doesn't quite accomplish what it sets out to do, but tries with such honest modesty that its failures seem almost gracious. The main malfunction here is director Joshua Goldin's scatterbrained script, which lunges off on narrative tangents but often double back before taking them to gratifying conclusions. Case in point, Ben's lawsuit against the city for "depraved indifference," a sequence that garbs itself in such flamboyant courtroom clich้s that it almost seems self-parodying. Even Ben's railings against The Man, consumerism, and the power of positive thinking sound tired, not because of the lie down and die point he's trying to make, but because we've heard it all before. At its best, Wonderful World is tender and mildly triumphant, but at its worst—in Ben's conversations with The Man, for instance—it's baldly didactic, preachier than a Sunday sermon.The plot also swings on a worn-out thematic hinge. How many times have we seen a white Westerner find redemption with the help of a soulful African who's monetarily poor but rich in spirit? When played too pointedly, as it is here, the trope comes off as more than a little condescending, a narrative leftover of post-colonialist guilt. But I don't think that's director Joshua Goldin's intent. He really does find simple, unadulterated joy in Khadi shaking her hips in a sensuous Senegalese dance or fixing Ben a meal of Wolof soul food. The relationship that develops between the two is never entirely convincing, but you do get an insuppressible satisfaction in seeing Ben finally crack a smile, the structural integrity of his self-imposed fortress of solitude compromised at last. Broderick is nicely cast here—his baby face covered in a five o'clock shadow of complete social indifference—and he manages to find that balance of being just flawed enough as a character to need redemption, but not so unlikable as not to deserve it. His fellow cast members do what they can—Sanaa Lathan alternately glows and glowers, and Michael K. Williams plays Ibou as both wise and na๏ve—but the affected accents and the clumsiness of the dialogue certainly don't work in anyone's favor. The film falters under stereotypes and a message that's a little too obvious, but it's hard to be too cynical about Wonderful World.