movies: curse of the golden flowers

The one downside (or upside, depending on your perspective I guess) in seeing any kind of Chinese quasi-historical drama, be it Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers or tonight's movie offering, Curse of the Golden Flower, is that you just know that by the end of the movie you'll usually be visually satiated, but almost everybody on screen will be dead and the last three minutes or so won't necessarily make a hell of a lot of sense.

Fortunately, Curse didn't disappoint on any of those fronts.

I need to briefly make one special mention before I go any further though... BOOBIES! You don't often see a plethora of heaving, constrained cleavage in a CQHD... that's usually the exclusive domain of the European QHD... but this movie had it in spades! From the opening scene of dozens and dozens and dozens of handmaidens preparing for their day, cleavage ahoy left, right and center... all the way through to Gong Li's imperial boobage, there was a lot of it going around.

Fortunately, for those of us who are much less interested in boobage, there were also fabulous outfits and set design to die for.

And what a hell of a set it was... I kept thinking they had maybe stumbled into a Chinese version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory... so many candy-bright colours... beautiful (what I wouldn't give for a set of those candy-bright columns), but almost a little much in some spots. Actually a whole lot of the movie seemed to come under the heading of "a little much"... the acting was a little melodramatic (although, to be fair, it was a melodramatic plot), some of the dialogue was a little overblown (well, the subtitles anyway, since this is a "reading" movie), the excessive use of gold in the costuming, the battle scenes at the end... it just teetered on that edge of "too much".

I will add a "warning" though, this isn't a "Wire-Fu" movie like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of the post... yeah, there is some "Fu" in there, but it's not quite as fantastical as say Crouching Tiger.

I also have to say this about Zhang Yimou, he knows about colour... Hero was a story told in colours, but in this movie Zhang just took all his coloured pencils out of the box and spilled them all over everywhere. The gold versus silver battle scene at the end though definitely shows off his eye for colours. Not to mention all the red and gold all over everywhere.

All in all though, it was slightly better than I was expecting.

yani's rating: 3 heaving bosoms out of 5