Reviews

Any Zhang Yimou movie is great, and this one is particularly good. It's not "Raise The Red Lantern," mind, but very good, and obviously a lot of the movie was done as a sort of precursor to Raise The Red Lantern, which also features the awesomely sexy Gong Li.

The basic plot line involves a miserly old man, Jinshan, and his adopted nephew, Tianqing. Jinshan purchases a new wife, Ju Dou, played, of course, by Gong Li. It turns out he's a brutal sadist who makes up for his impotence by torturing his wives. Ju Dou turns to Tianqing, with whom she conceives a son. The movie is basically about Tianqing and Ju Dou trying to find happiness, in spite of a son who won't recognize Tianqing as his father (and later kills him), a society that won't let them marry or see each other, and a husband who, before he dies (also killed, accidentally, by the son), is just as cruel as ever, physically and psychologically. It's a very intriguing movie, with characters who, although complex, are driven by a very basic goal all of us share.

It seems like some of the other reviewers didn't actually watch the movie, though; the son, Tianbai, is not evil. It's just that he feels strong loyalty to Jinshan, the husband of his mother and the man whose house he is carrying on. He fetches no plot to kill anyone, although he does.

This is, all the way through, excellent Zhang Yimou and excellent Gong Li. A must-watch for anyone who's a fan of either.

Let me start by saying that this movie is quite good. You will not have squandered the hour and a half it takes to watch it. However, a few things bothered me: 1. Perhaps a quibble, but I *hated* the music. The endless loop of what sounded like variations on Bolero for the first half of the movie -- augh! In general, I found it very choreographed; at times, it was more like watching a ballet. It was very overwrought and distracting.

2. The acting. Horribly overdone on the part of Toshiro Mifune; at times he seemed to have taken classes at the Daffy Duck School of Acting. He was not the only one overacting, either, just the most prominent.

3. The ending. We get through this very subtle and ambiguous movie, where, even at the end, we have no clue which of the four versions (or which mix of the four versions!) of the story actually happened, and Kurosawa absolutely clubs us silly with the theme of redemption. I wanted the movie to end when the woodcutter said, "On days like this, we have cause to be suspicious" (or something similar). I don't know what possessed Kurosawa to bugger the ending like he did, but, in my version, it'd be about two minutes shorter.

That said, there's a lot to like about the movie. I love how Kurosawa leads you into a false smugness at the end when it's revealed that the woodcutter stole the dagger. "Ah hah!" I thought; "Clearly, the dead samurai was telling the truth!" I was impressed with my sleuthing, my quick recall of the medium relating that he felt someone removing the dagger. Then it occurred to me that, in every story, the dagger was left behind. Probably my favorite part was when I had to go back and watch the end of all of the stories to ensure that the dagger was still there, either in the samurai or in the ground.

Good movie, but in desperate need of a dose of subtlety.