杜然的blog——i'm blinded by blackness » 日志 » 纽约时报和村声杂志关于《黄金甲》的影评
纽约时报和村声杂志关于《黄金甲》的影评
杜然 发表于 2006-12-24 20:44:06
《黄金甲》21日（美国时间）开始在纽约上画，22日开始在洛杉矶、旧金山、西雅图、波士顿、芝加哥、温哥华等十四个美加城市上画，1月22日开始全美上画。
《纽约时报》和《村声》对这部电影的评价都不算太高，基本观点还是场面华丽，故事贫乏。比较逗的是，《纽约时报》的评论在说明电影为什么被定为R级（17岁以下需要父母或者其他成年人的陪同方得观看）时，是这么说的：“电影里面有飞来飞去的刺客、血腥的战争场面以及一个爱上自己儿子的妈。”另外，《纽约时报》的影评人对于电影中的“汤碗胸”也是印象深刻。
《纽约时报》的影评
Dynastic Dysfunction and Loathing
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
With each new martial-arts drama, the Chinese director Zhang Yimou widens the distance between his adult self and his dismal youth during the Cultural Revolution, pushing himself to ever greater heights of ambition and experimentation. Energy and excess — of color, symbolism and emotion — are his antidotes to memories of uniformity and repression. His extravagant stories celebrate unfettered artistic expression as if it were a gift his Western counterparts have long taken for granted.
In “Curse of the Golden Flower” Mr. Zhang achieves a kind of operatic delirium, opening the floodgates of image and melodrama until the line between tragedy and black comedy is all but erased. Set in A.D. 928 during the late Tang dynasty, the movie wallows in the rotting marriage of a cruel emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) and his secretive wife (Gong Li), a union so corrupt that each is plotting the other’s annihilation.
The emperor, with the help of the royal physician and a rare fungus, is slowly destroying his wife’s sanity. Because palace protocol forbids her to refuse the “medicine,” the empress retaliates by planning a bloody coup during the coming chrysanthemum festival, persuading the most biddable of her three sons (Jay Chou) to join her revolt.
By this point most directors would have their hands full, but Mr. Zhang piles on the intrigue, adding a forbidden love affair, a vengeful first wife and two varieties of incest. His actors respond in kind, straining their facial muscles with silent-movie enthusiasm and doing everything but shooting flames from their eye sockets.
Matching them is a production design (by Huo Tingxiao, channeling Liberace) that brilliantly conveys the oppressiveness of opulence. As the empress moves through the palace’s endless corridors, her upper body at once compressed by and overflowing from her bodice and her face covered in poisonous beads of sweat, we can almost feel the weight of her brocade gown and pendulous hair ornaments. Not the most useful ensemble for a wife intent on fleeing her husband.
Bathed in thick, primary colors and Shigeru Umebayashi’s thumping score, “Curse of the Golden Flower” is more lurid and less romantic than Mr. Zhang’s previous martial-arts drama, the swooning “House of Flying Daggers,” but its path to destruction is paved with visual gold. The climactic coup, staged with competing armies advancing in waves of black and gold across a field of millions of bright yellow blossoms, may be computer enhanced but is nonetheless breathtaking. Parked in the clouds, the camera gazes down on a forest of lances bisected by the massive palace walls; the screech of metal on metal sears the ears.
But the movie’s most thrilling sequences belong to the silent, black-robed, assassins who attack by swinging from wires like malevolent spiders. In formation no less.
As the emperor, and the film’s seething fulcrum, Mr. Chow, the action star, delivers a performance of amazing intensity, focusing his considerable energy inward to suggest a volcano primed to erupt. His pairing with the incomparable Ms. Gong is no less than inspired. Locked in a tug of war for control of their offspring, the couple provide the film with a core of marital toxicity that’s almost nonverbal and deliciously unstable. Whenever the empress is not openly making cow eyes at her weak-willed stepson (Liu Ye), she’s sneaking more venom into a glance at her husband than he is sneaking into her bloodstream.
Though embroiled in familiar themes of fraternal rivalry and Freudian jealousy, Mr. Zhang is aware of the ridiculousness of man’s passions in the face of his impermanence. One of the film’s loveliest and most allusive sequences focuses on the royal cleanup crew as it restores order after the bloodbath, rinsing away gore and burying stains beneath a fresh carpet of golden chrysanthemums. In the wake of this shadow army, the battle is erased and the dead are swept aside like so many dust bunnies.
Since his debut in 1987 with “Red Sorghum” Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that’s more fun. With “Curse of the Golden Flower” he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.
《村声》杂志的影评
Blade of Flying Sparks
Visually stunning (as always), Zhang's latest is better seen and not heard
by Rob Nelson
Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter. Zhang's interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further than the kick he gets out of constructing ostentatious palaces and then watching from behind the lens as they crumble to the ground—he's a movie director, in other words. As much as Marie Antoinette, Curse of the Golden Flower, set in the later Tang dynasty, circa A.D. 928, pits its cloistered melodrama against the riffraff that threatens to penetrate the royal chambers. It's a battle of genres, and after 90 minutes of mostly talk, talk, talk, ostensibly there to placate bourgeois newcomers to Asian action, the wuxia wins.
The Will Durant quote with which Mel Gibson commences Apocalypto could apply here too: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." First seen getting dolled up and draped in gold from head to toe while warriors approach her fortress on horseback, Gong Li's medicine-swilling Empress is regrettably anemic—ditto her dialogue. Blame the Emperor (a bored-looking Chow Yun-Fat), who has been peppering his lady's herbal remedies with poisonous black mushrooms. Meanwhile each of three young princes (Jay Chou, Liu Ye, Qin Junjie) is scheming for power or love, the incestuous machinations failing to excite as much as the sight of black-suited, scythe-twirling assassins swinging on ropes toward the palace like Spider-Man on his web. Zhang's impressively acrobatic battle scene culminates in a torrential CGI spear storm that sets out to blockbust and does, even by, say, Two Towers standards.
Until then, the film's seemingly endless revelations of double- and triple-crosses would play like bad mid-'60s Hollywood epic wanking were it not for Zhang's mise-en-scéne, including long blue, green, and orange corridors that suggest a kaleidoscope in a funhouse. (Production designer Huo Tingxiao deserves every award.) Color combos here border on the psychedelic, but alas, they don't inspire Zhang to get trippy with the storytelling. This is the director's flimsiest material to date, and while you'd hope for some sexual frisson in his first film with Gong since Shanghai Triad in '95, her scenes with Chow deliver nothing but more evidence that Zhang is mainly in it for the carpentry and the computer FX. Flying daggers return in full force, but the neato trick this time is the slo-mo spray of sparks from a sword as it scrapes against armor or another blade. A great leap forward in film technology or another example of civilization destroying itself from within?
《纽约时报》和《村声》对这部电影的评价都不算太高，基本观点还是场面华丽，故事贫乏。比较逗的是，《纽约时报》的评论在说明电影为什么被定为R级（17岁以下需要父母或者其他成年人的陪同方得观看）时，是这么说的：“电影里面有飞来飞去的刺客、血腥的战争场面以及一个爱上自己儿子的妈。”另外，《纽约时报》的影评人对于电影中的“汤碗胸”也是印象深刻。
《纽约时报》的影评
Dynastic Dysfunction and Loathing
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
With each new martial-arts drama, the Chinese director Zhang Yimou widens the distance between his adult self and his dismal youth during the Cultural Revolution, pushing himself to ever greater heights of ambition and experimentation. Energy and excess — of color, symbolism and emotion — are his antidotes to memories of uniformity and repression. His extravagant stories celebrate unfettered artistic expression as if it were a gift his Western counterparts have long taken for granted.
In “Curse of the Golden Flower” Mr. Zhang achieves a kind of operatic delirium, opening the floodgates of image and melodrama until the line between tragedy and black comedy is all but erased. Set in A.D. 928 during the late Tang dynasty, the movie wallows in the rotting marriage of a cruel emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) and his secretive wife (Gong Li), a union so corrupt that each is plotting the other’s annihilation.
The emperor, with the help of the royal physician and a rare fungus, is slowly destroying his wife’s sanity. Because palace protocol forbids her to refuse the “medicine,” the empress retaliates by planning a bloody coup during the coming chrysanthemum festival, persuading the most biddable of her three sons (Jay Chou) to join her revolt.
By this point most directors would have their hands full, but Mr. Zhang piles on the intrigue, adding a forbidden love affair, a vengeful first wife and two varieties of incest. His actors respond in kind, straining their facial muscles with silent-movie enthusiasm and doing everything but shooting flames from their eye sockets.
Matching them is a production design (by Huo Tingxiao, channeling Liberace) that brilliantly conveys the oppressiveness of opulence. As the empress moves through the palace’s endless corridors, her upper body at once compressed by and overflowing from her bodice and her face covered in poisonous beads of sweat, we can almost feel the weight of her brocade gown and pendulous hair ornaments. Not the most useful ensemble for a wife intent on fleeing her husband.
Bathed in thick, primary colors and Shigeru Umebayashi’s thumping score, “Curse of the Golden Flower” is more lurid and less romantic than Mr. Zhang’s previous martial-arts drama, the swooning “House of Flying Daggers,” but its path to destruction is paved with visual gold. The climactic coup, staged with competing armies advancing in waves of black and gold across a field of millions of bright yellow blossoms, may be computer enhanced but is nonetheless breathtaking. Parked in the clouds, the camera gazes down on a forest of lances bisected by the massive palace walls; the screech of metal on metal sears the ears.
But the movie’s most thrilling sequences belong to the silent, black-robed, assassins who attack by swinging from wires like malevolent spiders. In formation no less.
As the emperor, and the film’s seething fulcrum, Mr. Chow, the action star, delivers a performance of amazing intensity, focusing his considerable energy inward to suggest a volcano primed to erupt. His pairing with the incomparable Ms. Gong is no less than inspired. Locked in a tug of war for control of their offspring, the couple provide the film with a core of marital toxicity that’s almost nonverbal and deliciously unstable. Whenever the empress is not openly making cow eyes at her weak-willed stepson (Liu Ye), she’s sneaking more venom into a glance at her husband than he is sneaking into her bloodstream.
Though embroiled in familiar themes of fraternal rivalry and Freudian jealousy, Mr. Zhang is aware of the ridiculousness of man’s passions in the face of his impermanence. One of the film’s loveliest and most allusive sequences focuses on the royal cleanup crew as it restores order after the bloodbath, rinsing away gore and burying stains beneath a fresh carpet of golden chrysanthemums. In the wake of this shadow army, the battle is erased and the dead are swept aside like so many dust bunnies.
Since his debut in 1987 with “Red Sorghum” Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that’s more fun. With “Curse of the Golden Flower” he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.
《村声》杂志的影评
Blade of Flying Sparks
Visually stunning (as always), Zhang's latest is better seen and not heard
by Rob Nelson
Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter. Zhang's interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further than the kick he gets out of constructing ostentatious palaces and then watching from behind the lens as they crumble to the ground—he's a movie director, in other words. As much as Marie Antoinette, Curse of the Golden Flower, set in the later Tang dynasty, circa A.D. 928, pits its cloistered melodrama against the riffraff that threatens to penetrate the royal chambers. It's a battle of genres, and after 90 minutes of mostly talk, talk, talk, ostensibly there to placate bourgeois newcomers to Asian action, the wuxia wins.
The Will Durant quote with which Mel Gibson commences Apocalypto could apply here too: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." First seen getting dolled up and draped in gold from head to toe while warriors approach her fortress on horseback, Gong Li's medicine-swilling Empress is regrettably anemic—ditto her dialogue. Blame the Emperor (a bored-looking Chow Yun-Fat), who has been peppering his lady's herbal remedies with poisonous black mushrooms. Meanwhile each of three young princes (Jay Chou, Liu Ye, Qin Junjie) is scheming for power or love, the incestuous machinations failing to excite as much as the sight of black-suited, scythe-twirling assassins swinging on ropes toward the palace like Spider-Man on his web. Zhang's impressively acrobatic battle scene culminates in a torrential CGI spear storm that sets out to blockbust and does, even by, say, Two Towers standards.
Until then, the film's seemingly endless revelations of double- and triple-crosses would play like bad mid-'60s Hollywood epic wanking were it not for Zhang's mise-en-scéne, including long blue, green, and orange corridors that suggest a kaleidoscope in a funhouse. (Production designer Huo Tingxiao deserves every award.) Color combos here border on the psychedelic, but alas, they don't inspire Zhang to get trippy with the storytelling. This is the director's flimsiest material to date, and while you'd hope for some sexual frisson in his first film with Gong since Shanghai Triad in '95, her scenes with Chow deliver nothing but more evidence that Zhang is mainly in it for the carpentry and the computer FX. Flying daggers return in full force, but the neato trick this time is the slo-mo spray of sparks from a sword as it scrapes against armor or another blade. A great leap forward in film technology or another example of civilization destroying itself from within?
收藏:
QQ书签
del.icio.us
订阅:
Google
抓虾
