The first thing in the Curse of the Golden Flower you will noticed is the colors of this over-cooked film. This movie has the color palette of an exploding paint factory and overly loud like a pink fluorescent shirt.
This movie is about a Chinese Imperial family a thousand years ago that wants to play like a Shakespearean tragedy but ends up confused the heck out me. You have the emperor, his younger new empress, his three sons. Mixed them all up and add a dash of poison for a good measure and you got a whole lot of blood letting in the end. I can not make head or tail of this movie not until after I have read the plot summary on IMDb. It seems that the emperor is having second thoughts about his new younger wife and decided to pull a Henry VIII without the whole beheading thing. His new younger wife by-the-way got the hots for her oldest step-son, while her second oldest sons happens to be her son with the emperor. I have no idea who the third sons belongs to. Anyway, the empress discovered the poison plot and decided it's time for a management change at the top, while her oldest step-son is chasing the daughter of the imperial family's doctor, which the emperor wants to have the good doctor and his family doing the dirt naps. Things really got interesting when the youngest son decided to jump into the foray.
The color palette of this movie is not the only thing I have problem with this film. The costumes in the movie seems like somebody mixed up the woman's Chinese imperial costumes with the woman's Europen royal costumes of the 15th century. I have never seen so much cleavages in a Chinese film! Another thing you get to see is lots and lots of hallway tracking shots, long hallway tracking shots with color splashed everywhere by a person with a bad case of ADD. One more thing, the film-maker likes to show lots and lots of people in his movie. You have scenes of thousands of imperial soldiers running around for which you don't know where and how they came from. During the movie I have no ideas of who are the bad guys or who are the good guys, and frankly, I don't care, because in this film it's hard to root for the emperor, empress, or the princes or anybody. This is the kind of film that reaches across the border of China and over the vast Pacific Ocean and grabs you and makes you say, "holy crap, this is an awful movie!".
This movie is about a Chinese Imperial family a thousand years ago that wants to play like a Shakespearean tragedy but ends up confused the heck out me. You have the emperor, his younger new empress, his three sons. Mixed them all up and add a dash of poison for a good measure and you got a whole lot of blood letting in the end. I can not make head or tail of this movie not until after I have read the plot summary on IMDb. It seems that the emperor is having second thoughts about his new younger wife and decided to pull a Henry VIII without the whole beheading thing. His new younger wife by-the-way got the hots for her oldest step-son, while her second oldest sons happens to be her son with the emperor. I have no idea who the third sons belongs to. Anyway, the empress discovered the poison plot and decided it's time for a management change at the top, while her oldest step-son is chasing the daughter of the imperial family's doctor, which the emperor wants to have the good doctor and his family doing the dirt naps. Things really got interesting when the youngest son decided to jump into the foray.
The color palette of this movie is not the only thing I have problem with this film. The costumes in the movie seems like somebody mixed up the woman's Chinese imperial costumes with the woman's Europen royal costumes of the 15th century. I have never seen so much cleavages in a Chinese film! Another thing you get to see is lots and lots of hallway tracking shots, long hallway tracking shots with color splashed everywhere by a person with a bad case of ADD. One more thing, the film-maker likes to show lots and lots of people in his movie. You have scenes of thousands of imperial soldiers running around for which you don't know where and how they came from. During the movie I have no ideas of who are the bad guys or who are the good guys, and frankly, I don't care, because in this film it's hard to root for the emperor, empress, or the princes or anybody. This is the kind of film that reaches across the border of China and over the vast Pacific Ocean and grabs you and makes you say, "holy crap, this is an awful movie!".