This Grand Guignol comes from the austere People's Republic of China? Jende ma?
I sat through about half of this frenzied mess before tuning out. It isn't that I found it too gross. The living frogs being chopped up weren't so bad. I've dissected frogs in class. The chickens getting their heads wrenched off weren't that offensive because I saw lots of chickens get it when I was a child. I helped castrate pigs in Pago Pago. It's that it was badly made, as if by an amateur on crack.
It's loud, fast, full of lurid color, and in the first half hour the director gives us -- let me think -- well, it begins with adultery, goes on to torture and mass murder, spitting a ginder into a pot of tea, doing to a piece of pork what Alexander Portnoy did to a piece of liver in "Portnoy's Complaint," rape, decapitation, ejaculating into a body in its death throes, serving sweet and sour pork to a diner who'd ordered steamed pork, and wearing white after Labor Day.
Violence can be done poetically. It has more impact when some care is taken with it. It was shocking when Roman Polanski's midget put a slice through Jack Nicholson's naris in "Chinatown." This violence is boring because the film is nothing but violence. Can anyone sit through a pornographic feature film without being bored? No. No one can. This movie runs into the same problem with satiation. Enough doesn't necessarily mean that the bloodshed and degradation must be forced on you as if you were a Strassbourg goose.
Let's face facts. Anyone who finds violence, sex, blood, and screaming insults attractive, has never been married.
Well, let me add a plus. Most of the Chinese girls are very attractive, dressed or disheveled. Gong Li should have shown so much flesh.
I sat through about half of this frenzied mess before tuning out. It isn't that I found it too gross. The living frogs being chopped up weren't so bad. I've dissected frogs in class. The chickens getting their heads wrenched off weren't that offensive because I saw lots of chickens get it when I was a child. I helped castrate pigs in Pago Pago. It's that it was badly made, as if by an amateur on crack.
It's loud, fast, full of lurid color, and in the first half hour the director gives us -- let me think -- well, it begins with adultery, goes on to torture and mass murder, spitting a ginder into a pot of tea, doing to a piece of pork what Alexander Portnoy did to a piece of liver in "Portnoy's Complaint," rape, decapitation, ejaculating into a body in its death throes, serving sweet and sour pork to a diner who'd ordered steamed pork, and wearing white after Labor Day.
Violence can be done poetically. It has more impact when some care is taken with it. It was shocking when Roman Polanski's midget put a slice through Jack Nicholson's naris in "Chinatown." This violence is boring because the film is nothing but violence. Can anyone sit through a pornographic feature film without being bored? No. No one can. This movie runs into the same problem with satiation. Enough doesn't necessarily mean that the bloodshed and degradation must be forced on you as if you were a Strassbourg goose.
Let's face facts. Anyone who finds violence, sex, blood, and screaming insults attractive, has never been married.
Well, let me add a plus. Most of the Chinese girls are very attractive, dressed or disheveled. Gong Li should have shown so much flesh.