【爱梁者说】《赤壁》英文影评贴

Film is pitched more at an older demographic than traditional Asian youth auds, and the July 10 release (in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) faces heavy competition from other summer titles after its first frame. But robust initial returns point to the two-parter putting black ink on most investors' ledgers - apart, maybe, from Japanese investor Avex, who bankrolled more than half the budget. Non-Asian returns look to be much smaller, especially as in the West the whole 4 1/2-hour movie will be available only in a single, 2 1/2-hour version that could end up losing much of the character detail that motors the production.
Detailing an incident familiar to auds throughout Asia, the by Woo and three other writers mixes elements from history (as recorded in a third-century chronicle by Chen Shou), the freely fictionalized classic "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" by 14th-century scribe Luo Guanzhong and their own filmic imagination into a dramatic stew that has engendered beaucoup debate among Asian specialists and auds who already have their own ideas about the characters from multiple comicbook treatments, TV drama series and school textbooks. However, given that these often contradict each other - even down to details of who were the good and bad guys -- pic always faced an uphill battle pleasing everyone.
But the picture indisputably works on its own terms. Though this first part is a long warm-up to the part two naval battle on the Yangtze River that saw the forces of the North rebuffed by those of the South, it contains more than enough action and drama to justify its length, as well as a cliffhanger ending that leaves auds hungry for more.
Yarn opens in summer AD 208, with prime minister-cum-general Cao Cao (powerful mainland Chinese vet Zhang Fengyi) asking permission from Han dynasty Emperor Xian (Wang Ning) to lead an expedition south to take on "rebellious" warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Taiwan thesp Chang Chen). Jittery mood in the imperial court sets the stage for the political machinations that marble the whole movie -- and forecasts the period of turmoil, known as the Three Kingdoms, that followed the imminent collapse of the 400-year-old Han dynasty.
Socko 20-minute action sequence, as Cao Cao's massive army sweeps south and meets Liu's forces in the Battle of Changban, establishes the gritty, chaotic tone of the movie's land warfare. Cool, almost grungy color processing, and action that's exaggerated but not manga-like, are underpinned by ace art director Tim Yip's realistic costumes and design. There's no clear sense of geography in the skirmishes, but maybe that's the point.
As Liu & Co. lick their wounds after their retreat, Liu's canny strategist, Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) proposes an alliance between him and Sun Quan vs. Cao Cao's seemingly unstoppable forces. Pic's second act broadens here, establishing the nervous, indecisive character of Sun Quan, his tomboyish sister, Sun Shangxiang (lively mainland babe Vicki Zhao) -- and last but not least, Sun Quan's commander, Zhou Yu (Hong Kong heartthrob Tony Leung Chiu-wai).


Top Critic评论，来自《娱乐周刊》，打分还不错。
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20320747,00.html
评论者：Lisa Schwarzbaum
出处：Entertainment Weekly
评价：B＋
Red Cliff (2009)
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum | Nov 18, 2009 Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum is a film critic for EW
Limited Release: Nov 20, 2009; Rated: R; Length: 148 Minutes; Genres: Historical, War; With: Chiling Lin and Tony Leung
Flying arrows rain down like deadly needles. Soldiers wield their shields in formations worthy of a Busby Berkeley musical. A beautiful woman pours tea with intoxicating precision. There's plenty of vivid action to fill two and a half hours in John Woo's Chinese historical war epic Red Cliff, a rewarding change of terrain and era for the inventive Hong Kong director. The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.
B+

Top Critic评论，介绍了一下背景。故事被类比为圣经中的“大卫与歌利亚”（请自行baidu）。这位评论者非常有趣，痛贬为了西方市场而裁剪新版本的行为，将浓缩版称为“Red Cliff for Dummies”（傻瓜版赤壁，这一词汇来源于曾经风行并且仍在风行的傻瓜丛书系列－－如傻瓜Photoshop、傻瓜French等等－－用最简单的语言来解释复杂的话题，使得即使傻瓜也能明白）
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-11-17/film/john-woo-s-killer-instincts-return-for-red-cliff-i/
评论者：Scott Foundas
出处：Village Voice （村声）
评价：好评
小梁部分
“And then there is Woo's Hard Boiled co-star, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, one of the last of the world's great movie stars, here at his most balletic as Sun Quan's magisterial viceroy, Zhou Yu. ”
“此外还有吴宇森旧作《辣手神探》中的搭档－－梁朝伟－－此时代中世界最优秀的电影明星之一，他在其中扮演了既具威严又能优雅舞剑的大都督周瑜。”
John Woo's Killer Instincts Return for Red Cliff
(Abridged for American consumption)
By Scott Foundas
Tuesday, November 17th 2009 at 3:24pm
Magnet Releasing
Ancient Chinese battle
Details:
Red Cliff
Directed by John Woo
Opens November 20
John Woo spent a decade navigating the big-studio minefield—longer than most foreign auteurs last in Hollywood before throwing in the towel. Beginning in earnest with an above-average Jean-Claude Van Damme programmer (Hard Target), Woo then produced one decent facsimile of his hyperkinetic Hong Kong neo-noirs (Face/Off), rose to the gilded heights of a Tom Cruise tentpole picture (Mission: Impossible II), and finally bottomed out in 2003 with the fittingly titled Philip K. Dick adaptation Paycheck. The John Woo who made that movie seemed spiritually broken and creatively spent—a shadow of the action maestro whose innovative Sam Peckinpah/Jean-Pierre Melville mash-ups, The Killer and Hard Boiled, had made an icon out of Chow Yun-Fat and been enshrined by a generation of burgeoning film students.
Woo returned to China—the Mainland—to make his latest film, but scale back he didn't. Conceived as a two-film epic with a combined running time of nearly five hours (reduced to a single two-and-a-half-hour version for extra-Asian consumption), Woo's Red Cliff is the most expensive movie ever produced in the country, and also the biggest—a third-century battle royale, with phalanxes of horsemen and armadas of battleships stretching as far as the eye can see (and, thanks to the CGI paintbox, even farther). The source material is an 800,000-word historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written in the 14th century and as deeply embedded in Chinese folklore as Shakespeare's characters are in the West—rooted in fact, but transfigured over time into something more mythic. And although Woo also turned to the more historically accurate text Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms for inspiration, watching Red Cliff feels like being in the presence of gods who have momentarily deigned to walk upon the earth.


The story is pure David and Goliath: Weakened by corruption and civil war, the Han Dynasty has fallen under the sway of a Machiavellian prime minister, Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), who persuades the ineffectual emperor to wage war against a pair of "insurgent" warlords, Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Crouching Tiger star Chang Chen). Prodded by Liu Bei's dandyish military strategist Zhuge Liang (a delightful Takeshi Kaneshiro), and despite a healthy mutual distrust, the two warlords form a tentative alliance and, outnumbered by several hundred thousand, prepare to face off against Cao Cao's imperial army at the titular Yangtze River locale. If you don't know what happens, far be it from me to spoil it for you.
In either version, Red Cliff (which surpassed Titanic to become China's all-time box-office champ) is a grand, old-fashioned spectacle, with massive armies wreaking massive havoc in strategically ingenious ways. Early on, Sun Quan's tomboy sister (Zhao Wei) and her coterie of fiercely armed handmaidens lead Cao Cao's forces into a raging sandstorm, where they are in turn blinded by the reflective shields of the rebel soldiers. Later, Cao Cao retaliates by turning the corpses of his typhoid-infected ranks into primitive dirty bombs. And, in one of the most storied episodes of Three Kingdoms lore (and one of the film's most dazzling set pieces), the weather-sensitive Zhuge uses the onset of a thick fog to trick the enemy into gifting his ammo-deprived forces with thousands of recyclable arrows.
Shorn by nearly half, the "international" version of Woo's film—or, as I like to call it, Red Cliff for Dummies—may not be a murdered masterpiece on the order of Heaven's Gate and Once Upon a Time in America, but it's unquestionably a lesser thing: saddled with an introductory voiceover; plastered with supertitles identifying individual characters (which actually have the effect of making the name game more confusing); and, most egregiously, stripped of most of the quieter, character-building scenes that are precisely what are needed to give non-Asian audiences a sense of why these events and their participants have loomed so long and so large in the collective Chinese consciousness. At the risk of advocating movie piracy, I strongly encourage you to purchase the widely available Chinese DVD.
Still, all is not lost: In both cuts, Red Cliff exudes a physical grandiosity that few movies of the past 20 years have attempted—no matter that Woo, even at his best, is still more at ease with down-and-dirty action than epic pageantry. And then there is Woo's Hard Boiled co-star, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, one of the last of the world's great movie stars, here at his most balletic as Sun Quan's magisterial viceroy, Zhou Yu. Perhaps it's too coy to suggest that, in the giant-slaying resolve of these underdog warriors, Woo saw something of an analog for his own recent career. In any event, he lives to fight another day.

In this case, though, the good guys — a pair of small southern China kingdoms whose forces are led by the viceroy Zhou Yu (Mr. Leung) — number in the tens of thousands, and the bad guys, the Han army led by the megalomaniacal general Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), in the hundreds of thousands.
Mr. Woo, who can make romantic poetry out of a battle among 20 men in the confines of a teahouse, seems defeated, or at least defused, by this increase in scale. The battle scenes, which involve vast fleets of mostly computer-generated ships, sky-darkening volleys of arrows and the heroic, self-sacrificial storming of ramparts, are no better or worse than what any number of competent Hollywood (or Chinese) directors can turn out. And it’s not that this sort of large-scale action can’t be infused with feeling — Akira Kurosawa proved that it can in “Kagemusha” and “Ran” not long before Mr. Woo was making his breakout films.
Watching “Red Cliff,” you realize that Mr. Woo was always best as a miniaturist: the memorable action sequences in movies like “Bullet in the Head” and “Hard Boiled” are a series of tiny, split-second set pieces, a slide down a banister here, a glance between buddies there. “Red Cliff” has a few similar moments, in the byplay between Mr. Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro as a military strategist and in some of Mr. Leung’s (or his stunt double’s) battlefield acrobatics. But they’re just grace notes amid the grinding mechanics of deploying the troops and moving the story along. (That might not be the case in the five-hour version of the film released in Asia.)
One thing that hasn’t changed since 1992 is the reassuring presence of Mr. Leung, one of the world’s last true matinee idols. His combination of Zen-like calm and wild expressiveness, centered in his pixieish eyes, serves equally well whether he is playing the tortured aesthete for Wong Kar-wai, the murderous bureaucrat for Ang Lee or the action hero for Mr. Woo. Not even body armor and an ancient helmet, let alone a cast of thousands, can contain him.
“Red Cliff” is rated R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for death by arrow, lance and sword.
RED CLIFF
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed by John Woo; written by Mr. Woo, Khan Chan, Kuo Cheng and Sheng Heyu; directors of photography, Lu Yue and Zhang Li; edited by Angie Lam, Yang Hongu and Robert A. Ferretti; music by Taro Iwashiro; production designer, Tim Yip; produced by Terence Chang and Mr. Woo; released by Magnet Releasing. At the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston Street, between First and Second Avenues, East Village. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 28 minutes.
WITH: Tony Leung (Zhou Yu), Takeshi Kaneshiro (Kong Ming), Zhang Fengyi (Cao Cao), Chang Chen (Sun Quan), Zhao Wei (Sun Shangxiang), Hu Jun (Zhao Yun, a k a Zhao Zilong), Shidou Nakamura (Gan Xing) and Chiling Lin (Xiao Qiao).

Top Critic
其中特别提到了周瑜和孔明合奏一段，对吴宇森不仅仅是展示一下姿态，而是真的以琴声来发展剧情加以赞美。总结之“赤壁是一位传奇导演的视觉交响曲。”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545613637647716.html
评论者：Joe Morgenstern
出处：Wall Street Journal （华尔街日报）
评价：好评
'Red Cliff'
Set in the twilight of the Han Dynasty, "Red Cliff" lends new meaning to the notion of Baby on Board when a fearless swordsman plunges into battle with an infant strapped on his back. This action spectacular, directed by the masterful John Woo, also lends new meaning to the notion of epic. As the most expensive movie ever made in China, it's certainly immense and, even in the truncated (and sometimes slightly frayed) form shown here, quite long—2½ hours, rather than five hours for the two-part version shown to Asian audiences. Yet the immensity encompasses such variety, subtlety and intimacy that you may find yourself yearning for more.
In one example of many, two distinguished warriors meet to decide whether to join forces against the tyrannical emperor. Once they discover that they're both musicians, they signify their decision by playing a duet on traditional stringed instruments. In a lesser film the duet might be no more than a pretty gesture. In this one it's a daringly extended interlude with as much dramatic development, in its way, as Mr. Woo has devoted to some of the intricately conceived battles, or to an astonishing sequence in which a homing pigeon leads the camera on an eye-popping survey of the dictator's troops. "Red Cliff" is a legendary filmmaker's visual symphony.

搬来给虎迷们练练英语阅读==

有翻译中文就更完美了~~

我去。。。。大段大段的英语。。。。。脑袋痛。。。。。
【还在纠结4级怎么过的某御囧囧有神ING。。。
赤壁在外国评价还不错啊看来~~~~