Post by Li Tun-ye on Jun 14, 2008 13:39:05 GMT -5
You know me, I’m a first generation Filipino American who desperately clings to the hope of being labeled “Asian” thereby inheriting the cool stereotypes you round-eyes often associate with your Far East business partners while casting off the weight of shame that comes with everyone thinking you’re really Mexican. That being said, it was this aforementioned fantasy of being accepted by the cute Chinese girls on my campus that strung me along to a screening of “The Promise,” an artistic romance/fantasy/martial arts epic from our friends over east. I’ll admit that I was intrigued by the poster, its stunning visuals, artistic cinematography, and the incredibly cute Chinese girls dragging me to the theater. I walked in hoping for an intimate moment with a menagerie of Asian girls and instead found myself treated to one of the more epically preposterous movies I have seen in some time. I’m still not sure if it was an even trade.
“The Promise” is the work of Chen Kaige, famous director of such films as “Farewell My Concubine” and “The Emperor and the Assassin,” both of which I had scene and loved for both the masterful cinematography and gut-wrenchingly tearful storytelling. Chen does his best not to disappoint with “The Promise,” a fact made evident within the first ten minutes of epic exposition and the death of a little girl’s mother. Tearful? Yes, even an emotionally bankrupt factory of cynicism and hate such as me couldn’t help but shed a tear as the little girl ate a bit bread stolen from a dead soldier after robbing the corpses on a battlefield. Reminds me of when I was a rambunctious young scamp.
“The Promise” is a more fantastical work by Chen. While his previous dramas remained grounded in at least a teaspoon’s worth of logic and reality, “The Promise” introduces goddesses, ghosts, and an effeminate Duke bent on a twisted plot of revenge. Rather than the warring states era or the Tang Dynasty, Chen sets the stage in a mystical fantasy China where wire-fighting is all too commonplace, which when we consider that this is a Chinese film with martial arts is practically like saying that as an added bonus the movie comes in a box.
The story centers around a young girl named Qingcheng who apparently makes a living by robbing the numerous corpses strewn about the Chinese landscape. While pillaging the dead soldiers of a previous battle, she is caught by a rather bratty young boy who apparently suffers from Draco Malfoy Syndrome as he so proudly proclaims that the corpses were his father’s soldiers thus making him the rightful owner of their earthly possessions. She promises to be his slave (PROMISE #1) but only uses the moment of distraction to bash his brains in with his own helmet in a move that would even be beneath Bugs Bunny. She flees home clutching some bread only to artistically drop it into a lake. While she artistically weeps for the sinking foodstuff, a beautiful woman artistically ascends from within the artistically clear lake to introduce herself as the Goddess Manshen … and then tells the little girl that her mother just died. She then offers the girl a promise: In exchange for the greatest beauty that could win the hearts of any man, any man she truly loved would ultimately die. Turning a frown upside down, Qingcheng happily accepts the promise (PROMISE #2) and walks across the water into her future. May I conclude this section by saying THIS ALL HAPPENED IN THE FIRST 10 MINUTES.
We then flash forward many years to a great battlefield. The legendary general Guanming watches over his impressively dressed army while awaiting a slave trader. The general purchases the slaves to use against the invading forces as a distraction. It is here we meet Kunlun, a slave with the remarkable ability to run across ninety degree angles at a speed so blinding that you can’t help but laugh at the Looney Tunes nature of his running. After a battle that was about as one-sided as a game of Dynasty Warriors III if you’re playing Lu Bu and the opposing army is only equipped with butter knives and orange marmalade, Guanming hires Kunlun to be his personal slave and make use of his great speed. Apparently, Kunlun is supposed to be the “loveable idiot” as he cheerfully agrees to work for the man who not only holds him in bondage but also put him in harm’s way not five minutes ago. Or perhaps he just loves making friends a whole huggy bunch.
The Brokeback Mountain moment doesn’t last long. A messenger arrives to warn Guanming that the emperor is under attack by the dastardly Duke Wuhuan of the North. Guanming and Kunlun assume that they alone can reach the emperor in time, and as such they abandon the rest of his A-Team army to sprint like madmen toward the imperial palace (I take it back, Guanming doesn’t sprint. He has a horse. Kunlun however is screwed in the deal but shows a not-so-surprising ability to keep up with the horse and maintain cheerful conversation). On route to the capital the two are lost in the woods and decide to split up. Now, in the Chinese version the general meets with the manipulative goddess bitch Manshen who taunts him for sacrificing the slaves for the good of the nation. He replies by attempting to decapitate her, only to have her mock him some more before showing him an image of the emperor dying at his own hands. Denying such a thing being possible, he storms off from the goddess leaving her to chuckle like the ice bitch she is (This bit of intrigue must have seemed unnecessary to American viewers and was ultimately cut from the DVD in the famous “we don’t want our character to be three dimensional” maneuver.)
At any rate, the general is wounded by a cloaked assassin only to be saved by his loveable slave idiot Kunlun. The assassin flees leaving the general in no state to fight of Duke Wuhuan and his army (as if he was capable of single handedly defeating them in the first place without three-hundred slaves to absorb the initial impact). He instead sends Kunlun, dressing him in his armor to instill fear in the army. Kunlun then rides off to the capitol where the impressively effeminate Wuhuan threatens the emperor to hand over of all things his prized concubine … Qingcheng!
It seems in fifteen years time the little grave robber has grown into the incredibly attractive Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung (for whom my beloved guitar is named … don’t judge me). She displays not only an impressive beauty but the unprecedented power to cock-tease an entire army into aiming their weapons at the emperor. Even the effeminate villain is impressed as he momentarily changes scepters to a scepter with a golden hand giving the “thumbs up” pose ornately fashioned on the top. YES HE CARRIES A SCEPTER WITH A GOLDEN HAND ON IT! He also fights with fans while commenting on how his victims’ blood will ruin the fabric. Needless to say, he’s my hero. But I digress.
Kunlun arrives in time to see the furious emperor ready to take the life of Qingcheng for cock-teasing the army into attacking him. Seeing a woman in danger, Kunlun does the only logical thing that comes to mind: He throws his sword with flawless accuracy into the heart of the emperor from two-hundred yards away before embracing Qingcheng and riding off on a horse into the distance. The Duke gives chase with a loyal military unit whose only purpose is to form a human throne for him to sit on once the two have been cornered. Convinced that Kunlun is actually the general, Wuhuan demands that he hand over the girl and take his own life or have both of them killed (as he knows that general Guanming would never give his life for anyone much less a cock-tease). Shocking both Wuhuan and Qincheng, Kunlun agrees telling the concubine that she must live no matter what happens (this effectively wins her heart). He then leaps off of a cliff into a waterfall, surviving the fall as everyone knows that a movie waterfall is pretty much the equivalent of jumping into a ball pit at Chuck E Cheese.
Qingcheng is brought back to Wuhuan’s palace where her cock-tease abilities prove useless as Wuhuan clearly loves himself more than any woman. She’s entrapped in a giant bird cage and forced to wear a white cape made out of feathers (the ancient Chinese equivalent of a chicken costume, I suppose). Meanwhile, Guanming is accused of killing the emperor and is left for dead by his soldiers only to be saved by the goddess Manshen who gives him a second chance to clear his name, regain his dignity, and win the heart of Qingcheng (whom he’s NEVER MET BY THE WAY).
Anyway, I could go on about the plot, but it gets so confusing that even I had a hard time comprehending it and I’ve sat through enough Silent Hill games that I practically have a PhD in “What the Hell is Going On”. The cast of 6 pretty much has the crap developed out of them; Kunlun learns that he was once part of a race of nobles that lived in snow and could run faster than the wind, Guanming honestly takes to loving QingCheng, QingCheng blindly loves Guanming but fears that the curse of her promise will mean his demise, the cloaked assassin turns out to be a relatively nice guy, Wuhuan has been planning this act of revenge since the first scene (he was the little boy), and the goddess just screws with people for roughly two hours. All of this may seem a bit difficult to grasp, but let me put your minds at ease by saying YES!
Ultimately, this may mislead you to believe I didn’t like the film. Quite the contrary, I loved it. But I loved it in the way a child loves to watch retardedly bad television on Nickelodeon. Its visuals though preposterous were certainly breathtaking; I can count at least twelve normally mundane scenes that were brought to epic proportions by the unscrupulous use of CGI. The story itself sort of works well in your mind provided you pay close attention to the plot (most of the twists and turns are eventually resolved, you just have to keep track of them all). Perhaps “The Promise” can best be compared to Cirque du Soleil: it’s visually stunning and very captivating but the story line is hard to grasp. I recommend the English dubs, not because I’m an uncultured swine who can’t grasp subtitles but because the English voice actor for the general sounds like Sean Connery, and having a Chinese Sean Connery wallop an entire army of invading barbarians is PRETTY FREAKING SWEET. The actor playing the general is none other than Hiroyuki Sanada, great actor of Japan who holds the single privilege of being the only Japanese actor to perform Shakespeare before the BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY. This leads me to believe that if an acclaimed actor such as Sanada thought this film was a good idea, then it must be because he senses the great humor in the obnoxious visuals and preposterous amounts of drama. Up and coming actress Cecilia Cheung absolutely stole my heart, and not just because she's a drop dead gorgeous Asian girl. And then we have rising star Nicholas Tse as the evil duke. For a pop star with a few DUI's on his record, he pulls of the effeminate evil genius role quite well. I also personally like to think that the only reason he's interested in destroying Qingcheng is because he won't allow anyone in China to be prettier than himself.
Defining Moment:
So I mentioned the part where the evil Wuhuan entraps the girl in a giant birdcage while forcing her to dress up in what amounts to a dove costume. Well, Kunlun and the general make a death-defying rescue mission in which Kunlun sneaks into the palace, Kunlun wraps a rope around the sleeping trollope, Kunlun hoists her into the air in a very Cirque du Soleil moment, Kunlun runs at breakneck speed over the rooftops of the palace effectively converting her into a kite, Kunlun saves the aforementioned flying harlot when Wuhuan ambushes them, Kunlun holds open the doors of the gate while the general rides in and spirits her away on his horse, Kunlun practically gets tea bagged by the general’s horse as they leap over Kunlun to escape, and Kunlun gets captured and beaten to within an inch of his life. Apparently, this is Chen’s artistic recreation of an old Chinese legend of a slave rescueing his master’s love and to be quite honest I found myself both moved and hysterical at the whole spectacle. Oh, and if you’re waiting for Kunlun to get treated any better you might not want to hold your breath.
Li’s Score:
8 out of 10
Okay. My furious ranting aside, I really did enjoy the movie. Much like how Steven Spielberg has been known to produce great visual masterpieces at the expense of a decent storyline, Chen has managed to create a stunning visual feast (I can’t believe I just said “visual feast”) while maintaining the over-the-top drama that made him the director he is today. Definitely worth watching, if only for the preposterous moments of CGI that create a colorful and fantastic display on par with Cirque du Soliel. Yes … I know … I like Cirque du Soleil … WHAT OF IT!!!
“The Promise” is the work of Chen Kaige, famous director of such films as “Farewell My Concubine” and “The Emperor and the Assassin,” both of which I had scene and loved for both the masterful cinematography and gut-wrenchingly tearful storytelling. Chen does his best not to disappoint with “The Promise,” a fact made evident within the first ten minutes of epic exposition and the death of a little girl’s mother. Tearful? Yes, even an emotionally bankrupt factory of cynicism and hate such as me couldn’t help but shed a tear as the little girl ate a bit bread stolen from a dead soldier after robbing the corpses on a battlefield. Reminds me of when I was a rambunctious young scamp.
“The Promise” is a more fantastical work by Chen. While his previous dramas remained grounded in at least a teaspoon’s worth of logic and reality, “The Promise” introduces goddesses, ghosts, and an effeminate Duke bent on a twisted plot of revenge. Rather than the warring states era or the Tang Dynasty, Chen sets the stage in a mystical fantasy China where wire-fighting is all too commonplace, which when we consider that this is a Chinese film with martial arts is practically like saying that as an added bonus the movie comes in a box.
The story centers around a young girl named Qingcheng who apparently makes a living by robbing the numerous corpses strewn about the Chinese landscape. While pillaging the dead soldiers of a previous battle, she is caught by a rather bratty young boy who apparently suffers from Draco Malfoy Syndrome as he so proudly proclaims that the corpses were his father’s soldiers thus making him the rightful owner of their earthly possessions. She promises to be his slave (PROMISE #1) but only uses the moment of distraction to bash his brains in with his own helmet in a move that would even be beneath Bugs Bunny. She flees home clutching some bread only to artistically drop it into a lake. While she artistically weeps for the sinking foodstuff, a beautiful woman artistically ascends from within the artistically clear lake to introduce herself as the Goddess Manshen … and then tells the little girl that her mother just died. She then offers the girl a promise: In exchange for the greatest beauty that could win the hearts of any man, any man she truly loved would ultimately die. Turning a frown upside down, Qingcheng happily accepts the promise (PROMISE #2) and walks across the water into her future. May I conclude this section by saying THIS ALL HAPPENED IN THE FIRST 10 MINUTES.
We then flash forward many years to a great battlefield. The legendary general Guanming watches over his impressively dressed army while awaiting a slave trader. The general purchases the slaves to use against the invading forces as a distraction. It is here we meet Kunlun, a slave with the remarkable ability to run across ninety degree angles at a speed so blinding that you can’t help but laugh at the Looney Tunes nature of his running. After a battle that was about as one-sided as a game of Dynasty Warriors III if you’re playing Lu Bu and the opposing army is only equipped with butter knives and orange marmalade, Guanming hires Kunlun to be his personal slave and make use of his great speed. Apparently, Kunlun is supposed to be the “loveable idiot” as he cheerfully agrees to work for the man who not only holds him in bondage but also put him in harm’s way not five minutes ago. Or perhaps he just loves making friends a whole huggy bunch.
The Brokeback Mountain moment doesn’t last long. A messenger arrives to warn Guanming that the emperor is under attack by the dastardly Duke Wuhuan of the North. Guanming and Kunlun assume that they alone can reach the emperor in time, and as such they abandon the rest of his A-Team army to sprint like madmen toward the imperial palace (I take it back, Guanming doesn’t sprint. He has a horse. Kunlun however is screwed in the deal but shows a not-so-surprising ability to keep up with the horse and maintain cheerful conversation). On route to the capital the two are lost in the woods and decide to split up. Now, in the Chinese version the general meets with the manipulative goddess bitch Manshen who taunts him for sacrificing the slaves for the good of the nation. He replies by attempting to decapitate her, only to have her mock him some more before showing him an image of the emperor dying at his own hands. Denying such a thing being possible, he storms off from the goddess leaving her to chuckle like the ice bitch she is (This bit of intrigue must have seemed unnecessary to American viewers and was ultimately cut from the DVD in the famous “we don’t want our character to be three dimensional” maneuver.)
At any rate, the general is wounded by a cloaked assassin only to be saved by his loveable slave idiot Kunlun. The assassin flees leaving the general in no state to fight of Duke Wuhuan and his army (as if he was capable of single handedly defeating them in the first place without three-hundred slaves to absorb the initial impact). He instead sends Kunlun, dressing him in his armor to instill fear in the army. Kunlun then rides off to the capitol where the impressively effeminate Wuhuan threatens the emperor to hand over of all things his prized concubine … Qingcheng!
It seems in fifteen years time the little grave robber has grown into the incredibly attractive Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung (for whom my beloved guitar is named … don’t judge me). She displays not only an impressive beauty but the unprecedented power to cock-tease an entire army into aiming their weapons at the emperor. Even the effeminate villain is impressed as he momentarily changes scepters to a scepter with a golden hand giving the “thumbs up” pose ornately fashioned on the top. YES HE CARRIES A SCEPTER WITH A GOLDEN HAND ON IT! He also fights with fans while commenting on how his victims’ blood will ruin the fabric. Needless to say, he’s my hero. But I digress.
Kunlun arrives in time to see the furious emperor ready to take the life of Qingcheng for cock-teasing the army into attacking him. Seeing a woman in danger, Kunlun does the only logical thing that comes to mind: He throws his sword with flawless accuracy into the heart of the emperor from two-hundred yards away before embracing Qingcheng and riding off on a horse into the distance. The Duke gives chase with a loyal military unit whose only purpose is to form a human throne for him to sit on once the two have been cornered. Convinced that Kunlun is actually the general, Wuhuan demands that he hand over the girl and take his own life or have both of them killed (as he knows that general Guanming would never give his life for anyone much less a cock-tease). Shocking both Wuhuan and Qincheng, Kunlun agrees telling the concubine that she must live no matter what happens (this effectively wins her heart). He then leaps off of a cliff into a waterfall, surviving the fall as everyone knows that a movie waterfall is pretty much the equivalent of jumping into a ball pit at Chuck E Cheese.
Qingcheng is brought back to Wuhuan’s palace where her cock-tease abilities prove useless as Wuhuan clearly loves himself more than any woman. She’s entrapped in a giant bird cage and forced to wear a white cape made out of feathers (the ancient Chinese equivalent of a chicken costume, I suppose). Meanwhile, Guanming is accused of killing the emperor and is left for dead by his soldiers only to be saved by the goddess Manshen who gives him a second chance to clear his name, regain his dignity, and win the heart of Qingcheng (whom he’s NEVER MET BY THE WAY).
Anyway, I could go on about the plot, but it gets so confusing that even I had a hard time comprehending it and I’ve sat through enough Silent Hill games that I practically have a PhD in “What the Hell is Going On”. The cast of 6 pretty much has the crap developed out of them; Kunlun learns that he was once part of a race of nobles that lived in snow and could run faster than the wind, Guanming honestly takes to loving QingCheng, QingCheng blindly loves Guanming but fears that the curse of her promise will mean his demise, the cloaked assassin turns out to be a relatively nice guy, Wuhuan has been planning this act of revenge since the first scene (he was the little boy), and the goddess just screws with people for roughly two hours. All of this may seem a bit difficult to grasp, but let me put your minds at ease by saying YES!
Ultimately, this may mislead you to believe I didn’t like the film. Quite the contrary, I loved it. But I loved it in the way a child loves to watch retardedly bad television on Nickelodeon. Its visuals though preposterous were certainly breathtaking; I can count at least twelve normally mundane scenes that were brought to epic proportions by the unscrupulous use of CGI. The story itself sort of works well in your mind provided you pay close attention to the plot (most of the twists and turns are eventually resolved, you just have to keep track of them all). Perhaps “The Promise” can best be compared to Cirque du Soleil: it’s visually stunning and very captivating but the story line is hard to grasp. I recommend the English dubs, not because I’m an uncultured swine who can’t grasp subtitles but because the English voice actor for the general sounds like Sean Connery, and having a Chinese Sean Connery wallop an entire army of invading barbarians is PRETTY FREAKING SWEET. The actor playing the general is none other than Hiroyuki Sanada, great actor of Japan who holds the single privilege of being the only Japanese actor to perform Shakespeare before the BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY. This leads me to believe that if an acclaimed actor such as Sanada thought this film was a good idea, then it must be because he senses the great humor in the obnoxious visuals and preposterous amounts of drama. Up and coming actress Cecilia Cheung absolutely stole my heart, and not just because she's a drop dead gorgeous Asian girl. And then we have rising star Nicholas Tse as the evil duke. For a pop star with a few DUI's on his record, he pulls of the effeminate evil genius role quite well. I also personally like to think that the only reason he's interested in destroying Qingcheng is because he won't allow anyone in China to be prettier than himself.
Defining Moment:
So I mentioned the part where the evil Wuhuan entraps the girl in a giant birdcage while forcing her to dress up in what amounts to a dove costume. Well, Kunlun and the general make a death-defying rescue mission in which Kunlun sneaks into the palace, Kunlun wraps a rope around the sleeping trollope, Kunlun hoists her into the air in a very Cirque du Soleil moment, Kunlun runs at breakneck speed over the rooftops of the palace effectively converting her into a kite, Kunlun saves the aforementioned flying harlot when Wuhuan ambushes them, Kunlun holds open the doors of the gate while the general rides in and spirits her away on his horse, Kunlun practically gets tea bagged by the general’s horse as they leap over Kunlun to escape, and Kunlun gets captured and beaten to within an inch of his life. Apparently, this is Chen’s artistic recreation of an old Chinese legend of a slave rescueing his master’s love and to be quite honest I found myself both moved and hysterical at the whole spectacle. Oh, and if you’re waiting for Kunlun to get treated any better you might not want to hold your breath.
Li’s Score:
8 out of 10
Okay. My furious ranting aside, I really did enjoy the movie. Much like how Steven Spielberg has been known to produce great visual masterpieces at the expense of a decent storyline, Chen has managed to create a stunning visual feast (I can’t believe I just said “visual feast”) while maintaining the over-the-top drama that made him the director he is today. Definitely worth watching, if only for the preposterous moments of CGI that create a colorful and fantastic display on par with Cirque du Soliel. Yes … I know … I like Cirque du Soleil … WHAT OF IT!!!