Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10903 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-02-02
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 125 minutes

Synopsis
Lavish martial arts epic in the tradition of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS from the director of ASSEMBLY, Feng Xiaogang.

Customer Reviews

Now if somebody could explain the plot sometime.......
I'm truly not competent to comment on how this movie was made but it is a little hard to follow at first. So much is going on that it takes a while to work out who is doing what to whom , you are spending so much time reading the subtitles some of the action slips by. It settles down though and turns into the usual fully-costumed , gory romp through Chinese history. If you like chinese movies this one won't disappoint, although it isn't as subtle as Crouching Tiger nor does it have the visual impact of Curse of the Golden Flower. It has all the usual ingredients. Cast of thousands ,bloody sword-fights, amazing scenery ( natural and film-sets),fantastic costumes,people whizzing about on wires , lots of yelling and over-acting.
Vintage stuff.
The final scene turns into a bit of a pantomime ( its as if they were running out of time and needed to eliminate some characters double-quick !)and Ziyi Zhang is positively luminous throughout.Well worth a look. (I actually meant to give it four stars but messed that bit up .)

banquet
I bought legend of the black scorpion and found out that its the same dvd of Banquet. The poster and title are diffrent but the films are the same.I own Banquet I bought it two months ago from another seller. Thanks

interesting sets and costumes, shame about the rest
there is a chinese saying that when an ugly girl tries to imitate the way a beautiful girl adorn herself, the ugly ones ends up looking worse. This film seem to have that problem. While each shot in the hands of a master like Zhang yimou has a perspective and a raison d'etre, even though the cuts are swift and choppy, here, they are just pointless and choppy, chaotic and all over the place, with no smooth flow, and arbitrary close ups only a student would do, as if the director hasn't quite understood how and why things are done, believing he was being avant gardely aesthete. The same half-understood, bad imitation thing appears throughout the film, in the dialogue, the script, the story, which makes it quite painful to watch when one can tell the difference.The quality is so uneven, every 15 minutes, there is a line of dialogue that shows some wit. Even Tan Dun's sound track, ( the only reason I bought this dvd) isn't that impressive here, although Tan is a brilliant composer. Still, I am not disappointed that I bought the dvd because some of the sets and much of the costumes are pretty authentic and quite glorious.