Review of Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) by Ben S — 31 Mar 2013

I'm just an ordinary old man and just want to give my opinion. First problem was the subtitles were in yellow and this often clashed with the near constant gold coloring ot the costumes and scenery in the background, as everything was heavily gold colored. This sometimes made it difficult to read the subtitles against the gold background. There was one part of the plot that bothered me. It was never made clear as to why the Emperor wanted to simply drive his wife buggy insane by adding black fungus to her medicine, when killing and just being plain evil seemed to be second nature to him.

This movie starts out with overwhelming beauty of costumes, sets, and scenery. But of course this alone doesn't make a good movie. It was well acted, but I found all the repeated rituals of every little thing they did somewhat annoying. Although it is fiction, I do like a movie to be realistic. The soldiers appearing from almost out of nowhere without being detected on both sides is surely a physical immpossibility. It's simply not possible to sneak all those people in the palace or surround the palace and either side go undetected. But then surprise we're here. That was ridiculous enough, but when the men in black dropped down from the mountainsides in perfect harmony on ropes, mind you without hardly touching each other with an attack of perfection. Then one man surrounded by thousands of men in black doesn't get subdued until he single handedly slays numerous people. Well this just put it in the cartoon catagory. You expect this in futuristic or fantasy movies and I don't believe this movie was intended to be either.

Obviously, multiplication of the masses, was done by digital enhancement. The ending was abrupt and real dissappointing as it didn't tell what became of the Empress. It had the making of a really good movie if ithere would have been more realisim and didn't end in a ridiculous manner. But it was one of those movies I had to watch to see how it ended.