Wednesday, August 06, 2008

The Battle of Red Cliff: bad chose of main charactors



No!!! How could John Woo let Takeshi Kaneshiro (Jing Cheng Woo) played the role of Zhu Ge Liang, the most honorable strategist in the ancient Chinese history? This is definitely a bad decision! He has always played roles as handsome guy or fighter, but no way being a strategist. If I were the director, I would reverse the role between Tony Leong (Zhou Yu) and him.

Red Cliff is one of the famous battles in the Three Kingdom history. I read it long time ago when I had to sit for the form six Chinese paper. A friend lent me the whole set of VCR, a very long winded series but it helped me to score well in the exam. At that time Chinese actors were chosen not based on their look but their acting skills. The guy who played Zhu Ge Liang was so good that the first impression I have about him was that he is a wise man. Takeshi Kaneshiro certainly couldn't give me this impression.

What is done is done. I read that Tony Leung was supposed to play this role but he gave up due to some health issues. Later he came back and picked up the role of Zhou Yu, which was supposed to be played by Chow Yun Fat. Tony Leung's performance was ok, but I couldn't help but notice that he was actually speaking in Cantonese and his voice got dubbed by someone else. The sound matching for Takashi was off too despite him speaking fluently Mandarin. Chang Chen's Taiwan Mandarin was odd compared to a bunch of mainland Chinese speaker.

The famous Taiwanese model Lin Chi-Ling was playing as Tony Leung's wife. Hubby was quite disturbed by her baby voice but overall this is just another vase character in a male dominated movie. Despite being the most expensive Chinese movie ever made ($80 million), I prefer Hero than Red Cliff.

6 comments:

  1. I saw the trailer and looks pretty good, especially the battle scenes. Might go watch it.

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  2. Anonymous9:14 PM

    I agree with you that either Tony Leung or Chow Yuen Fatt would have been a better choice as the lead character.

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  3. Anonymous9:16 PM

    Oh I forgot ... even Andy Lau would have been a better choice instead of Takeshi Kaneshiro.

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  4. Thanks cooking ninja, luckily someone shares my point of view.

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  5. Hi Bee Ean,

    On Saturday night, I watched a movie title "Julie & Julia". It is about Julia Child a famous America chef started her career in Paris and a blogger Julie Powell writing her blog of her cooking experience of Julia's recipes. It is comedy and a lot of "smiles" too when I watched the movie. After I watching this movie, I think of recommend this to you because your husband like to cook, you are blogger too, and this movie was taken scenes in Paris. So, I feel like you might like this movie :)

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  6. Beside that, I forgotten to tell, it is real story. And the blogger finally got her book published.

    Below is Julie's blog :
    http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/26.html

    I read few pages, kind of difficult to read. Maybe not familiar with french cooking and also a lot of jargon been used.

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