"Red Cliff" stands tall as pressure piles on

At "south of $80 million," this has got to be the most expensive Asian film ever.

My real concern is that it's planned as a two-part, four-hour film for Asian territories, but two-and-a-half hours for the rest of us. Based on "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," this sounds like something I'd want to see the longer version of. I'm sure I'll eventually be able to pick up the long version as an import release in Chinatown, but it would be nice to see it on the big screen.

They haven't sold it to North America yet; producer Terence Chang wants to wait till the film is finished to show it to potential distributors. There's still about a month of shooting.

I think it was reported here months ago, but I'll say it again: Tony Leung Chiu-wai is in, Chow Yun-Fat is out.

Is it just me, or is Woo coming in too late on an already spent wave of big budget spectacle ancient china films...

While I generally like all these movies, it is getting pretty old. Battle of Wits was very good, but still, there's a limit.

Now on DVD is the new GENGHIS KHAN film, then shortly after that, we have WARLORD, Andy Lau's THREE KINGDOMS movie, and possibly the Jackie Chan/Jet Li FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, though not sure if it fits from current news.

And then comes John Woo, with his huge spectacle film, after we are all totally sick to death of them. And recently watching Exiled has reminded me that John Woo hasn't done anything really creatively groundbreaking in maybe 17 years. Does anyone who has seen PAYCHECK really believe he is still capable of making a good movie?

Nice review of "Exiled"., Keeping my fingers crossed that it does respectably well in its US release.

Speaking of WARLORD: A trailer of it has been playing in Hong Kong. It looks quite spectacular. As for Andy Lau's THREE KINGDOMS movie: It had better be better than A BATTLE OF WITS... :ph43r:

And ditto -- or even more so -- after viewing the film he produced and closed the Venice Film Festival: BLOOD BROTHERS. :(

Though, to be honest and as many Mobius regulars know, I've never been that enamored by the works of John Woo. Indeed, of his directorial efforts, I've only really liked ONCE A THIEF and been really blown away by BULLET IN THE HEAD; with even a big screen viewing of HARD BOILED leaving me pretty cold.

I never know when one director will make a good or crappy film (Paycheck was bad but watchable) and since I love all of Woo's HK films and Tony and Takeshi as actors I'm willing to give this one a try.
If only I was able to read the book... So far I have started it twice and can not go beyond 20 pages. I'm hoping it will be a book I'd love after reading a quarter of it but still it completely leaves me cold (as opposed to Outlaws of the Marsh for instance)

WARLORD looks like it is going to be good but of course Peter Chan can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned (yeah I'm the only person on easrth who actually liked Perhaps Love).

The reason for Woo's weak showing of the past 15 years seems obvious to me: his last screenplay credit was HARD-BOILED. At least he's had a hand in the script for RED CLIFF, so that might bode well for the film.

Interesting. WARLORD is of course a remake of the original BLOOD BROTHERS (1973) of which John Woo assisted in directing. And now before the release of the remake, we have John Woo himself producing another movie which happened to have the same English name... :huh: