2008, China
Region-free DVD available from Sensasian.com and YesAsia.com among others
I'm not holding out any hope that the complete, two-part, and four-hour Chinese cut of John Woo's Red Cliff will hit the US in anything other than a DVD or Bluray release. As a result, I've gone ahead and imported it. I can't help but think of the parallels to the impending release of Che. IFC isn't paring Che down into one 2.5-hour condensation, but the only way we expect to see the whole experience of either movie is in one's living room.
For those unfamiliar with the film and its still-hazy US release plans, the plot of the film concerns the Battle of Red Cliff, a landmark event in Chinese history that further unified regional rulers as China grew together to become the People's Republic that it is today. Woo has attempted a more historically-accurate take on the material than has been seen in more...loose adaptations that use Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel, as their blueprint rather than Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, the historical record of events from which Romance is adapted.
Part One was released in China in early July 2008 and has waged a path of destruction across Asian box offices since then, recouping over 80% of its budget so far. The movie came out just in advance of the Beijing Olympics, and I wish someone gave me a vote as to whether the US got The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor or Red Cliff: Part One this past August.
I'm used to waiting months (Mongol) or years (Hero) for Asian films to hit the US, but this one is getting chopped to pieces before it gets here. The nearly 2.5-hour Part One will be combined with the undetermined-length Part Two and shaved down to...2.5 hours? I know nothing's official yet, even a US distributor, but the reason no one seems to have any clue what's happening with the movie is inextricably tied to the fact it's non-English language period drama clocking at around five hours in two chunks.
Even more so after seeing Part One, I can't fathom how you effectively shave almost 5 hours down to 150 minutes with this material. The cast is Lord of the Rings large in terms of focal characters, so you'd have to chop a few people completely out of the movie to really drill the running time down that much. What am I saying? I'm giving people ideas now. Terrible ideas.
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Region 0: The IT Crowd
An article I read in the New York Dying Media Times angered me so much I'm firing off a post to defend one of my favorite TV shows from the UK.
I love America. I love mom, Apple Pie, and freedom. I love the freedom of the press we have in this country. I hate the fact that some of the people writing for our oldest, most-respected outlet that reports "all the news thats fit to print" can be unrepentantly lazy idiots.
If I could Find+Replace the New York Times' recent review of The IT Crowd with what I'm about to write below, I would. NYT's Ginia Bellafante not only wrote a hastily-compiled "review" of the show in advance of its premiere on IFC, there's little evidence she did more than watch a promo trailer before baselessly calling it a rip-off of The Office. Judging from her other recent writing, she's a fan of bland Bravo network design competition shows and emo-soaked primetime drama. I'm probably making baseless assumptions myself, but that's only in the tradition of her infuriatingly childish IT Crowd review.
The show concerns the basement-bound denizens of a corporate IT department and is indeed a workplace sitcom, but it is not remotely comparable in form to the single-camera, docu-com that The Office is and always will be. The show follows Jen (Katherine Parkinson), an upward corporate climber who makes the mistake (she finds) to list "computer experience" on her CV, getting her sent to manage the IT department, which is staffed by wisecrack-slinging slacker Roy (Chris O'Dowd) and his socially-awkward compatriot Moss (Richard Ayoade). All three and their supporting castmates are fantastic and pop up occasionally in things Americans see now and then or after they get imported by HBO. This weekend, you can see both O'Dowd and Parkinson in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People with Simon Pegg.
Thanks to the wonders of region-free DVD players and shows hitting DVD in the UK well in advance of them premiering on US channels, I've seen all of The IT Crowd as it's aired thus far. In fact, thanks to that same technology, I'd previously seen creator Graham Linehan's other work, best known among it Father Ted (a mother-fucking classic...note the use of a hyphen) and Black Books. Linehan's work excels in sarcasm, silliness, and absurdity (and that's a sincere compliment int he form of a list). These are the same qualities that make The IT Crowd wonderful. It balances sometimes surreal silliness and geek reference jokes with sharply-written situational comedy and doesn't smash you over the head with any of them. It's quite a perfect stew.
The IT Crowd is more enjoyable than all of the new shows that US networks put on the air this fall...combined. It is more precisely scripted and expertly performed than the vast majority of the abortions they've paraded on the air in recent memory either. Perhaps that is why NBC (or whoever) failed miserably doing a pilot for a US version of the show. I've not been able to track down a copy of that pilot that was panned by a number of people in early 2007, but I'm sure it was as badly-done as McG's "reimagining" of Spaced would've been had it not been killed before production.
Do not brush aside The IT Crowd because someone with a predisposition against situation comedy who writes for the New York Times only felt like spending 5 minutes pretending to review it. The DVDs exist, and there's no reason (especially in New Yawk) that one couldn't do the "watch more than one episode" degree of research on a highly-acclaimed British show that's about to start its third season (series) on the air.
Wait a minute...she mentions something from an episode later in the first season, so it appears she did watch more than a clip. Maybe she's just launching a takedown campaign on anything remotely concerned with nerds, geeks, and the socially allergic. Maybe she copy/pasted the wrong review template into Word. Maybe she was too busy livejournaling about feelings and didn't feel like the oppressive act of laughter and the tyrannous nature of having fun.
My wife, who is decidedly not geeky and watches the Style network's How Do I Look? and Clean House considers The IT Crowd one of her favorite sitcoms. She also likes Bravo's Top Design, and I'll repeat: she loves her some IT Crowd. The only logical conclusion my horribly under-developed American brain can suss out of all this data is that Ginia Bellafante is a blockhead of epic proportions.
I have now added Black Books as well as the long-neglected Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner DVDs to my already overrun queue of Region0 projects. I think I'm less angry about this whole sordid ordeal now, so I should write a sincere apology letter due to the embarrassment I've caused here. Please see it below if you read (or Google Translate) English and reside in Europe. Americans, please carry on being irrationally afraid of having a black President.
Dear Enlightened Europe,
My dear friend, I regret to write you once again in this fashion. It pains me that the vast majority of our correspondence is limited to these sad apologies.
Please assume my entire country is peppered with uncultured, lazy bastards like an American steak is peppered with...pepper. I will endeavour (that is how you prefer it to be spelled, yes?) to correct these egregious errors of "critical" judgment as soon as I notice them, but lordy lord...there are so many idiots here, and only so many hours in the day.
Despondently,
M. W. Chiullan
American Yahoo Cowboy
Texas, US of A
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If I could Find+Replace the New York Times' recent review of The IT Crowd with what I'm about to write below, I would. NYT's Ginia Bellafante not only wrote a hastily-compiled "review" of the show in advance of its premiere on IFC, there's little evidence she did more than watch a promo trailer before baselessly calling it a rip-off of The Office. Judging from her other recent writing, she's a fan of bland Bravo network design competition shows and emo-soaked primetime drama. I'm probably making baseless assumptions myself, but that's only in the tradition of her infuriatingly childish IT Crowd review.
The show concerns the basement-bound denizens of a corporate IT department and is indeed a workplace sitcom, but it is not remotely comparable in form to the single-camera, docu-com that The Office is and always will be. The show follows Jen (Katherine Parkinson), an upward corporate climber who makes the mistake (she finds) to list "computer experience" on her CV, getting her sent to manage the IT department, which is staffed by wisecrack-slinging slacker Roy (Chris O'Dowd) and his socially-awkward compatriot Moss (Richard Ayoade). All three and their supporting castmates are fantastic and pop up occasionally in things Americans see now and then or after they get imported by HBO. This weekend, you can see both O'Dowd and Parkinson in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People with Simon Pegg.
Thanks to the wonders of region-free DVD players and shows hitting DVD in the UK well in advance of them premiering on US channels, I've seen all of The IT Crowd as it's aired thus far. In fact, thanks to that same technology, I'd previously seen creator Graham Linehan's other work, best known among it Father Ted (a mother-fucking classic...note the use of a hyphen) and Black Books. Linehan's work excels in sarcasm, silliness, and absurdity (and that's a sincere compliment int he form of a list). These are the same qualities that make The IT Crowd wonderful. It balances sometimes surreal silliness and geek reference jokes with sharply-written situational comedy and doesn't smash you over the head with any of them. It's quite a perfect stew.
The IT Crowd is more enjoyable than all of the new shows that US networks put on the air this fall...combined. It is more precisely scripted and expertly performed than the vast majority of the abortions they've paraded on the air in recent memory either. Perhaps that is why NBC (or whoever) failed miserably doing a pilot for a US version of the show. I've not been able to track down a copy of that pilot that was panned by a number of people in early 2007, but I'm sure it was as badly-done as McG's "reimagining" of Spaced would've been had it not been killed before production.
Do not brush aside The IT Crowd because someone with a predisposition against situation comedy who writes for the New York Times only felt like spending 5 minutes pretending to review it. The DVDs exist, and there's no reason (especially in New Yawk) that one couldn't do the "watch more than one episode" degree of research on a highly-acclaimed British show that's about to start its third season (series) on the air.
Wait a minute...she mentions something from an episode later in the first season, so it appears she did watch more than a clip. Maybe she's just launching a takedown campaign on anything remotely concerned with nerds, geeks, and the socially allergic. Maybe she copy/pasted the wrong review template into Word. Maybe she was too busy livejournaling about feelings and didn't feel like the oppressive act of laughter and the tyrannous nature of having fun.
My wife, who is decidedly not geeky and watches the Style network's How Do I Look? and Clean House considers The IT Crowd one of her favorite sitcoms. She also likes Bravo's Top Design, and I'll repeat: she loves her some IT Crowd. The only logical conclusion my horribly under-developed American brain can suss out of all this data is that Ginia Bellafante is a blockhead of epic proportions.
I have now added Black Books as well as the long-neglected Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner DVDs to my already overrun queue of Region0 projects. I think I'm less angry about this whole sordid ordeal now, so I should write a sincere apology letter due to the embarrassment I've caused here. Please see it below if you read (or Google Translate) English and reside in Europe. Americans, please carry on being irrationally afraid of having a black President.
Dear Enlightened Europe,
My dear friend, I regret to write you once again in this fashion. It pains me that the vast majority of our correspondence is limited to these sad apologies.
Please assume my entire country is peppered with uncultured, lazy bastards like an American steak is peppered with...pepper. I will endeavour (that is how you prefer it to be spelled, yes?) to correct these egregious errors of "critical" judgment as soon as I notice them, but lordy lord...there are so many idiots here, and only so many hours in the day.
Despondently,
M. W. Chiullan
American Yahoo Cowboy
Texas, US of AOff the Cliff
It strikes me as quite odd that Hollywood has completely passed on a golden (or should I say Red) opportunity. The Beijing Olympics begin at the end of this week, and not only has John Woo's Red Cliff not been released in the USA, it isn't set for release until January, according to Merrick at AICN. The reason this strikes me as odd is that the closest to Chinese Cinema we have in US release through the end of the Olympics is...The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. What kind of parity is that?
THR posted a piece reporting Red Cliff opened in multiple Asian territiories doing four times the money Crouching Tiger did there in 2000 before it became the highest-grossing Chinese film in US box office history. Correct me if I'm wrong, but releasing subtitled prints stateside seems to be a huge profit opportunity lost. Guys like me who import Asian all-region DVDs will have had it for some time once it hits here in January 2009.
Wuxia (chinese "sword man") movies are considered a set few things by US distributors from what I can tell: 1) flushing money down the toilet (Iron Monkey), and 2) something the "sword nerds" out there will pay for later or 3) something the Weinsteins pick up and silently dump on DVD or store in a vault (Tai Chi Master and the Chinese Ghost Story series respectively, among many).
I suppose the best shots I have of seeing Red Cliff before January would be if Tim & Harry snag a print for Fantastic Fest in September or I shell out for an import DVD. I'm used to the standard operating procedure for Wuxia or "Asian Sword Dude" movies in general, even ones like Mongol that are nominated for Academy Awards. The pattern has been thus: release it outside of awards season and save space for "our" movies.
Wuxia cinema is a closet industry in the US even though they keep making more and more of them back East and they keep making money. When it comes down to it, there are some great Wuxia films and some terrible ones, and even though Red Cliff had its share of production trouble including Chow-Yun Fat ditching the show on the first day of filming, it's apparently excellent from all accounts.
On the one hand, I know I'll get to see it eventually, but it still angers me that availability is so delayed in this Age of Instant Gratification. This story from the dawn of the era of the Three Kingdoms isn't just some people on wires flying around and bouncing off rooftops talking about spirits of monkey gods, it's legitimate Chinese history. On top of that, it's John Woo's first Chinese flick since Hard Boiled, which came out when I was nine years old. I like these movies as a genre, but tons of people would gladly pay to see it over a seventh viewing of The Dark Knight with the added proximity of the Olympics.
What's in current release or coming out in the next three weeks that would "compete" with Red Cliff? This is a major, multinational cinematic event and the US has decided to just sit this one out.
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