'Red Cliff' ready for its closeup

[Sandy]

John Woo's 'Red Cliff': An Epic Cut Down To Size

by Mark Jenkins
November 19, 2009 6:30 PM
W: Fengyi Zhang in 'Red Cliff'

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120456018



Hard Target: Zhang Fengyi plays the martially inclined prime minister Cao Cao in a battle epic that makes Zack Snyder's 300 look unambitious — and that lets some character-building get lost amid the sweep of history.

Red Cliff

Director: John Woo
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 148 minutes

Rated R: Bloody violence, mild sexuality

With: Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Shido Nakamura

After a frustrating second career in Hollywood, director John Woo has gone back to China — way back. His Red Cliff is a battle epic based on a war fought 18 centuries ago.

When he worked in Hong Kong's stylistically promiscuous movie industry, Woo did it all, from costume pictures to romantic comedies. But he's best known for his gangster movies, and for good reason: Films like The Killer and Hard Boiled balanced the director's more florid tendencies with street-level realism.

Red Cliff feels less urgent and authentic than those movies, and not just because its spurting blood is clearly computer-generated. While not as extravagantly art-directed as Zhang Yimou's Hero or House of Flying Daggers, Woo's movie is too tidy to evoke combat's mud, gore and terror.

An even bigger difficulty is that the film is more interested in military tactics than character development. There's little psychological strife, just clanging swords and clashing ships.

In Woo's defense, the U.S. version of Red Cliff may be sketchy because it's cut been by half. Released in two parts in Asia, the movie lost roughly two hours on its way to American screens. What remains is a cast-of-thousands saga that concentrates on just four people.

The Han Empire's unsavory prime minister, Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), has designs on two smaller kingdoms. He sends an armada down the Yangtze to attack the rulers of those lands, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, who play minor roles in the story. The crucial alliance against Cao Cao is between the two leaders' strategists, Zhuge Liang (Japanese-Taiwanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Zhou Yu (Hard Boiled co-star Tony Leung).

The fourth character of note is Zhou's wife, beautiful Xiao Ciao (fashion model Chiling Lin). Cao Cao has long coveted Xiao, so she's the logical person to distract the invader as Zhuge and Zhou prepare their final counterattack.

Although the heroes wield swords rather than pistols, Woo employs many of his mobster-flick trademarks, including doves (representing heavenly peace amid earthly carnage) and slow-motion action scenes. The director also retains his taste for comically intense male bonding, although Zhuge and Zhou achieve rapport not in battle but during a zither duet.
A scene from 'Red Cliff' Enlarge image

Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) is one of two rebel generals who form an alliance against Cao Cao, hoping to thwart the prime minister's designs on two neighboring kingdoms.

Magnet Releasing

Synergy attained, the two men begin plotting the movie's two major engagements. In the first, the defenders use "the tortoise formation" to repel and then trap Cao Cao's superior forces. The second showdown involves ships, fire and a timely shift in the wind. (Zhuge turns out to be one heck of a weather forecaster.)

Whenever there's a break in the fighting, the movie's major characters become detached and artistic. Cao Cao recites poetry about life's transience, Xiao does calligraphy — she's seen writing the character for "serenity" — and Zhuge and Zhou play their zithers. One crucial sequence even turns on the tea ceremony.

Reportedly the most expensive Chinese-language movie ever, Red Cliff impresses with its sweep, scale and precision. It's like a real-world chess game, with pawns who never seem fully alive, even when they bleed copiously.

Life was cheap in Woo's gangster movies, too, but those films had a moral dimension this one lacks. Red Cliff is big enough to be entertaining, but not deep enough to be moving.

[Sandy]

Listen to NPR interview on John Woo

A Fresh Air Interview with Director John Woo from NPR

July 17, 2005

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4758144

Director John Woo. He grew up in Hong Kong and directed numerous films there before coming to Hollywood. He has established himself as a master of action thrillers and is known for his elaborate action scenes. Woo has directed the American films "Broken Arrow," "Hard Target," and "Face/Off." His new film, "Mission Impossible 2", came out this week. (REBROADCAST from 7/10/97)

[Sandy]

Review: Heavily edited 'Red Cliff' will disappoint true Woo fans

"Red Cliff" has plenty of battle action and other signature elements of John Woo's style, but some subtler subplots were lost in the editing.

By Tan Vinh, Seattle Times staff reporter

http://seattletimes.com/html/movies/2010347729_mr27red.html

In his third-century Chinese war epic "Red Cliff," director John Woo wanted to make an Asian version of "Troy." Except the warriors looked like they were storming the beach of Normandy.

Woo, whose balletic gangster flicks have been so much imitated and parodied, may have left his favorite genre temporarily, but he's still raiding the pyrotechnics prop room. More ships explode and more things go "boom!" in the night here than in most World War II movies.

Woo's epic is a loosely based historical account of one of China's most famous battles, involving Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) who wanted to expand the empire southward in 208 A.D. There's also a Helen-of-Troy-like figure who inspired him to launch his thousand ships.

Two rival kingdoms joined forces to stop Cao's army at the Battle of Red Cliff.

Outnumbered, the kingdoms rely on viceroy Zhou Yu and military strategist Zhuge Liang (played by Asian superstars Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro, respectively) to outsmart the massive enemy forces. More military strategies get airtime here than in most war documentaries on the History Channel.

Last year, "Red Cliff" broke all box-office records in China, where the five-hour movie was released in two parts. The movie was edited to two-and-a-half hours in the United States.

The two long, spectacular battle scenes were left intact. Massive battalions fighting on foot and on horseback, on land and at sea — highly stylized, choreographed fights that look like dance numbers in a musical, with slow motion and Mexican standoffs, Woo's motifs.

Woo's much-anticipated epic marks his return to China after his stint in Hollywood ("Broken Arrow," "Face/Off"). But the U.S. version of "Red Cliff" has been so heavily edited that the character development, subplots, love story, the historical significance of the battle and Woo's signature themes of male bonding and honor got lost.

What's left is an entertaining action flick. Not a bad consolation prize, but not the complex, multilayered drama that made "Red Cliff" a hit in Asia.

Tan Vinh: 206-515-5656 or tvinh@seattletimes.com

[Sandy]

John Woo on “Red Cliff” and the rise of Chinawood

Back home after 17 years, the action maestro has created his biggest spectacle -- and rebooted China's film biz

By Andrew O'Hehir

Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009 08:19 PM PST

http://www.salon.com/2009/11/19/john_woo/

When John Woo left Hong Kong in the early 1990s, a few years before the then-British territory was to be handed over to the People’s Republic of China, it clearly marked the end of an era. Although he was hardly the only important Hong Kong filmmaker, Woo symbolized the sudden global emergence of the territory’s highly choreographed action cinema. With pictures like “Bullet in the Head,” “The Killer,” and the “Better Tomorrow” series, he had personally elevated the violent police thriller to implausible levels of symbolism and visual poetry.

Woo’s move to Hollywood suggested that Chinese authorities might have trouble convincing the best talents in Hong Kong’s film industry to stay home, under what was presumably going to be a censorious and intrusive regime. It also suggested that however corporatized mainstream American film had become, it could still attract exciting directors from overseas. Indeed, while Hong Kong studios struggled with budgets and distribution problems over the next few years, Woo became a certified Hollywood hitmaker, directing the cult faves “Broken Arrow” and “Face/Off,” along with the Tom Cruise vehicle “Mission: Impossible II,” which grossed $565 million worldwide.

But you can go home again, it appears. When I caught up with Woo for a few minutes on the phone recently, the 63-year-old action legend was partway through a whirlwind American tour to promote a film he calls the biggest and most ambitious he’s ever done — a massively-scaled, visually spectacular historical epic called “Red Cliff” that was entirely conceived, financed and made in China. He was also serving as a de facto spokesman for China’s burgeoning campaign to build a new global film industry that can compete on equal terms with both Hollywood and Bollywood. Yeah, if the suits in west L.A. haven’t made the logical deduction yet, they might make it now: Chinawood is coming, and it’s going to be a very big deal.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, of course. From “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to “Hero” to “Curse of the Golden Flower,” productions financed or co-financed by China’s film industry have occasionally combined big budgets with artistic vision and become hits on a global scale. But “Red Cliff” has definitely kicked the game up a notch, and you have to wonder whether veteran Chinese filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou are feeling disrespected. Woo spends a dozen years in L.A. living the high life with Tom Cruise and Nic Cage while they’re making serious films, and then he gets to come back and become a huge national hero.

After protracted discussions with Chinese authorities, Woo got near-total carte blanche to come home and make this long-contemplated dream project, one for which Hollywood producers had displayed little enthusiasm. In the process, Woo — a devout Christian who is widely assumed to be anti-Communist — has clearly been tasked with driving Chinese cinema in a more commercial direction. “I have learned so much from Hollywood,” Woo told me, “and I thought it was about time to bring what I have learned in Hollywood back to Asia. There are so many young and talented filmmakers in China. I think it’s great for them to have the chance to work on a big-budget, Hollywood-type movie. To learn some new spirit, you might say.”

Whether Chinese film really needs an injection of Hollywood’s spirit is very much open to debate, but the Chinese authorities, like Woo himself, are thinking big. Woo’s grandiose retelling of the 208 A.D. Battle of Red Cliffs, between Han Empire forces and the rebellious kingdoms to the west and south — a legendary conflict as well-known to Asians as the Trojan War is to Westerners — veers, like most of his films, from the portentous to the breathtaking (and is often both at the same time). It combines Asian action cinema and Hollywood-style CGI effects in truly dazzling fashion and on a scale never seen before. And it’s become the biggest-grossing release in Chinese history (breaking the record previously held by “Titanic”), and a record-breaker in several other Asian countries as well.

Unfortunately, American moviegoers will only see a sliced-’n'-diced version of “Red Cliff,” edited down from the two-part, five-hour opus that played in Asian markets to a single, 148-minute release stitched together with voiceover narration and explanatory on-screen titles. This only drives home the point that “Red Cliff” wasn’t made for Americans; its release here by Magnet, a genre-oriented offshoot of Magnolia Pictures, is almost an afterthought by comparison. (Woo says the full-length Asian version will eventually be released here on DVD; you can probably find it now, if you know where to look.)

Despite the occasional clunkiness of the foreshortened “Red Cliff” and its ancient-world setting, it’s unmistakably a John Woo movie. (I haven’t seen the full-length version.) It’s built around patterns of male friendship and enmity, a deadly feud over a beautiful woman who represents the domestic bliss Woo’s violent heroes always yearn for, and three or four of the most elaborate action sequences ever filmed. (Yes, Woo devotees, there are still doves. Lots and lots of doves!)

Woo says the climactic, three-stage naval battle that lends the movie its name involved building two dozen or so full-size wooden warships, creating many more digitally, and shooting with four different filmmaking crews: a first unit to capture the principal action, a second unit, a stunt unit and a special-effects unit. “We had to shoot all kinds of live-action scenes while the ships were actually on fire,” he laughed. “We CG’d the rest of the ships and the rest of the fire, but a lot of it is real. And we were shooting against bad weather. It was extremely cold and we were facing high winds. We had to get creative in every shot. This was definitely the biggest movie, and the toughest movie, I’ve ever tried to do.”

Given that the historical battle of Red Cliffs took place 1,800 years ago, and the best-known account is a fictionalized version written in the 13th century, more than a millennium later, Woo and his writing team felt free to simplify and amplify the story as they see fit. Three of Asia’s biggest male stars play the principal roles: Tony Leung plays Zhou Yu, the rebel hero who joins forces with Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a rival kingdom’s military strategist, to confront the massively superior forces of Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), a nefarious schemer who has convinced the Han Emperor to go to war.

There are dozens of other characters in the mix, but none are as memorable as the ethereal Xiao Qiao (Taiwanese supermodel Chiling Lin), who is married to Zhou Yu but, of course, coveted by the evil Cao Cao, whose uncontrollable desire for her will prove to be a near-fatal failing. (No one is ever likely to accuse Woo of being a feminist filmmaker. His women come in two flavors: lovely and mysterious or tomboyish and spunky.)

Despite the wide variety of fantastical violence depicted in “Red Cliff,” Woo insists he has stayed true to his code of never glorifying killing in the service of entertainment. “It’s very much an entertaining film, but I think there’s a human story in there too, that’s important for me to tell,” he said. “It’s a war movie, and I like to stress that in war there are no winners. I think we have an antiwar message in there. As I’m sure you can see, I emphasize that when people get shot, there is death and tears. I think that’s the way to send the right message.”

Woo was able to borrow up to 1,500 soldiers from the Chinese army to serve as extras in the battle scenes and work on building sets, which gives you some idea how much national pride became officially invested in this prodigal son’s homecoming. For his part, Woo describes working in his native country after all these years as “a dream come true.” (He was born in Guangzhou, in southern China, and moved to Hong Kong as a child around the time the Communists came to power.)

”I’ve wanted to make this movie for more than 20 years,” he said. “I always dreamed about making a movie like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or ‘Spartacus’ or ‘Seven Samurai’ — that scale of movie. And I really love this part of history. This is the most famous battle in Chinese history. Anybody who grew up in China knows this story. The Japanese know it, the Koreans know it, all the other Asian countries know this story.”

Seeing the audience reaction in China and other East Asian countries, says Woo, made him see the potential of a Hollywood-scale Chinese film industry. “The movie was so successful in China and Japan and that was very, very gratifying,” he said. “The audience really felt so much excitement about the movie. Most Asian audiences are used to watching big Hollywood movies, which honestly are much higher quality, with the heroes and the big stars. But a movie like ‘Red Cliff’ has really changed their minds. It’s a movie on the Hollywood scale that has so much of the Asian spirit. It has drawn the Asian audience back to the movie theater. We will have to see what happens, but I think the film industry in China will grow very fast, very fast. People in China really want to watch this kind of movie.”

“Red Cliff” is now playing in New York, and opens Nov. 25 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Washington; Dec. 4 in Honolulu, Monterey, Calif., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Dec. 11 in Baltimore, Cleveland, Hartford, Conn., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Memphis St. Louis, San Antonio, Texas, and Santa Fe, N.M., with more cities to follow. Also available on-demand via many cable-TV systems.

[Sandy]

Epic 'Red Cliff' a return to gory form for Woo

Amy Biancolli, Hearst Movie Writer

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, November 25, 2009



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Epic-Red-Cliff-a-return-to-gory-form-for-Woo-3280001.php#ixzz2MNBY4tZK

Time was, impalement was a shocking development in movies. Now, skewered midriffs are the norm for period war epics. They're a common sight in John Woo's captivating spectacle "Red Cliff," a huge, bloody slab of orgiastic battle sequences and crafty military gamesmanship.

The movie doesn't handle nuance too well, and the dialogue spins pretty frequently into unmitigated corniness. But anyone who enjoys stylized hyper-violence should be enthralled by this long, sweeping, murderously vivid dramatization of ancient Chinese warfare, circa A.D. 208.

On one side: The 800,000 amassed troops of Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), a prime minister busy manipulating the weak Han emperor (Wang Ning). On the other side: the combined armies of Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen), two emergent leaders to the south. With Cao Cao preparing to invade, Liu Bei's canny young strategist, Kong Ming (Takeshi Kaneshiro), persuades him to ally with Sun Quan and Quan's stouthearted viceroy, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung).

Together, Sun Quan and Liu Bei lead a fraction of the men at Cao Cao's command. They don't have nearly as many weapons. When the prime minister's forces encamp across from Sun Quan and Liu Bei's on the Yangtze River, the sheer mass is chilling. This setup has us rooting for the underdogs: The good guys may be outgunned (or out-catapulted), but they're far from outwitted. For all its thundering armies, fleets of ships and eye-popping digitized glitz, the strong suit of "Red Cliff" is the way it puzzles out the tactics behind the Battle of Red Cliffs: weather and wind, arrows and fire, spying behind enemy lines.

Virtuosic gore is standard operating procedure for John Woo, back in form after losing his way with irrelevancies like "Paycheck." Originally released for Asian theaters in two parts (with a 280-minute running time), this condensed version opens with a stentorian English voiceover and adds a few on-screen titles identifying various generals. The titles fade after a while, along with the need for them. The film is plenty vivid on its own.

-- Advisory: Epic warfare.

Red Cliff

WILD APPLAUSE Action adventure. Directed by John Woo. Starring Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro (R. 148 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Epic-Red-Cliff-a-return-to-gory-form-for-Woo-3280001.php#ixzz2MNBTZJuL

[Sandy]

John Woo directs action film 'Red Cliff'

G. Allen Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 22, 2009

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/John-Woo-directs-action-film-Red-Cliff-3280363.php#ixzz2MNBmrcSX

The doves are back, and that's very good news for action movie fans.

A universal sign of peace, they are a trademark symbol in the films of mayhem maestro John Woo, so when they soar in the new Chinese historical epic "Red Cliff," it signals a return to form for the iconic director.

Six years after his last Hollywood film, "Paycheck," and 17 years after his last Chinese-language film, "Hard-Boiled," Woo, now 63, seems reinvigorated with "Red Cliff," which was shown in two parts totaling more than four hours in Asia, doing terrific box office in both China and Japan, and has been edited down to a two-hour, 28-minute version for Western release. It opens in San Francisco on Wednesday.

"It was very challenging," said Woo after wheeling his suitcase into a conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel. He had come straight from the airport to present "Red Cliff" at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

"Everyone in China knows the characters, knows about Red Cliff," he continued. "How do you make it work, make it original?"

Set in A.D. 280 and based on a famous incident that could be described as the Chinese Alamo, it is about two military leaders from neighboring provinces (Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro) who must unite their armies to try and defeat a power-hungry general (Fengyi Zhang).

Outgunned and outmanned, they attempt to lure their foes to a confined geographical space near Red Cliff, using nature and strategy to mount a defense.

Obviously, because of the time period, Woo couldn't use his favorite props - guns. There are none of the stylish two-fisted gunbattles to be found in the Hong Kong movies of the 1980s and '90s that made him famous: "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer" and "Hard-Boiled." But he has new toys to play with, including big-scale ships, costumes and the latest computer effects technology.

"Technically, I love the action scenes in 'Red Cliff,' like the burning ships scene," Woo said. "It was the first time for me to combine CGI and live action, and it matched so well."

Woo, who cited David Lean and Akira Kurosawa as inspirations for making a sweeping historical epic, spent five years working on the project, which included the building of 25 full-scale battleships. Although he still keeps a home in the Los Angeles area, he now has a home in Beijing to reflect the new movie reality: Since the handover of Hong Kong to China, the movie industry has migrated to Beijing. The Hong Kong filmmakers who can survive are the ones that tell stories the Chinese can appreciate.

Thus the Hong Kong-raised Woo, who helped usher in that industry's golden age in the '80s, has reinvented himself as a Chinese director.

"(The '80s) was a golden time for Hong Kong movies," Woo said. "It was what we call the Hong Kong New Wave era. Everyone had so much freedom to do whatever they want. Everyone tried so hard to create a (distinctive) style. ...

"(In China) the government is getting more open. They welcome all kinds of foreign production. One of the biggest reasons I wanted to make this film is I have been working in Hollywood for over 16 years and I learned so much from a lot of great, talented people. I wanted to bring back what I had learned to Asia."

Although Woo is still involved with Hollywood projects, the truth is he never really clicked in Tinseltown. After he felt he went as far as he could go in Hong Kong with "Hard-Boiled," he relocated to Los Angeles and took a job directing a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, "Hard Target."

He had some notable box-office successes - the Nicolas Cage-John Travolta thriller "Face/Off" and "Mission: Impossible II," the most stylish of Tom Cruise's action trilogy, but bombed with the World War II movie "Windtalkers" and the corporate amnesia thriller "Paycheck."

He made one fan during that latter film - Uma Thurman. Also at Mill Valley last month, Thurman said she took a part that "wasn't particularly fleshed out, not well drawn, but I didn't care at all because John Woo to me is such an unbelievably dynamic filmmaker and such a sweet person. I adored him, and I think he's a wonderful filmmaker."

In fact, his good relationship with his actors is the common factor in both his Asian and his Hollywood work. Woo worked with Travolta, Cage and Christian Slater on more than one film, and is in talks with Cruise about starring in Woo's next project, about the American-and-Chinese Flying Tigers air unit in WWII.

He also had a bit of a comfort zone in "Red Cliff" working with Leung, a star of "Hard-Boiled."

"He's more mature and more charming," Woo laughed. "More calm and relaxed. Even though he's older, and got tired, he did 95 percent of his own stunts."

Which begs the question, when will he work with Chow Yun-Fat, his main collaborator in the 1980s and also a Hollywood crossover?

"We're still good friends, but we can't find the right project," said Woo, whose many planned films include a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 French assassin film "Le Samourai," a biography of Marco Polo and a remake of his and Chow's "The Killer," which seems to be the film that resonates with him the most.

"Creatively, my favorite action scene is the final gunbattle scene," Woo said. "I was strongly, emotionally in touch with my actors. When they shoot the guy, or they got shot or they got hurt - I got shot too. So when I look at the white dove flying over the candles, I feel the pain too."

In "Red Cliff," the doves are back, and so is a certain signature style. John Woo is in his element once again. {sbox}

Red Cliff opens Wed. at Bay Area theaters. To see a trailer of "Red Cliff," go to www.redclifffilm.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/John-Woo-directs-action-film-Red-Cliff-3280363.php#ixzz2MNBjYXzc