PRGAAMWA DVD Fight: Smokin’ Aces vs. Curse of the Golden Flower
If I’m inwardly weeping at the DVD match-up selections every week, there is something wrong. We had been limiting the selections to recent sci-fi, fantasy and horror releases, but there isn’t much out there right now. Also, we want to have a prize pack of good movies at the end of this instead of shipping a big box of crap to someone’s door. If the mail carrier is going to throw out his back delivering a box of 64 movies, it shouldn’t be for crap. So, we expanded the parameters to include pretty much anything except chick flicks and romantic comedies. Unless, of course, they involve zombies.
This week our match-up was Smokin’ Aces and Curse of the Golden Flower. Chow Yun Fat, Jeremy Piven, hitmen, martial arts. . . I figured this was going to be a hard one to call. And it was, only I had to figure out which one was the least disappointing.
Smokin’ Aces was weird, it was fast and it had a great cast in wacko roles. I enjoyed the hell out of it until the last half hour when the tone switched from irreverent to serious. Then the entire last fifteen minutes felt like it had been tacked on in a hurry and didn’t fit in any way with the rest of the movie.
There were some really good performances from Jeremy Piven (who, for all of his hotness, looked disgusting here), Jason Bateman (also disgusting) and Nestor Carbonell, who you may know as Richard on Lost, but who I will always think of as Batmanuel. But, none of that could save the movie. Smokin’ Aces was trying to True Romance, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and Snatch all at the same time and turned into a steaming mess on the carpet.
Curse of the Golden Flower was horribly marketed in the United States. The advertising and the DVD cover made Curse of the Golden Flower out to be another martial arts movie, which it wasn’t. What it is, is a melodrama with the feel of a fable and drenched in Chinese cleavage. I dig historical dramas. I like period costumes. Just don’t tell me I’m going to watch a movie that will “change the way I look at martial arts forever” and then give a me a melodrama with occasional swordplay.
Think Days of Our Lives in imperial China and that pretty much sums it up. Gong Li spends most of the movie alternately embroidering crysanthamums on stuff and storming around the palace, which is the peak of all of the actors performances. They pretty much range from moping around to looking tragic to open mouthed horror.
But, the costumes and the sets were so pretty. . .
I didn’t particularly like either movie, but I have to pick a winner. When you get down to it, Smokin’ Aces couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. It wanted to be action, comedy and mystery, it wanted to be ultra-violent and still show that human life has value. Curse of the Golden Flower knew what it was, even if the marketing team didn’t, and that’s an OK reason for it to win this match.
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The Pink Raygun Association of Associated Movie Watchers, Associated 2008 March Movie Madness Tournament Prize Pack So Far…
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You know, you don’t have to only do new movies! There are tons of movies out there that I’d love to see go head to head. For instance: Serenity Vs Bladerunner or Old Dawn of the Dead Vs New Dawn of the Dead. I firmly believe there are a lot of great oldish (ie: not new released) movies out there, that I think would be awesome to battle each other.
I’m just sayin’ I mean we can get general movie reviews all over the interweb, and as long as they’re on DVD, then what the heck? Why not go backwards? I’d rather get a box of newish movies and classics than a box of whatever was recently released. Although the Fountain is coming out soon, so at least you’ve got that going for you!
We kind of have to stick with newer releases for one simple reason – we have to be 100% sure that we can purchase the winner of each week’s battle for inclusion in the March Movie Madness Tournament. If we go too far back, some of the films may not be available, or, worse yet, may only be available as an overpriced “collectible” if it’s fallen out of print or something.
We also want to make sure that each year’s contest has a new batch of movies in it.
I like your idea of the older movies, though. Perhaps we could do an “All Stars” edition of the tournament, but without the Prize Pack option. We’ll see…
I understand the availability issue, but I know of a lot of great genre movies that are not only available, they are CHEAP! From the $5.50 bin at Wal-mart I’ve gotten, Bladerunner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Christina’s House, Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, the Buffy series starter set (first 3 episodes), the Forsaken, and I’ve even gotten Night of the Living Dead from their $1 movie area. Places like Wal-mart have a long list of movies in the $5.50-9.99 range. Deep Discount DVD also carries a lot of very cheap movies. The benefit of genre movies, is they end up in the cheapie bin pretty easily! (on Deep Discount right now all under $10: Labrynth, Star Trek (all of them!), Shaun of the Dead, Night of the Demons, 12 monkeys, and a lot of great looking B-movie genre titles (Like Adam and Evil or 666 Demon Child).
It was just a thought…
I’d love to know how to enter into the big contest for all the cool movies, aka ’swag”.
Arrrr
Glad you brought that up, Josh. We’ve had to revise the prize pack for legal reasons (more on that here). The winner will now have his or her choice between all eight of the top ranking DVDs OR a $100 Amazon gift card.
We’re going to run it like an NCAA basketball bracket contest. Look for a printable bracket and rules shortly.