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The Bride With White HairRating:
Release Date: 17 June, 2003 Retail Price: $19.95 OUR Price: $17.96 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
The Bride With White Hair Reviews
Classic Chinese Folklore
Anyone and everyone in America has grown up on the fairtales of Europe. This is one the best movies out there about a classic chinese tale of swords and sorcery of horror and love. As the title suggest. I can't really find the words to explain it but this movies rates up there with Fong Sai Yuk 1 and 2. Its that good.
Epic, Operatic, Enjoyable
If you liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then see The Bride With White Hair. Drawn from the same sword and sorcery tradition, both movies feature strong female leads. In the case of Bride, we have Brigitte Lin Ching Hsua, one of Hong Kong's most popular female stars. Brigitte is beautiful and compelling; more fey than Zhang Ziyi, she is a sorcerous assassin at the top of her game. Her meeting with the male lead, Leslie Cheung (a singer-actor best known in the US for his role in as Chen Dieyi in Farewell, My Concubine) is either accidental or destined, depending on how you look at it, but it changes her world and his.
The visual style of the film is spectacular, thanks in no small part to cinematographer Peter Bao. Director Ronny Yu Yan-Tai, who has been compared to Ridley Scott, is not very well known in the United States yet, but he's got a pretty good following world-wide. (Yes, yes. He directed Bride of Chucky. I'm not going to defend or attack him for that, because I've never seen it.) In Bride he conducts, like the best of the fantasy Hong Kong masters, an opera or ballet. Every word, every move is larger than life, everything fraught with meaning, promise or threat--this is not "everyman" action; this is epic. Like many epics, it sometimes does suffer from excess.
Bride is, in my opinion, not quite as good at humanizing its characters as Tiger. Both are Romeo and Juliet stories, but Lin's Lien Ni Chang and Cheung's Zhou Yi Hang are not as fully rendered as the star-crossed lovers of Tiger (either pair). They're archetypes. But they're grand and glorious archetypes. Who cares that Lien Ni Chang was raised by wolves who somehow taught her the mastery of wind instruments? Who cares how precisely the villains came by their genetic-defying bond? That isn't the point in this film, and people who allow themselves to bog down on these issues are, I believe, depriving themselves of a transporting film experience. Go willing to enjoy, and you probably will.
Those disturbed by the loose ending of Tiger, be warned: Bride isn't likely to satisfy you much more. If the "what then?" haunts you too much, you can find an answer in The Bride With White Hair II. It returns all the major characters and picks up where the other left off.
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