!±8± Peking Opera Blues

Brand : | Rate :

| Price :
Post Date : Feb 04, 2012 09:45:05 | N/A

Peking Opera Blues

An adrenaline-rush masterpiece, this period action comedy is so hyperactive and ingenious that it'll make your head spin. Along with John Woo's The Killer and Jackie Chan's Project A, Peking Opera Blues is one of the key works of a great period of Hong Kong cinema in the mid-1980s. Director Tsui Hark had been studying Spielberg under a microscope, but he uses the multilayered visuals knowingly, to capture the frantic complexity of a turning point in Chinese history. In a period of political chaos around the turn of the century, just before the first republican revolution, three women are thrown together: Cherie Chung as the daughter of a recently deposed warlord, who only wants to protect her jewel case from the loot-crazed troops; Sally Yeh as the daughter of the manager (Wu Ma) of a traveling Peking Opera company, who desperately wants to break the taboo against women on the stage; and Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia as the daughter of the newly installed warlord, and a dedicated revolutionary. All the characters converge upon an inn where the boisterous opera troupe is gearing up for a performance. Tsui transforms action slapstick into a form of acrobatic ballet, and a final shootout sequence on a crumbling tile rooftop is beyond thrilling: you'll believe a man can fly. --David Chute