★★★½ Curse of the Golden Flower

[Gino: 3.0, TwoShoes: 3.5]

Gino says: "This film presented a lot of problems for me to rate for two main reasons: (1) I think the projection in our theater was very dark, so while the colors looked lavish online digitally in the trailer, they looked washed out at the theater (Ritz 16 in NJ). I could be wrong. (2) More importantly, I got mixed up over a few basic plot elements, which made me ignorant of character motivations.

So, firstly, I am saying: both I and Twoshoes really enjoyed the actors involved. The basic story is satisfying in the archetypal royal family problems kinda way. The giddily-ornate imagining of Tang Dynasty Forbidden City was really fun to watch, the breasts omnipresent [and now breasts will find two posts in a search, so that is good]. All things that point to a 4-star film or more. The problems? Well for one, Gino reads really slow, so I got the order of the brothers mixed up (stupidly) and also missed some very key stuff that provided the motivation for many of the main characters. So, I ended up confused. One thing that was not my fault: I found the climactic battle scenes cartoonish and uninspiring. But the film was mostly not an action film, and it worked better on those levels.

So, all in all a good film that might have been better if I had better comprehension."