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House Of Flying Daggers R1 - April 19 (1 Viewer)

Citizen87645

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The person at DVD Talk who posted comparisons between the Starmax and Edko 2 Disc had his settings off on the Starmax and, based on the new screen caps, the transfers look identical. So either one of those are your best bet if you want uncut and other region capability.

I think the cuts to the US release are pretty innocuous so I'll probably pick it up. I'm curious how they handle the commentary from the two Zhangs. To my knowledge neither is that fluent in English.

I watched Flying Daggers with my mom and she made the comment about how the film is targeted to Westerners, just as she did with Crouching Tiger. I asked her what makes it different from the period, martial arts films she likes and she said there is more focus on the martial arts in those films, i.e. the various styles or schools. So the fight scenes in Daggers et al seems rather generic. The "my kung fu is better than your kung fu" thing is pretty pulpy, so I think Mom was kind of missing the point, but I think her view is representative of the majority of Hong Kong audiences. I think that region tends to view films on more of an entertainment than artistic level, more so than we do over here. But then it could simply be another instance of the divide that exists between critics and the mass audience, which knows no borders ;)
 

Citizen87645

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Also, with Mom's help I saw that the "Zhang" for the director is a different character and pronunciation (in Cantonese) than the "Zhang" for the actress. I don't know that much about romanisation of Mandarin, but that seems kind of strange to me. Any Mandarin speakers who can shed some light?

EDIT: I think my mom must have misread the character. Did some research and the character is pronounced "zhang" in Mandarin and "zeong" in Cantonese. My mom was saying it was a "wy" sound.
 

Rich Malloy

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Just wanted to reiterate what's been posted above about the Starmax release... the blown-out contrast levels where a function of the way this person took the screen-grabs, and the new grabs look far better. I'd say at least equal to the Edko 2-disc and 3-disc releases.

But I don't exactly have alot of confidence in this person's reviews, and judging video quality from nothing more than a couple of screen-grabs (especially from such a dodgy source) simply isn't sufficient. But it seems fairly assured that either the Starmax or Edko SE/LE are acceptable.

Now that we have a complete listing of the cuts made for the US release, I no longer consider these to be slight to unimportant. I think there's a strong argument to be made in favor of the original cut.
 

Shad R

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now, i think Japan has the same region encoding, right? How do I go about finding a copy of the uncut version in DTS???
I may consider this.
 

Kirk Tsai

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The "Zhang"s in the director and actress' names are two different characters. In Mandarin (which I believe is both of their primary spoken language), the two are pronounced the same. Identifying which spoken language is being used on paper is very important to identifying whether two people have the same last name. For example, HK superstar Jackie Cheung has the same last name as Zhang Yimou, but Cheung is using a Cantonese pronounciation. The same is true of Andy Lau and Lucy Liu. I believe for my last name, the same character for the Cantonese speaking population would be written in English as Choi instead of Tsai.

To add more confusion, I believe China has sort of revamped the translation system. So someone like Michael Chang (the tennis player) has the exact same last name as Zhang Yimou, and both English translations would be based upon Mandarin.

Hopefully I've confused everyone enough to stop reading. :)



I agree there is a certain "pulpiness" inherent to this thinking, but I don't equate this with wanting entertainment as opposed to artistic value. The styles and schools come directly out of the "wuxia" genre, especially the wuxia literature. For example, two prominent schools would be associated with Shaolin and Wu Tang. In a different author's pen, each could have very different values and depictions. But the variety of styles and ideology are always present in the novels.
 

Aaron Silverman

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Kirk,

Do you know of any good wu xia novels that have been translated into English? Most of what I can find in terms of translated Chinese literature is more along the lines of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms.

Xie xie!
 

Kirk Tsai

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I don't, unfortunately. In the past few decades, the most popular author has been Jin Yong (rough approximation in pronounciation; he's had people write books on him in the way people write about JRR Tolkien), and I've seen a few of his novels adapted into comic books/ graphic novels with English in Borders or Barnes and Nobles. Just flipping through them, they were not really of interest to me.

What I would consider to be within this genre is, overall, quite narrow in time. It has its roots in some of the older Chinese literature, but I think most people would limit wuxia novels to 20th century works. For those who can read Chinese, any crappy little Chinese bookstore in your neighborhood would probably dedicate a section to the genre.
 

Aaron Silverman

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Thanks for the info. I'll have to see if I can find a crappy little Chinese bookstore in my neighborhood. :) (The library across the street from my old office had a very large selection of Chinese books, but it's too far to go now.)

Were the graphic novels of Jin Yong's stuff that you saw not of interest just because you'd rather read the originals, or because they looked lousy? I'm not a huge comic book fan, but in this case I'd make an exception in order to check that material out.
 

Shad R

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Ok, do I need a region free dvd player to play this, or will my region 1 (usa) player work? I"m confused. If I get the region 3 two disc set from cdwow, will it play??
 

Patrick Sun

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A Region 3 DVD will not play in a DVD player that only plays Region 1 or Region 0 DVDs. So, yes, you'll need a DVD player that allows you to change the Region Code playability, or one that is already Region Free.
 

Ken Chui

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Good news for Sony PSP owners: the UMD version of the film will also be available on the same day as its DVD counterpart. Bad news: the MSRP will also be the same ($28.95; actual retail price should be lower though ;) )
 

Jay Pennington

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Is it known if this is the longer cut? DVD Beaver lists a longer running time but stated they had not confirmed this was accurate.
 

Citizen87645

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No cuts to the release as far as I know and have heard. Everything that has been identified as cut in the U.S. print is in there.
 

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