The Curse of the Golden Flower and Grindhouse: a Double (er . . . triple) Feature Review

"Grindhouse" is the sort of movie that is bound to make those who grew up in the 1970’s grimace, as they think cheerfully about how bad movies used to be, at the same time that it makes those who grew up more recently think to themselves, “thank God I didn’t grow up in the seventies”. It is a real generation uniter, though not, I believe, in the fashion that Rodriguez and Tarantino intended. This film (or films, as it were) are droll for a while, as cheerfully garish nostalgia. But merely because the basis for their homage is so banal and tacky, the film itself is forced into that same trail of bad taste. Violence is depicted with visceral fascination, with an almost surgical interest in documenting every cut, amputation, and disembowelment. Another problem with the films is that they do not create a cohesive sense of their role as either a serious film or an outright parody. Had the directors taken a bolder step in actually satirizing the genre more clearly, that is, in creating a sense of distance from characters, and taking absolutely none of their characteristics, actions or ambitions seriously, it would have been a much greater success. This was done to a certain degree in "Planet Terror", the initial segment, but did not carry over into Tarantino’s "Death Proof", which, to the viewer, is a first semi-disconnected murder story, and then a highly glorified car chase. As it were, then, this film was interesting for its novelty value, and not something I would generally recommend. My only exception to this would be to purchase a copy of the soundtrack to "Planet Terror".

On the other side of things, "The Curse of the Golden Flower" is a Chinese historical fantasy, based about a decadent and crumbling imperial society, rife with intrigue, incest and megalomania. Like "Grindhouse", "The Curse of the Godlen Flower" is a largely derivative work, although it does work out much better as an individual film; it is possible to enjoy it without constantly referencing the sort of films which have came before it (except for perhaps other films recently directed by Zhang Yimou, such as "Hero", "House of Flying Daggers", etc.). When I was watching this film, I saw the consistent aesthetic echoes of its predecessors, but exaggerated. This artistic vision, however, complements a plot that is equally baroque.

Initially, any connection between "The Curse of the Golden Flower" and "Grindhouse" would seem quite tenuous. Here is one film set in a stylized, quasi-rococo Tang Dynasty, and here is another set in the imagined film grit of the 1970’s, but rife with seemingly anachronistic modernisms, most notably PDA’s and modern cars. Both of them, however, are strikingly similar in their approach to visualizing their respective worlds. Both are characterized by an extreme stylization, exaggerating the conventions upon which they build into a garish aesthetic gestalt. For example, in "The Curse of the Golden Flower", there are many of the elements of the contemporary Chinese martial-arts/history film: multitudes of soldiers, warriors suspended from wires, floating about perpetrating acts of destruction against each other, rebellion against empire, and the ultimate restoration of order to the system. Here, however, this is taken to the most extreme degree, developing what is normally a cold, ascetic visual palette into something both golden and multicoloured, everything aggressively ornamented with reliefs, gilded, and ostentatiously declaring its dramatic intensity. Likewise, "Grindhouse" takes a similar path into the aesthetic qualities of exaggeration and ugliness. Indeed, this is the whole purpose of the film: to represent the grotesqueness and poor taste of the original genre in a (satirical?) send-up. Of course, when the basis for your film has a limited aesthetic quality, and is as awful as that which inspired "Grindhouse", your film itself is bound to be both bad and tasteless.

Grindhouse–**/*****

The Curse of the Golden Flower–**1/2 /*****

Films reviewed by Dancing Turkey Productions.