Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45000 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-10-14
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

Customer Reviews

good movie, botched dvd
This DVD is a botched production job, and Amazon will charge you to return it because it's "not the result of our error." Amazon's error is to distribute this dog of a product. Wait for a better release. Caveat emptor.

The sound track lags several seconds behind the picture (and the subtitles) for the first 45 minutes of the movie. And there's a lot of dialog. It's almost impossible to figure out who is saying what to whom.

But maybe the visuals alone are worth it? Not really: The bottom quarter of the picture is blacked out, to cover the Chinese subtitles -- which nonetheless peek out from time to time when there are two lines of them. This provides a nice black background for the English subtitles (which contain the predictable dumb typos), but wouldn't you like to see the whole picture? I know I would.

Only a couple of times, there are pixilated intrusions of images from some other movie, with white people in it, for a second or two. Spoils the willing suspension of disbelief, you know?

And only once, there is a snatch of dialog in English -- not likely part of this movie, whose setting is earlier than the advent of English.

You don't need to spend any money on this product. Amazon should be ashamed of itself for selling it.

Good movie, awful DVD
This is great movie. No doubt about it, but quality of DVD is horrible. Picture sometimes got blurred, sound is very low quality. This is worst DVD ever. Movie is more then worth to watch, but not from that DVD.

a brilliant, beautiful movie - on VHS.
This is one of my favourite movies of All Time - the story is moving, the cinematography is painfully beautiful, and the characters are fascinating.

The DVD mastering, accoringly, is perhaps the greatest injustice the movie could have possibly suffered. The source from which the DVD was dubbed was in *terrible* condition. Your local rental store's VHS copy probably looks like it's in better shape. The picture is very scratchy.

Even worse is the subtitling. The subtitles in the VHS version were very thoughtfully written and give a good sense of the poetry of the original script. The only problem is that they are sometimes a little (read: teeny bit) hard to read. The DVD version "overcomes" this problem by BLACKING OUT the bottom 20% of the screen and displaying new subtitles on the black bar.

Two problems with this method - they didn't resize the picture at all. You simply lose the bottom fifth of the picture. Also, the subtitles in the DVD version are a much poorer translation of the original. They are almost comical at times, they depart so far from Wei's original vision.

I would whole-heartedly recommend this movie to anybody, especailly lovers of Hong Kong cinema or Asian period peices. Please save yourself a lot of disappointment, though, and pick up the VHS version.