The Bride With White Hair
by Ronny Yu
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DVD details
Actor: Brigitte Lin, Elaine Lui, Francis Ng, Kit Ying Lam, Leslie CheungDirector: Ronny Yu
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Cantonese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Mandarin Chinese (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 2.35:1
Running Time: 92 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-07-22
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Tai Seng
DVD Reviews of The Bride With White Hair
DVD Review: Typical Pre-2000 Wuxia, Which Means It Sucks
Summary: 2 Stars
I've seen over a dozen wuxia films, but the only ones that are worth watching were released after the new millennium: House of Flying Daggers (2004), Hero (2002), and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000).
Everything else I've seen has been an utter waste of my time: The Bride With White Hair (1993), A Man Called Hero (1999), Storm Riders (1998), Ashes of Time (1994), A Chinese Odyssey Part 2 (1994), Butterfly Sword (1993), and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) to name a few. There have been some bad films made post-2000 (e.g., 2005's The Promise), but the pre-2000 wuxia library is thoroughly horrible. Even more disturbing is that these films are hideous for the same exact reasons:
1) Awful screenplay. 2) Atrocious action choreography. 3) Dreadful editing.
The Bride With White Hair is not exempt from these common wuxia pitfalls. The screenplay simply fails to properly develop the romantic relationship between the two leads. They spoon each other in a mini waterfall for 10 minutes, and the viewer is supposed to be convinced that they care for each other. It's not convincing in the least. In fact, the script writers contradict themselves near the end of the film when the two leads do everything in their power to desert one another. Their actions are beyond stupid, as they inexplicably begin to doubt one another on speculative events that are promulgated from the institutions and persons that they initially abandoned for the sole purpose of being together. There is no reason for them to give a rat's arse about these people anymore, yet the male lead sides with them without hesitation. At that point, I wanted both leads to die for counterfeiting the very idea of love.
The action choreography is non-existent in The Bride With White Hair. A character waves their sword or whip at the camera, which immediately cuts to show an enemy instantly die. Repeat ad infinitum. The final fight is laughable when two siamese twins (connected at the back) grab hold of one of the protagonists and bounce around the room like a superball. Interestingly, the sub-par editing is directly related to the fight scenes themselves. It's much easier to cut up the movie on an ad hoc basis to gloss over the unimaginative character interactions in combat, instead of mapping out fight scenes and brainstorming over fresh combinations of moves and maneuvers. There's really nothing else to say other than the obvious fact that no effort was put into the action set pieces, and it shows.
It would seem that filmmakers within the wuxia genre showed almost no development or improvement before the year 2000. It is thus important that this review exists to inform readers of the futility inherent in watching wuxia films released during that period of time. A majority of reviews of this film are overwhelmingly positive, but the reasoning behind these high ratings is dubious at best. The pre-2000 wuxia camp seems to consist solely of fanboys who will eat up anything and everything released under that particular genre's banner.
As a fan of East Asian cinema, I think that this is a disservice to new viewers who are attempting to make the transition to better cinema. They may hit a pre-2000 wuxia film and go running (perhaps screaming) back to Hollywood.
DVD Review: as described
Summary: 3 Stars
was a good film, however not quite what i expected.
i would rate as 3.5 but that's not possible.
DVD Review: Martial Arts
Summary: 5 Stars
An exciting movie about Chinese martial arts and how true love is value. A good movie with plenty sword fights with nice love scene.DVD Review: Lower your expectations
Summary: 2 Stars
The story is good and the screenplay has the right idea, but the low-grade technical aspects are terrible. The considerations one must make for this is too much. The movie on this DVD is primitive stuff! (too bad for South City) If Ronny Yu did it today with access to all the technical devices and support it would be worth the money.DVD Review: A great story, but not always well told
Summary: 4 Stars
The Bride With White Hair is a curious beast. Much of the first half of the film feels like you've seen it a hundred times before (a troubled sifu/student relationship, divided loyalties, warring clans and the rise of what would become a united China) and the style often looks like a relatively low-budget film trying to look more expensive than it is rather than the genuinely expensive film it was, with director Ronny Yu shooting much of the film in near darkness with deep blacks, heavy blue filters and smokey backlighting, stylistic devices that aren't to everyone's visual taste. The action scenes are often played out via jerky step-printing (where the film is shot at around 12 frames per second or less but each frame is printed twice or more to create a sense of motion at normal speed that's either heightened or degraded depending on your point of view). While the film was shot on massive sets (genuine exteriors are few and far between), they're neither lit or shot to stress their scale or often to be particularly visually interesting, with much of the early action of the film very deliberately styled after a shadow-puppet play, all profiles and silhouettes. And yet gradually it casts its spell over you and begins to grip as the story becomes more ambitious and intriguing.
On the surface it's a Romeo and Juliet story between Leslie Cheung's heir apparent to a clan dedicated to good but filled with doubt no-one else shares about the severity with which it is enforced and Brigitte Lin's "wolf-girl" (meaning she was raised by wolves rather than turns into one) who has been trained as a supernatural killing machine by an evil pagan cult and who sports a particularly lethal whip that Indiana Jones would kill for - sharper than a meat cleaver and very handy for slicing-and-dicing any number of opponents. Their inevitably doomed romance occupies a moral middle ground that, naturally, neither side will tolerate, with their respective rejected mentors eager to reclaim their undivided loyalty. In many ways the film is a rejection of all the intransigent moral codes of the fantasy swordplay genre, where even the "good" clan and their allies are so blinded by their own self-importance that they have no qualms about killing innocent peasants just to be on the safe side in case they're lying ("Better to kill a hundred innocents than let one guilty escape"). And just to add to the complexity, the film offers a truly unique villain - a pair of male/female Siamese twins, the sister often goading her brother over his inability to understand the woman he loves. The finale is certainly unusually ambitious, and can be seen either as a fantasy battle or as a physical realization of the hero's nervous breakdown: either way, it offers a welcome level of emotional weight to what could easily have been clich?d fare. It's a film that has a lot working against it, but it lingers in the memory long after it's over.
Description of The Bride With White Hair
Ronny Yu (The Bride of Chucky, The Phantom Lover, Warriors Of Virtue) directs this highly operatic fable based on a well-known martial arts novel with LESLIE CHEUNG (Temptress Moon, Farewell, My Concubine) and BRIGITTE LIN (Dragon Inn, Deadful Melody) as doomed lovers caught in the crossfire of warring clans. With beautiful cinematography by PETER PAU (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and over-the-top action sequences, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR is one of the best swordplay fantasy film ever made.General DVDs
- Genres > Action & Adventure
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- Sword & Sorcery
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- General
- Yu, Ronny
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