Wonderfully offbeat film!

The greatest movie ever!

Masterful Movie

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Fun film. Weird, jumps around, but I thought it was a worthy use of 5 or 6 dollars it cost.I have a huge collection of various martial arts films and watch that stuff all the time. I like the butcher, he always gets run over by some dude on a horse. The chef was pretty involving, preparing the perfect dish to serve to the master. The swordsman, well I guess he got what he deserved for being so bold. The spoiler is he goes up against some other swordsmen, but the old sword maker cheated him when he built the ultimate sword, and he dies.I thought it was good for a few laughs, but it is hard to follow. Use your imagination to fill in the confusing parts and all is well.

The Chinese movie industries have been hesitating at the puzzling crossroad of "Quo Vadis?" They really don't know how to choose the right direction of making decent movies, how to write irrational screenplays with logic story lines, how to transform a screenplay into a concrete decent film with believable characters who could connect with the consumers/viewers. There are lot of so-called new generation screenplay writers and directors with certain special connections with filthily rich people who desperately want to add another auspicious title as "movie producer" to their collections. Thus resulted in having such screenplay writers, director and producers of one of the most pathetic and messy Chinese movies in 21st century."Dao jiàn xiào(2010)" is such a movie that you could use it to test how tough your nerves could be, what kind of depth of your patience could reach and endure, what kind of logic reasoning ability you have, what kind of absorbing ability and flexibility to deal with ridiculousness and absurdity and, most of all, how you consider to waste 1hr32mins of your life on planet Earth is nothing but.What a mess, folks. Only the sound track, the choose of the music, would drive you crazy. The poor crafted dialog, the exaggeration and the pretentiousness of all the actors, the obvious self-indulgent but absolutely out of controlled directing....on and on and all summing up with just one conclusion: "Where is the logic and what's going on?" The only question after you rejected the DVD came up on your dizzy brain was: "How dare you call this a Movie!?" The screenplay(if there really had one) writer(s) and the director both have to be banned and banished from the Chinese movie industries permanently.NO STAR should waste on this mess.

A hapless butcher (Liu Xiaoye) is in infatuated with a courtesan named Mei (Kitty Zhang Yuqi). Her charms are unworldly. In his way is the infamous fighter Big Beard. The butcher doesn't stand a chance. When he happens upon a stranger with a magical cleaver, he suddenly has the means to win. Before he uses it, he's told the magical blade isn't for killing and the blade's origin is explained. As the title suggests, the rest of the story involves a chef and a swordsman (Ashton Xu).Set in ancient china, this is a highly stylized version of the past. Director Wuershan hails from the commercial ad world and it's obvious. You can tell he makes ads featuring lots of slow motion, fast edits, bellowing fabric and soaring arias. The film is full of gimmicks. This includes, black and white sections with red highlights à la Sin City, animations, video game sequences, Taiwanese 3D news renderings and cartoons. Audio wise there are funky hip hop beats, techno tracks and a horrific Mandarin rap performed by the Bordello staff. Gimmicks or not, he knows how to compose a gorgeous visual. The images are great, the problem is the rapid fire delivery approach of it.The story unfolds like a Russian doll; stories are nestled within each other. It's not a bad concept except only one of the three stories is watchable. The other two stories suffer from too much whiz-bang effects that leaves no room for digestion. They're simply over wrought, over edited and over produced. When the story settles down, it's in the middle part featuring Ando Masanobu as the chef. It is by far the best story of the three and if the movie is judged on this part, it would be a very good one. Unfortunately it's surrounded by the frantic blur of the rest of the film.excerpt from www.cinemaliberated.com

The first few minutes of THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN gave me pause: the hip-hop-rock scoring, the one- and two-second cutting rhythms, the alternating between color, black & white, and artificially colored black and white, the use of kooky on-screen graphics. Everything just screamed that this would be a 90 minute assault on the senses from a director who probably had a lot of experience with music videos. And that's basically what it is, but where Hong Kong director Andrew Lau tried this fast-cutting bullshiht with THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN, more or less ruining a story and trivializing characters that didn't deserve it, Wuershan's THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN is a gonzo story stocked to capacity with a grimy grotesquerie of characters that all but demand an addled directorial style to give them life.Expanded from a fiction piece from a magazine (according to the director), the movie is a story within a story within another story in which three cursed owners of a near-mythical blade (forged from a ball of iron originally melted down from the weapons of many powerful swordsman) relate in flashback the stories of the how they came to possess the knife. Reaching the third tale, the film then boomerangs back through the climaxes of each story to bring us back to the present. Sounds a bit like INCEPTION, right? Only with flashbacks instead of dreams. The two films were shot independently of one another, making the similarity in structure a pure coincidence.Everything but the kitchen sink is in here: a brothel madam and her charges berate "The Butcher" with a catchy modern-style hip-hop rap number (so yes, this is partly a musical!); crudely but cleverly animated children's sketches illustrate "The Chef's" flashing back to his father being killed by a corpulent eunuch for not satisfying his finicky culinary demands. Duped by his beloved, "The Butcher" skirmishes with her true beau in a Streetfighter-like video game scenario, complete with life-meters and flashing scores. This is truly unlike any other film made in mainland China to date, and while I wouldn't want to see an abundance of punked-out period pieces like this from the country, it is a long-overdue antidote to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of self-important, tiresomely nationalistic, cast-of-millions costumers that have flowed out of the country for nearly a decade now. This is like a breath of fresh air, even if much of it was previously exhaled by the likes of Takashi Miike in Japan. The fact remains, nobody was doing anything this over-the-top in China, and one wonders if this picture won't mark a turning point away from action pictures that do nothing but thump their celluloid chests. Executive produced by BOURNE IDENTITY director Doug Liman, though I suspect he attached his name after the project was in the can, as the version screened at TIFF also had the full 20th Century Fox (Asia) logo attached.