Critical Views - watching something

Ornate if overwrought, hypnotic if hysterical, dazzling if delirious, Curse of the Golden Flower takes almost everything Yimou Zhang's done with his previous wuxia films and continues to twist things in its own way; Hero looked at the genre through a lens of memory and history while House of Flying Daggers did so through a lens of romance, and so too does this one through the lens of drama.
But not the same type of drama that's present in most films, rather that of old school Shakespearean family downfall that harkens back to the ancient Greeks. ...
Here, what matters are the royalty and nothing else. ... and ultimately this is a story about how power corrupts, and the corrupt are powerful. Quite dispiriting for a folk tale.
Review by reibureibu