User Reviews

Who would have thought that Zhang Yimou, once art house darling and for trying too hard at the martial arts genre, could be capable of pulling off an all-out, slapstick black comedy with A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop? It certainly took my by surprise, and showed that he's more than willing and capable of stepping outside his comfort zone, to remake what's essentially The Coen Brother's Blood Simple, albeit set in a period Chinese era and in context as well, with the bar in an unnamed Texas town becoming a noodle shop out in a desert.

And paying homage to The Coens isn't just the only one here. Curiously, the finale sequence was very similar to how Danny Boyle decided to end Slumdog Millionaire, with an out of place song and dance sequence that became more absurd as the clip ticked by. Serving little purpose other than to get everyone lip sync, dance, spin some dough, break the 4th fall and essentially telling us that everyone had a swell time making the film, I thought this could be done without since the end was quite pitch perfect.

Beginning with an introduction to the important plot element of introducing a gun into the story, a group of Persian merchants come into Wang's (Ni Dahong) noodle shop to sell some wares, and ultimately Wang's Wife (Yan Ni) decides to buy a three-barrelled gun. Nobody knows what for, and a cannon demonstration brings forth the local police, whose chief investigator Zhang (Sun Honglei) gets engaged in an expensive scheme by Wang to finish off his adulterous wife and her lover, employee Li (Xiao Shen-Yang). But of course things never go according to plan, especially when everyone has their own agenda, and it becomes one heck of a comedic blood bath with motivations questioned, and you the audience left wondering just how everyone will get out of this mess.

Zhang Yimou once again goes for very saturated colour schemes for his films, from the rich blues of the skies to the orange-brown sands of the desert land, and this time too keeping his characters in single-toned striking colours. If anyone doubts the director in being able to helm a comedy, the opening scene itself will allay those fears, and indeed much of the physical comedy come thanks to the wonderful casting, especially that of the two bumbling shop assistants caught up in the complicated events only because they're looking toward settling their back pay.

It highlights how men become easily tempted by money, the root of all evil, when faced with bucket-loads of them, and how coincidences play a huge part in getting the characters where they end up, with each unfortunate moment ending in becoming a corpse (yes, there will be blood, and death) in a seemingly convoluted narrative that has to be seen to be believed the kind of rich writing which can pull it off. But what I enjoyed more, is how modern day devices are given the old fashioned treatment, such as the police "siren" - horse mounted and wind-generated - and a combination lock, designed with an abacus, no less!

A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop may seem like a less than epic film from Zhang Yimou, but it sure is a lot of fun delivered by its outstanding casting who seem all too comfortable in dishing out black and physical humour. Recommended, just so you know that the director has the bandwidth to do a lot more than what his filmography thus far has pigeon-holed him into.

Zhang's latest is a remake of the Coen Brothers' debut film, Blood Simple. It's a slightly more comic adaptation, set in the distant past in the beautiful Gobi (?) desert. It opens wonderfully with the beautiful colors and impeccable cinematography that have always been a trademark of Zhang Yimou. Unfortunately, when it gets into the Blood Simple plot, it becomes very mechanical. I'd say that it lacks suspense because I know the story, but I've seen Blood Simple half a dozen times and it holds up every time. Every time, the tautness of the plot works. There's just something a little bland about this adaptation. I'd still moderately recommend it for the visuals, and the vibrant opening sequence, where the titular woman (Ni Yan, who is pretty good though she can be annoying at times, too) buys the titular gun from a wacky Persian salesman.

Did you know that Yimou Zhang remade the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple" in China? In some quarters it's known as "Yimou Zhang's Blood Simple" while elsewhere it has been rechristened "A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop". Yimou, of course, was at one time a director to be reckoned with, perhaps more famous internationally than even the Coens are now, (his "Raise the Red Lantern" is one of the masterpieces of world cinema), so we had every right to have had high hopes of this remake of what was a brilliant, if minor, Coen Brothers classic. Unfortunately, this is much closer to a black farce with none of the terror of the first "Blood Simple".

Visually it's a terrific looking film, which is as we might expect from its director. Few directors in the history of cinema have used colour as expressively as Yimou but there's no substance here. This is just a piece of pulp fiction Chinese-style with the comedy falling flat and the suspense singularly lacking. Today the Coen Brothers' film is now considered one of the great debuts in American film and it will be remembered as such long after this is forgotten.

'A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP': Three and a Half Stars (Out of Five)

Chinese remake of the Coen brothers first film 'BLOOD SIMPLE', this one is set in 19th century China as opposed to 1980's Texas. The film is directed by Yimou Zhang (who directed such popular and critical acclaimed films as 'HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS', 'HERO' and 'CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER') and it's quite a departure from his older work. Zhang says 'BLOOD SIMPLE' is one of his favorite films and claims the Coens wrote to him after seeing his version and expressed how much they loved it. It's written by Jianquan Shi and Jing Shang and stars Ni Yan, Honglei Sun, Xiao Shen-Yang and Dahong Ni.

The original Chinese title of the film is 'A SIMPLE NOODLE STORY', it was changed to 'A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP' for it's international release. It's set in a small desert town where a man named Wang (Ni) runs a successful noodle shop. He purchased his young beautiful wife (Yan) several years earlier and beats her every night. His wife is having an affair with a servant at the noodle shop named Li (Shen-Yang) and when Wang finds out about the affair things get ugly. Wang enlists the help of a local police detective (Sun) to help him carry out a plan of revenge. Things of course become complicated and bloody.

The film is an odd mix of dark action thriller and screwball comedy. The slapstick jokes aren't exactly my taste in humor but the action scenes are cool and the suspense is intense. It does drag on a little here and there but for the most part the action / crime drama aspect of the film is effective. It's also often visually stunning with plenty of beautiful scenery and elaborate effects. It's not nearly as epic and breathtaking as Zhang's other films but I think it's a nice surprise change for him. By no means is it great or as classic as the original, of course, but it's still a remake worth checking out.

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It starts just as a spaghetti western, but then comes a parody of spaghettis and samurai films with minimal use of dialogue and excessive extravaganza of imagery. While the scope of the film seems unbelievable, a little, simple story revolving some stupid stereotypes is going on. Starting with buying an imported gun, the premise recalls the emergence of modernism in traditional, moralist society as it happens in too many samurai ventures, but the concept is contrarily based on the consequences of reliance on such bad habits as greed and jealousy. Not as promising as his RAISE THE RED LANTERN and JU DUO, not inspiring as his LA VIE and HERO, Zhang Yimou's A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP is an eccentric experience by a cineaste assumed as a master: crazy, wild and frantic, but not trying to tell a story in the size of epic

Wow. A boring comedy. My movie companion and I each thought of walking out early but didn't realize it until we compared notes at the end. I heard very few chuckles from the rest of the audience, so maybe everybody there wanted to leave long before the credits rolled. The characters were so cartoonish and one dimensional that I wasn't even interested in seeing what happened to them. It was like watching a Three Stooges movie that went on for far too long. It could have used some of the actual Stooges too, rather than the stooges who populate this lushly filmed laugh-deprived mess.

Supposedly this is a remake of Blood Simple. I didn't see Blood Simple. I don't think I ever will.

It's like this: Whether you know what goes into constructing a story because you've done so yourself or because you've just seen and/or read so many of them that the formulas are embedded in your mind, a lot of times it's tough not to look where they don't mean for you to look, the marionette wires maneuvering it, the groundwork holding it all up. When you remake a merely twenty-year-old cult classic by filmmakers with an enormous cult following, a story everybody knows, it's one thing to tell the story in a different style, or to change certain things, but anachronizing everything to an arbitrarily different time period, culture and characters, we are only really looking for all the anachronisms, waiting for them, being let down, occasionally being gratified.

The time period is never specified, but what I expected was going to lead to interesting dramatic twists on the Coens' plot was that it begins with the sale of a gun, which the cheating wife and the ridiculous slapstick moron noodle-makers find foreign and unheard-of. The gun is apparently a pretty new invention. But Yimou, who normally cares profoundly about his characters, loses his passionate emotional dominion over his actors. He dries out the original's sultriness, trades humid night for arid day, and strains for slapstick. That would be perfectly fine if he traded those elements in for something just as or hopefully more effective, but he does not.

The Coens' original Gothic film noir, fanged and toxic like snake venom, dwindles here to the point of amateur slapstick. Though the exterior shots make almost psychedelically atmospheric use of red and orange sandstone, day for night, sunrise and sunset, the characters are never more than ugly, overwrought cartoons. I'll admit that Blood Simple was not the quintessence of character arc. Nobody really seemed to change in that film, despite having a wryly farcical lack of conception as to what's happening. So at the outset of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, when the adulterous lover, originally played by John Getz, is a redefining coward, I was pleased, because, knowing what this character must later do, I felt I was in for a true character transformation. To describe the outcome without spoilers: No such luck.

Aside from its inevitable comparison---one of the reasons, in hindsight, it's fated to be a letdown---Noodle Shop is simultaneously frantic and dull, with no hint of the restraint or meticulous concern with form exhibited in Yimou's own earlier blockbusters. Like Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower, and even as early as Ju Dou, the stars of the show are ultimately Zhao Xiaoding's mostly gorgeous cinematography, Tao Jing's evocative sound design and Yimou's choice of otherworldly locations. But all its visual brightness and tonal goofiness are far from either the literal or conceptual darkness of the fundamental story. Most damning is that the effort to recreate the remarkable final shot of Blood Simple is so tacky and clumsy that I reflexively sighed in revulsion. Zhang needs to reconnect with the fierce, principled, humanistic sensibility that made him one of China's finest film artists.

So the result of this uneasy mix of ironic screwball affectation, particularly evident in the big comic close-ups, and Zhang's majestic but mostly show-offy imagery is triteness, artifice, unevenness, and pretension so immoderate and pointless as to have defiantly stylish interest. If the cast were comprised of John Waters, Elvira, Pee-Wee Herman and RuPaul, it would be less kitschy.

What an odd movie. The normally brilliant Yimou Zhang comes up with a very odd remake of the Coen Brothers overrated movie Wise Blood. It's a strange, slapsticky black comedy with no consistency of character or tone. While there are good performances by Ni Yan and Honglei Sun, they don't really belong in the same movie, and neither performance fits with the very odd one from Xiao Shen-Yang. The slapstick is often too broad (although there's a brilliant comedic scene involving making noodles) and the quick shifts in mood seem unaccountable.

All this movie has going for it are the visuals, which are stunning. It is a really amazing looking movie. But that's it.

I saw this in the cinema yesterday without even knowing it was a Yimou Zhang movie, my friend told me afterwards that it was a Yimou film and i couldn't really believe him. It seems Yimou Zhang is looking for something new to do because is different that anything i've ever seen from him. To start with i haven't seen the original form the Coen brothers but this was pretty much a comedy with quite some slapstick and i don't know if the original is that way too. The film is OK but is missing what makes Zhang's previous movies good i cant put my finger on it but i didn't think Zhang did a great job on this, maybe because the fact he is new to comedy. The actors give a solid performance but can't lift the movie to higher heights its just an average movie for a boring Sunday to me.I must say i did get a few very good laughs out of it although sometimes in between the funny bits it seemed to turn into a drama which didn't really help it at all.Zhang perhaps could have focused on just the comedy or drama instead of trying to mix which didn't work out in the end. So in the end its an average movie but far below Zhang's capability as a gifted film maker.

It's considered by the main stream media that this movie is a break-through of Zhang, as well as a master piece (yet another) of his too.

However considered by most of the Chinese audience with common senses, to be nothing but crap.

So do not believe what the media tells you, trust me, it's crap. If it's not for Zhang, the movie would be probably categorized as another low-budget amateur parody practice, only except the budget is not low at all.

I watched this piece of crap only to see how lame it could get. I'm pretty satisfied to experience a fantastic one-and-a-half hour watching what I'd expected: Expensive crap - that's my final rating.

The original Blood Simple is a great movie, and the changes here in setting, time and culture do work rather decently, but it's brought down by its misplaced attempt at comedy which goes on to cheapen the stakes and the tension. The characters weren't all that well written and the set designs appeared cheap. The ending too, despite being almost entirely identical to Blood Simple, fails to have the punch and impact of the original.

Overall, it's somewhat amusing, thanks mostly to the weight of its source material, but ends up being an underwhelming project on every other regard. Not in character for a Zhang Yimou movie!

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is acclaimed director Yimou Zhank's satire of the Coen Brothers' satire of film noir, Blood Simple. Although I am not a fan of Chinese humor because of its reliance on slapstick and hyperbole, it is filmed with a visual richness that Yimou has made his signature.

Older husband abuses younger wife, who is being adulterous with a handsome, cowardly servant. Her purchasing a gun sets in motion a series of revenge activities that flesh out the Coen's title.

The magnified close-ups and slow motion sequences accompanied by dazzling colors make a satisfying visual experience if the humor is just not that humorous.

Right, well "A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop" (aka "San qiang pai an jing qi") is not exactly your average Chinese movie. So chances are that the movie may be a swing and a miss for people in the audience.

I had not heard about this 2009 movie from director Yimou Zhang before 2020, when I was given a chance to sit down and watch it. Needless to say that I took the chance, as I thoroughly enjoy Asian cinema. Plus, a movie that I haven't already seen is also a factor that will make me sit down to watch it.

Now, the storyline in "A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop" was a little bit weird, I will say that much. But oddly enough, I found that approach for the storyline to actually be interesting, because it set the movie aside from many other movies to make it from the Chinese cinema. At times, though, it felt like the movie was dragging on, as not all that much was actually happening throughout the course of the storyline.

The movie was actually nicely carried by the acting performances of Shenyang Xiao, Ni Yan and Honglei Sun - all performers that I wasn't previously acquainted with.

All in all, "A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop" managed to be slightly more than an average movie. It wasn't a masterpiece, nor was it utter rubbish. I am rating the movie a six out of ten stars.

I watched this in Berlin at the Festival there and unfortunately I was sitting near an older couple who were commenting on the movie. You read this right, they were old and commenting on what happened on screen in a despicable way. Their view of the film is also the view some others have (see the rating for that), still it was a bit annoying hearing them while watching.

One of the most common point that gets criticized, is that this is not worthy for a man like Yimou. I don't think it is fair to write something like that, but it's always how a viewer will watch this movie. With what expectation one goes into a movie. If you let yourself see through the comedic set pieces and the absurdity of most of them (you could call it slapstick, a movie that would be considered a master piece in another era of movie making), you can see a very human drama.

Not only that, but many human flaws that are on display here, that are hiding behind the comedy. What is not hiding though, is the phenomenal cinematography. The colors, the set pieces (designs) and the choreographed action is all in place here. There's even symbolism here, that I didn't catch (read some of the other reviews for that, the ones with a spoiler tag). A movie that you can enjoy as a silly comedy, or as a high concept drama ... or of course dismiss entirely as "silly".

Being familiar with several of director Yimou Zhang's movies (THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, HERO, and HOUSE OF THE FLYING DAGGERS), I was frankly surprised at how restrained A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP turned out to be- but I should've known better: unlike American filmmakers (who, generally speaking, lack the savvy to do more than a single type of movie- if that), foreign filmmakers tend to be extremely versatile (Takashi Miike springs to mind). The movie is far better than the source material (the movie BLOOD SIMPLE), which serves to point up the very thing that I mentioned. Old Wang is hilarious, as are the adulterous couple (one of whom happens to be Wang's beautiful young wife), and the crooked lawman he engages to do his dirty work. All too often, dumbed down American versions of superior foreign films are released in this country; rarely, indeed, do we find superior foreign versions of average (at best) American movies.

Yimou Zhang (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower, and the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games Opening Ceremony) does things in a big way. I was interesting to see how he adapts a simple story of love and revenge, the Coen Brothers first film, Blood Simple.

It may be a simple story, but when you add Chinese costumes and brilliant cinematography in the Gobi desert, the simplest film becomes spectacular.

But, that won't save it as a story. Zhang just quite get the hang of the Coen Brothers. Characters come off looking like the Three Stooges.

It is recommended simply to get the great master in action. Watch the original if you want to see an interesting movie.

one of splendid films. for reminding of old flavor of comedy. for irony,for madness, for the circles of stories, for silk performances, for science to use tenderness and cruelty and the photography in the most inspired manner. so, a nice film. or, maybe, a happy meet with a great story and with its director. slices of western and Medieval stories and spectacular situations, beautiful fight scenes and remind of the force of...woman. so, perfect show.

more than a movie, it is a puzzle. more than a puzzle, it is a gorgeous mixture of image, set up and profound message. an old man, a young wife, the law, a shop. each in shields of a strange humor and as step to a precise science of detail. because it is a film of details and this fact could defines it as special, stupid or silly, a not complicated comedy or, maybe, a masterpiece. a film about sins in a wise manner. that fact is key of adventures, decisions and the seductive flavor of it. nothing new or complicated at first sigh. but useful. maybe only its spectacular beauty. a beauty who, in many moments, seems be magic.in its case, not the story is essential - it represents only the frame. but a kind of delicacy , from old times, to present it.

The original is junk. This one seems better. Sure, the colors, the camera, the fewer mistakes make it worth 4 stars on the IMDb scale. I mean, all this was in the House of the Flying Daggers with some more action and less of a stupid plot. For an advertisement to a detergent it would be a glorious 5 minutes, maybe even nicer than that famous 1984 Apple commercial.

The sad part is that I used to enjoy this guy's movies. But Hero was the last high, now it's downhill for him. The good side is that China is rising in quality and it's way over the average Hollywood golden productions, so there must be another director waiting in line to keep up.

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

I saw this film as a love song to the Coen brothers for their wry comedy _oeuvre_. Much like you can see _O Brother_ as a love song to country/bluegrass music; the Coens clearly are highly sophisticated musically, and can work their magic around this framework into a superb film.

Note that it is _not_ a remake; _Blood Simple_ is hardly a comedy by any measure. It was just a starting point for Yang to hang his comedy on. And what a comedy it is! Elements of traditional Chinese film comedy: the slapstick, including the bumpkin assistant Zhao with the buck teeth; the hapless Li who finally finds his gumption; the remarkable acrobatics shots with the noodle preparation; the spunky little ingénue.

The whole extended mime sequence near the end is pure Coen. The characters are gently satirized via their idiosyncratic behavior in the face of incongruous events (think Jeff Bridges in _Lebowski_.) Zhang shows us the universality of this kind of humor, born of Keaton in the silent era.

Highly recommended!