From my favorite movies..

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

I purchased this movie from Amazon because I overly enjoy Asian cinema and also because Maggie Q is in the movie. From the DVD cover it would seem that this is a Chinese epic movie, but the truth is far from it. This is a story of doomed love and an ancient curse. Yeah, still does sound interesting, but this movie was one of the slowest and boring Asian movies that I have seen for quite a while.The storyline never really got up into proper speed to make it interesting, and the plot was just too dull. And this was ultimately the downfall of the movie.As for the acting, well lets just say that there was nothing impressive or memorable about this. And Maggie Q wasn't up to her usual level here; perhaps because she had nothing to work with from the script.There were some adequately executed scenes throughout the movie, but the overall result was just a slow paced movie which had very little to offer, and as such then not even those good scenes really did much to raise the level of the movie.Of course it is utopia to think that every Asian movie will be great, and "The Warrior and the Wolf" was a wide swing and a miss.

I watched now "The Warrior and the Wolf" two times and it worked rather well for me as an art film.For me the film is structured in three parts: 1) war 2) warrior and woman 3) folk tale about humans shape-changed into wolves.The time-structure of the first part "war" is not easy to follow at first viewing, but on the other hand not as hard as I feared from the reviews. The first part reminds me very much of the first part in Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)", where a scholar from central China is shaped into a warrior by a general in the western out-reaches of the Chinese empire soon to be overrun by tribal people. This part has the same feeling of following a whirling leaf in a storm.The second part "warrior and woman" is still reminding me of the scholar's story in "Tun-huang", because the scholar-warrior finds a princess, hides her in a store-house, and finally forces intercourse, after which she considers herself his wife. I like the second part best, because it shows the strongest acting as the actors portray very conflicting emotions. Odagiri has convinced me now in three different eccentric roles: mad samurai, uninformed prince, peace-loving warrior. Some reviewers wrote about repeated rape and Stockholm syndrome. My impressions were more that here animalistic behaviour overruled humanist behaviour. The woman is very conflicted. Maggie Q. is somewhat less convincing than Jo Odagiri, but her character is the more difficult to portray. She is partly a wolf and partly human and thus her humanity leads her to moral behaviour while her wolf nature leads her to quite different expressions by which she lures the warrior to the wolf side.The third part, the folk tale, is for me the weakest. Not in the sense of the director's vision but in the sense of handicraft. It uses cgi and trained animals, but nevertheless it's simply a bit less convincing because those "tricks" are still discernible and thus a bit irritating to me. I can infer what the director wanted to tell, and that works quite well for me, but since I feel irritated by the artefacts of make-belief I perceive the last part as the least perfect.Overall for me the film has very good pictures, good direction, and great acting. I have not read the original short story, but by comparing Yasushi Inoue's novel "Tun-huang (1959)" and short-story "The Hunting Gun (1949)" with the film I think that the director captured Yasushi's style quite well.In my view the film might be quite attractive for people who like modern poetry, in the sense of feeling comfortable with visualisations based on mental associations and produced by a disjunctive structure. The film "The Warrior and the Wolf (2009)" reminded me in style and nihilistic atmosphere of the films "Valhalla Rising (2009)" and "Dust (2001)", but worked decidedly better for me than these two.

THE WARRIOR AND THE WOLF is a beautiful film to look at. The lush cinematography with its wide landscape shots of endless expanses of wilderness, hilly terrain and distant mountains is a glory to behold. The colours are vivid and the director has a real eye for nature's beauty. Wolves play a large part in the film's background and they've never looked so appealing as they do here. The addition of a wolf pup to the storyline only adds to that feeling.A shame then that in all other respects this is a dog, rather than a wolf, of a film. It starts off muddled, with murky choppily-edited battle sequences and a disjointed feel to the narrative. The erstwhile hero of the piece is a pacifist shepherd one moment and a ruthless leader of men the next. I didn't have a clue what was going on in regards to the historical backdrop and it's always a giveaway of poor writing when they have to keep including on-screen text at regular intervals to tell the viewer what's supposed to be going on.After half an hour or so of this, the action shifts to a supposedly cursed village where the lead character meets a woman and rapes her. Then he rapes her again, and again after that. Eventually, the woman falls in love with her attacker, a plot point that is so repellent as to be purely offensive. The ending of the film just peters out with no real explanation of what's happened or what we just watched. Odagiri plays the lead with the same stony-faced expression from beginning to end and Maggie Q is relegated to a window-dressing role with pretty much all of her scenes taking place in the bedroom. If you're looking for a decent Chinese historical then give this one a wide berth.

Like the title says, this is one of those movies. Good attempt with many bits of good elements but collaged together into a mess that depending on your tolerance, leave you unsatisfied at the very least.First off, great scenery though heavily filtered that end up ruined the scenes.(At least for me). Music sounds great and make everything more atmospheric. Acting wasn't terrible but could definitely improved. Set design and everything else props wise looks solid. The only big thing then is how the director delivered the story through the film. I haven't read the novel by the original author which this movie is based on so I can't compare. Without getting into too much detail, the story sets during the Han Dynasty of China, revolving a man's journey and encounter at the western frontier where nomadic tribes kept pestering the empire's borders. The focus of the story is on the literal "transformation" of this man before, during and after. The movie involves a lot of fast and short cuts that I personally dislike. There were quite a few of shuffling around the time of the events to fast track the experience of the character(At the start of the movie)to the audience which might turn some people off but I actually liked. Though the cuts were rather short but the movie was a slow one which isn't a bad thing and I honestly liked the first half of the movie with its little guessing game of what happened and some rather good exploitations of inner emotions but as the movie went on, it started to go down hill, eventually ended up in a mess of a movie with too much extra footage that felt shouldn't be there and the ending made for a lot to be desired.This is a movie that had good material to be sure. I am sure the novel would be better than this but this film isn't the worst either. In short, if the film had better editing and "tiding" up, it could have been an enjoyable movie.So take that with a grain of salt.