Tai-Pan (1986)

Best movie of this year hands down!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

It's 1839 near Canton, China. Chinese officials come to the British settlement demanding for Tai-Pan (chinese word for supreme leader) to appear before the emperor's commissioner for importing opium. Dirk Struan (Bryan Brown) goes despite his companion May-May (Joan Chen)'s warning. The commissioner orders the opium burned without compensation and all foreigners leave Canton. The foreigners retreat back to Macau. Struan sets up his new Nobel House in Hong Kong and convinces Britain to claim the land.The production looks more like a TV movie. The quality isn't there. The acting is pretty stiff. The story is even worst. This world is too complex to be simplified this way. It basically skims over such tricky issue such as the Opium War. The movie feels lifeless and overwrought.

Tai-Pan was probably too ambitious an undertaking for a film as short as just over 2 hours. Maybe a mini-series would have been the answer, but Tai-Pan certainly had the potential to be an oriental Gone With The Wind.Unrealized potential though it is. The screenplay made many references to previous events in the novel that are not shown here. We do know there's one nasty rivalry going on between Bryan Brown and John Stanton who both rose to wealth in the China trade like the protagonists in an Edna Ferber novel.Bryan Brown is the Far East version of Rhett Butler. He's built the family fortune on legal trade and illegal trade in opium. Not that opium was unknown before the British and other European powers got there, but they did turn it into a thriving business. When the Chinese government objected, the European powers took nibbles out of a prostrate and weakened state. One of those nibbles the British took was Hong Kong, spoils from the Opium War of 1841. Brown like Margaret Mitchell's Rhett Butler or the hero of many Edna Ferber books is the guy who builds what became one of the busiest trading centers on the globe.Unlike his rival Stanton, Brown's wife left him and took their small son back to the United Kingdom. Brown didn't mourn he took up with some Chinese women, they were pawns in various business negotiations. He got a son, Russell Wong, from one of them.Things get interesting when his other son arrives from Great Britain played by Tim Guinee. He's a rather uptight Victorian youth who is not pleased with the debauchery he finds and his father's part in it.Tai-Pan is exquisitely photographed with the climatic typhoon scene very well done indeed. A better screenplay would have been needed to tell this epic story.

Okay, so it was very late, and I was very tired, but I did find this entertaining, and in the end, that's all I was looking for when I was channel surfing last night.I admit that some of the accents were poor, but not any worse than Tom Cruise's 'Oirish' in Far and Away, and many other Hollywood attempts I can't be bothered to list at the moment. And though not Oscarworthy, this certainly wasn't the worst acting I've seen. I may have enjoyed it far more than it deserved, because I'm feeling really homesick for HK at the mo, and all the little things like the materials used for some of the men's waistcoats and even the skyline (wow, how much things have changed since they filmed that!) made me smile. What also made me smile was the way *SPOILER*Dirk always seemed to get wounded in the same arm....you'd think after a few fights he'd be all 'What are you doing with that gun? Watch my arm. Watch my arm. Oh, not again!' */SPOILER* I have to confess, I didn't catch all of it - only about an hour and a half - from about 5mins before *SPOILER* the fight on the boat*/SPOILER* to the end, but what I did see kept me up and wanting to see more until the end, and isn't that what filmmakers want us to do?Not the best film I've ever seen, but certainly not the worst.

I dont have much to say about this movie..It had a lot going the right way, until you hear Bryan Browns scotland accent HORRIBLE and ANNOYING ! I actually noticed he's got one look on his face through the whole movie..the type of look you see on a person who is avoiding looking straight in the cameraI saw this movie after I saw Shogun, so I had my hopes up I guess ! Go see Shogun or read the book forget about this crappy Kurosawa wannabe movieA lot of nice scenery and photography, but the rest sucks swedish meatballs..I feel sorry for the people who had to see this in the cinema and watch the whole thing. My generation had Pearl Harbor so... !!!