From the Rental Vault (2008 & 2009): Red Cliff

Realistically, if you want to know that the Oscars are lame all you have to do is watch the show. But if you'd like some more proof, watch John Woo's two-part masterpiece Red Cliff and realize that since its different parts were released in two separate years, there are two successive Best Motion Picture winners that didn't really earn their honors.

Thanks to the vagaries of the Academy nominating system, five (or recently, ten) of the movies released in the United States compete for the top award, but only five out of the every movie from everywhere else not released in English will compete for the Best Foreign Language Film. None of those movies are considered for Best Picture and none of the actors make the acting award categories. A piece on CNN's international site a couple of years ago noted that the omissions are even more apparent if we focus on solely Asian movies. If you don't want to read it all, I can sum it up in one sentence: Akira Kurosawa only has two Oscars, and one was for "lifetime achievement." In other words, ol' Oscar omits most of the movies released in the world in a given year, and that means that Slumdog Millionaire -- certainly a pretty good movie -- and The Hurt Locker -- which was above average -- went home with John Woo's statues.

Woo made his name directing high-octane crime movies in Hong Kong, essentially establishing a genre of his own that one movie writer called "Heroic Bloodshed." The lead characters may be criminals whose consciences instill in them a code of ethics that puts them afoul of less ethical conspirators or bosses, or they may be law enforcement faced with similar problems. Sometimes characters on both sides of the law will find common cause in their shared honor, but the price of their honor may be very high, in terms of personal sacrifice and violence. Woo moved to the U.S. in 1993 and continued to direct, but found the top-heavy control system of Hollywood moviemaking harder to deal with. His U.S. movies have not had the success of his Hong Kong and Taiwan-based productions.

Red Cliff was Woo's return to Chinese-language moviemaking and his first historical epic -- in Woo fashion, he dove headfirst into the deep end. The Battle of Red Cliffs (or the Battle of Chibi) was a decisive battle in 208-209 AD that moved China from the Han Dynasty period to the era of the Three Kingdoms. A fictionalized telling of the story is a part of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Chinese culture's most important classic novels.

Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) has manipulated the weak emperor into declaring war on two southern provinces, led by warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Cao Cao's armies defeat Liu Bei, but Liu manages to retreat with most of his soldiers and many refugees. They seek an alliance with Sun Quan to rally and throw Cao Cao back to his lands in the north. Strategist Zhuge Lang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) meets first with Sun Quan but realizes he will need to persuade the viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) to his cause in order to convince the young and uncertain ruler. Even united, the two southern armies are outnumbered by the massive land and naval forces at Cao Cao's command, and they must use every bit of wit, cleverness and heart at their command as they make their stand at the Red Cliffs along the Yangtze River.

Reading that, you may wonder how Woo could make a four and a half hour movie from it. Some of the expansive story comes from the director's fictionalizing of the battle, introducing elements and characters who may not have actually existed. But the bulk roots in Woo's refusal to create characters without dimension and his expertise at adding those layers. The rousing speech before a battle is kind of standard in these stories but Woo puts his in the mouth of the villainous Cao Cao as he rallies his sick troops. They respond, even though what we know of Cao Cao makes us wonder if he even meant the words he said.

Woo also takes as much time as he needs to show us things we need to know, rather than tell us. Zhuge Lang and Zhou Yu develop a deep and respectful friendly rivalry that begins with a shared love of music. Rather than have the pair talk about that, Woo shows it, starting from a scene where both play the guqin, an ancient Chinese musical instrument that can produce sounds not unlike a slide guitar. As two Chinese nobles go down to the crossroads sixteen and a half centuries before Robert Johnson, they play in both complement and competition to each other and we see that these two men will be rivals as well as friends.

We know Zhou Yu is on the side of right when we see one of his generals bow to a peasant whose stock was stolen by soldiers as the property is returned. He and his allies see their power as their way to protect those who have little else to protect them, while Cao Cao sees it as a way to gain what he wants. The more powerful army will have to struggle to overcome the arrogance of its commander and the obstacles it creates.

All of this happens thanks to an excellent cast, with the stalwart Leung and and wry Kaneshiro as standouts. Their top-notch work, combined with the nuance of Zhang Fengyi's Cao Cao and the grace notes of other cast members with smaller but no less vital roles mean that Red Cliff's acting takes no back seat to its action, which is as usual superbly conceived and visualized by Woo.

Red Cliff isn't perfect -- there's some excess in the number of great fighting heroes who serve under Liu Bei and that means we get a couple more battle sequences than it really needs. But those missteps are rare and they don't erase the impression that we're watching two of the best movies of 2008 and 2009 -- whether Oscar saw them or not.