Watch The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman For Free

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It won't let me post this anywhere sans mobile phone number so I'm posting it here...I love the music from this movie. The song that was sung in the brothel was called 'zai zai'. It's an ensemble song and the lead singer from the song is Yan Jixuan. Contributing are I believe Pan Shuai, Liu Aotian, Liu Shengtian and Feng Xu. Copyright belonging to Beijing Jingwen Record Co. The ending credits song is called 'eaten yet' and is sung by Wang Xiadou. Both through CMCB. Both arranged by Wang Yuanzhao.Sorry for posting this here in the review section, but it is a review of the music. For anyone who loved the music as much as I did and is seeking the ost, I hope this helps!

Fun film. Weird, jumps around, but I thought it was a worthy use of 5 or 6 dollars it cost.I have a huge collection of various martial arts films and watch that stuff all the time. I like the butcher, he always gets run over by some dude on a horse. The chef was pretty involving, preparing the perfect dish to serve to the master. The swordsman, well I guess he got what he deserved for being so bold. The spoiler is he goes up against some other swordsmen, but the old sword maker cheated him when he built the ultimate sword, and he dies.I thought it was good for a few laughs, but it is hard to follow. Use your imagination to fill in the confusing parts and all is well.

A hapless butcher (Liu Xiaoye) is in infatuated with a courtesan named Mei (Kitty Zhang Yuqi). Her charms are unworldly. In his way is the infamous fighter Big Beard. The butcher doesn't stand a chance. When he happens upon a stranger with a magical cleaver, he suddenly has the means to win. Before he uses it, he's told the magical blade isn't for killing and the blade's origin is explained. As the title suggests, the rest of the story involves a chef and a swordsman (Ashton Xu).Set in ancient china, this is a highly stylized version of the past. Director Wuershan hails from the commercial ad world and it's obvious. You can tell he makes ads featuring lots of slow motion, fast edits, bellowing fabric and soaring arias. The film is full of gimmicks. This includes, black and white sections with red highlights à la Sin City, animations, video game sequences, Taiwanese 3D news renderings and cartoons. Audio wise there are funky hip hop beats, techno tracks and a horrific Mandarin rap performed by the Bordello staff. Gimmicks or not, he knows how to compose a gorgeous visual. The images are great, the problem is the rapid fire delivery approach of it.The story unfolds like a Russian doll; stories are nestled within each other. It's not a bad concept except only one of the three stories is watchable. The other two stories suffer from too much whiz-bang effects that leaves no room for digestion. They're simply over wrought, over edited and over produced. When the story settles down, it's in the middle part featuring Ando Masanobu as the chef. It is by far the best story of the three and if the movie is judged on this part, it would be a very good one. Unfortunately it's surrounded by the frantic blur of the rest of the film.excerpt from www.cinemaliberated.com

The first few minutes of THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN gave me pause: the hip-hop-rock scoring, the one- and two-second cutting rhythms, the alternating between color, black & white, and artificially colored black and white, the use of kooky on-screen graphics. Everything just screamed that this would be a 90 minute assault on the senses from a director who probably had a lot of experience with music videos. And that's basically what it is, but where Hong Kong director Andrew Lau tried this fast-cutting bullshiht with THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN, more or less ruining a story and trivializing characters that didn't deserve it, Wuershan's THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN is a gonzo story stocked to capacity with a grimy grotesquerie of characters that all but demand an addled directorial style to give them life.Expanded from a fiction piece from a magazine (according to the director), the movie is a story within a story within another story in which three cursed owners of a near-mythical blade (forged from a ball of iron originally melted down from the weapons of many powerful swordsman) relate in flashback the stories of the how they came to possess the knife. Reaching the third tale, the film then boomerangs back through the climaxes of each story to bring us back to the present. Sounds a bit like INCEPTION, right? Only with flashbacks instead of dreams. The two films were shot independently of one another, making the similarity in structure a pure coincidence.Everything but the kitchen sink is in here: a brothel madam and her charges berate "The Butcher" with a catchy modern-style hip-hop rap number (so yes, this is partly a musical!); crudely but cleverly animated children's sketches illustrate "The Chef's" flashing back to his father being killed by a corpulent eunuch for not satisfying his finicky culinary demands. Duped by his beloved, "The Butcher" skirmishes with her true beau in a Streetfighter-like video game scenario, complete with life-meters and flashing scores. This is truly unlike any other film made in mainland China to date, and while I wouldn't want to see an abundance of punked-out period pieces like this from the country, it is a long-overdue antidote to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of self-important, tiresomely nationalistic, cast-of-millions costumers that have flowed out of the country for nearly a decade now. This is like a breath of fresh air, even if much of it was previously exhaled by the likes of Takashi Miike in Japan. The fact remains, nobody was doing anything this over-the-top in China, and one wonders if this picture won't mark a turning point away from action pictures that do nothing but thump their celluloid chests. Executive produced by BOURNE IDENTITY director Doug Liman, though I suspect he attached his name after the project was in the can, as the version screened at TIFF also had the full 20th Century Fox (Asia) logo attached.