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Excellent adaptation.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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!

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.

It's my first review on IMDb, because I was riled by cheeky Chinese media. For the sake of their own investment movie "shi yue wei chen", they criticized "San Qiang" was dirty, depraved and evil rubbish. It's ridiculous. Although wrapped in absurd comedy, the movie is serious and tragedy fable in essence. As we know, the movie is based from Coen Brother's movie "Blood Simple", Director Zhang enriched the plot and adjusted the role's character, which made the story more compact and delicate, but the theme "Sometimes seeing is believing maybe wrong" was kept. As stand-by, we know the whole process; As the party, they were all treated as the experiment objectives. I appreciated the details of this movies, I wish my explanation could help the views to understand the story better:1.Why the wife of boss only accepted the quoted price of 3 Guan for the gun not 4 or more? It just took the boss 3 Guan and 800 wen to buy his wife, the wife could not admit the value of the gun is higher than herself, so she only offered 3 Guan.2.Please pay attention to the bell over the cashbox, which was touched twice by the killer and counterjumper. Both of them were dead at last. The bell reminds me of the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls 3.Some people said they could not understand why the killer used arrow not falchion to kill Li Si. One side the arrow will be more secluded than falchion, on the other hand, as Chinese proverb goes "It is easy to dodge a gun thrust in the open , but difficult to guard against an arrow shot from hiding."4."15 guan" which is not only a figure the killer quoted, but also honor to Chinese traditional opera"15 Guan", which is a miserable tragedy.Gernerally speaking, the movie is full of symbolistic things. If you are immersed in the movie, you would be find more fun.The visual effect of the movie is stunning and created a absurd drama world. I was impressed by the amazing feeling and become a fan of director.Perhaps the movie is not perfect, but it is so precious for an old man of good reputation to try a new style at his 60s', so I gave it 10/10.

It's almost like history now talking about ZHANG Yimou's degenerating from quality films to trash like "House of flying daggers" (2004) and super-trash like "Curse of the golden flower" (2006). But at least there is "Riding alone" (2005) in which he tries to bring the audience a human story, although the style has a faint trace of Hollywood. "Noodle Story" is yet another welcome attempt from Zhang, a mixed bag of outlandish farce, black humour, dark tragedy and tense thriller.The opening credit clearly announces this movie as an adaptation from the Coen Brother's "Blood simple" (1984). In this adaptation, a solitary noodle shop in a forsaken wilderness on the Silk Road provides the theatre. The characters, though simple folks, are varied and not quite one-dimensional. The foxy, cheating wife of the owner turns out to be sympathy-worthy as one who has suffered for ten years under a sadistic Scrooge of a husband. Her sissy, sheepish young lover, one of the employees, later rises to the occasion when things get serious. The other two employees are more along the line of caricatures, but still caricatures with lives and characters of their own. There's also a villain with a menacing dark aura.Those who have seen "Blood Simple" will know that the plot is not complicated, but sufficient to generate scenes of various moods. This movie brings these scenes together without making the whole works look awkward. The casting is excellent. An extra bonus is the grotesque yet beautiful landscape that doesn't seem to belong to this Earth. The song and dance number during the end credit, which should not be missed, is probably inspired by Kitano's Zatoichi, which is probably inspired in turn by Bollywood.