1. Yes, prior knowledge is a must! After first seeing Red Cliff, this white chick spent the next four months reading and watching various versions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then came back to Red Cliff and Hey Presto, it all made sense! And it was soooo good after all those other crappy versions I watched! I know that Woo views Red Cliff as an introduction to Chinese culture, but I think he doesn’t understand how little we know. And how little most of us care to know. The majority of us will need to be spoonfed the basics.

2. Yes, Cao Cao’s obsession with the wife is ridiculous. And it’s demeaning to his character. As if pure power is not motivation enough for war… Can’t he just be a normal treacherous, strategically brilliant power-monger? Axe the whole sexual obsession thing; it’s just dumb.

3. Puhleaze, John Woo’s infamous long, loving glances don’t take up that much screen time! Hey, the manly men turning their heads skyward to quietly listen to the boy play the flute was, in my opinion, way more gooshy. That’s a scene that I think could (and should) be dispensed with, along with:

4. The qin jam/bonding scene. Yes, it does explain the bond, but Woo could chop the scene up and add it into a montage of bonding/training/preparing and achieve the same result. Or something like that. I intensely disliked the music in this scene (all the music in the film, actually), so I’d love to make it go away.

5. Yes, Tony Leung needs more screen time. But Kaneshiro is indeed the hub around which all things revolve, so I very much like the idea of the Watson/Holmes relationship in a voice-over.

I am waiting for my copy of Red Cliff II to arrive, so I’ve got nothing left to say!

Great ideas for the combo “Battle of Red Cliff”. If I were Mr. Woo I’d hire you right away.

So I don’t think any additional info about the novel is necessary, the prominant characters in the novel (Kuan Yu, Chang Fei and Liu Bei) are just side characters in this chapter - which is more like a battle of wits between Zhuge and Chao Y, yes even though they are on the same side.

The rescue of Liu Bei’s son, etc — maybe that should be cut down to montage/prologue material.

For real, I agree that you could lose the music battle (but I liked it), but I think I may have to disagree about Tony Leung. Don’t get me wrong, you know he’s my man, but I would ditch all the time they take to convince Sun Quan to get with the program. Yeah, he’s the ruler and all, but I wouldn’t miss him. That’s all I’m sayin.

I think you could cut the rescue of Liu Bei’s son, just have them get the refugees out.

It should be apparent that I really don’t have any ideas. For the US, editors will cut out stuff we think should stay in, and it won’t be the same, and I’ll have to tell people to go get their own.