Hey man, your loss. I gave it four whole stars on Netflix. (Although Netflix thought I would give it five.)
We should start a thread listing the films we gave 4 or 5 stars to on netflix.
…just look for “Italian” and “Sex comedy” and you’ll see mine.
(i keed, i keed)
I’m disappointed, but not surprised, to hear that it focuses more on kung fu
But is the kung fu any good? Most TV martial arts is rubbish, but I’d be up for watching a show with good choreography/performances.
It’s pretty decent. They did ramp it up a bit towards the end, but it was primarily the domain of Hundred Eyes, Mei Lin and the Chancellor. I would say it’s on par with the average Chinese action flick. It’s not quite the magic realism of a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it does come a little close at times. I enjoyed it, although I preferred the political intrigue and familial plots more.
On a Jet Li scale with The One at the bottom and, say, Once Upon A Time In China or Fist of Legend at the top, where would you put it? And is it wire-fu or more grounded?
Aren’t all Jet Li movies wire-fu?
Yeah, sorry that wasn’t clear: the scale was intended to be a strictly quality one rather than a fully grounded to fully floaty one. If you want a wire-fu scale, shall we say Ip Man to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
Closer to Ip Man than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I would say. No one actually flew. It was mostly just acrobatic.
Oddly enough, I ended up liking Hundred Eyes as a character. I thought he’d be the weak point for me as he was kind of a cliche character. But the actor did a good job of adding some charisma to the role.
Got through the whole season. I really enjoyed it - not the best show I’ve ever seen but a very solid B+. A must watch if you enjoy Kung Fu or this style of show.
Solid B+/A- for me, too. A really good cast of supporting characters, including Hundred Eyes, the Empress Chiba, and Byamba, the Klingon. Hell, Marco Polo was probably the character that I cared for the least, followed by the Princess from the Blue Bayou, though neither were terrible.
The Kung Fu was high-quality and used sparing, really only amounting to maybe a combined total of 10-15 minutes across the whole season.
I’ve watched 2.5 episodes so far and I’m not really digging it, though I understand from the AV Club it gets better. So far it’s too much of a mishmash of genres, with HBO style gratuitous nudity just because they can, and the dialogue at times is really bad. They actually had someone say “So it has come to this” in the second episode.
Also, while it’s by no means exclusive to this show, the haphazard accents are really offputting. Half of the actors are either doing, or trying to do, “authentic” accents, and half are just speaking in straight-up British accents, with no attempt to explain it in-universe. It’s so jarring. Having finished the third episode, I think I’m calling it a day. I just don’t give a shit about the characters, especially Polo, and the rest of it isn’t good enough to make up for that. And there’s lots of better stuff in my backlog.
The accent stuff I’ve learned to ignore. So many shows especially period pieces are like this I’ve gotten used to it by now.
The gratuitous nudity more or less gets dialed down by the end of the season. I think there were even a couple episodes without any nips, but the rest of the things you don’t like about it pretty much hold all the way through. It wasn’t great, but I’m pretty much a sucker for anything set in “ancient” or “medieval” “place”.
B+ sounds about right for me. I’m partial to ancient/medieval settings too and I think they actually put a lot of effort into the setting and it showed. The performances overall weren’t great, but I really enjoyed watching both empresses as well as hundred eyes. I’d recommend it, but can completely understand people bouncing off.
I’ll watch it for the costumes and settings and that glorious title sequence alone. Throw in some intrigue and sex and it’s like the Borgias in China (well, sans Jeremy Irons). Marco? Okay, not so compelling in himself, and yeah, pick an accent and stick with it, but I just binged watched seven episodes (mostly because I can put it onto the big wall TV now and not a whole lot else was on TV) and overall enjoyed it. As to historical accuracy, I’d probably give more credit to Marco Polo existing as depicted than Ragnar Loðbrok is in Vikings, and that hasn’t stopped me one bit there (hell, I love mythology anyway).
My wife and I are enjoying it so far, though the obvious non-Asian accents and casting are both pretty immersion-blowing in so many scenes. Also, the scenes in Kublai-Khan’s throne room in the first two episodes were almost nausea inducing, what the hell was wrong with the effects that made Khan and some of his court folks seem to literally bounce around the screen? How the hell did that get past editing? Thankfully they changed the background and the shot angles for the rest of the episodes and I don’t have to watch Kublai-screensaver anymore.
It’s an interesting story that maybe isn’t getting the caliber of acting it deserves, but the scenery is great, the setting is unique and it’s benefitting a lot from there being literally nothing else decent on television this time of year. We’re going to watch all the way through, and would probably watch another season if it ends up getting extended.
Huh? He did. Italian. Probably wasn’t hard considering he is Italian. ;)
Renewed for 10 more episodes:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news/35313/netflix-renews-marco-polo-sets-more-dates
The whole of the show, as mentioned by others (I assumed I didn’t need to spell that out, but there’s always one…). ;-)