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It also doesn't help that screen writers John Briley and Stanley Mann have written dialogue that is a bizarre amalgam of period gibberish (plenty of "by God!" and "God's blood!" here) and pidgin English (for May-May, things are "terrifical bad" or "fantastical good," or sometimes "terrifical good"). It doesn't help that Duke, his production designer Tony Masters ("2001") and his old-time cinematographer Jack Cardiff ("The African Queen") have created little sense of place - the movie's various locales seem like sound stages in different cities. You're always jumping from Struan versus Brock to Struan and May-May to Struan versus Culum, his idealistic son (Tim Guinee), and then Brock and the wily Tai-Pan are sizing up each other's joss again, and you never quite know where you are. In the hands of director Daryl Duke, "Tai-Pan" is crazily edited so that frequently the story just doesn't make sense. The paradox of "Tai-Pan" is that it has a broad sweep, containing the history that led to a century of European imperialism in China, but it has no scope.
#TAIPAN BOOK MOVIE#
Better the book had been Sanforized, for in the shrinking process the movie becomes a sloppy mess.
#TAIPAN BOOK TV#
What's more, the Tai-Pan has good "joss," which would appear to be the equivalent of karma.īased on the bestselling novel by James Clavell, "Tai-Pan" is a TV mini-series made into a minier movie. Brock goes at Struan seven ways from Sunday, but he doesn't stand a chance against a man wise to local custom - the Tai-Pan even lives with a Chinese woman, May-May (Joan Chen). "Tai-Pan," which is a sort of "Gone With the Monsoon," tells the story of Struan (Bryan Brown), the local Tai-Pan, or muckiest of mucky-mucks, and his tussle with another merchant, Brock (John Stanton), for control of the China trade in early 19th-century Hong Kong.