Also found the running time of the DD release to be rather odd. The theatrical cut is just over an hour (2 hrs and 1 min IIRC) while the director’s cut is about 2hrs and 15 min. The DD cut is 2hrs and 6 min(??). I don’t believe anyone at DD has come out with an explanation for this.

Lastly, a quick note about Chinese. Any dialect that is defined as being a Chinese dialect shares the same written language. However, the spoken language can be dramatically different. It’s a little hard to explain because I can’t think of an equivalent to this in English: even with the various types of English that are spoken around the world (e.g., Indian English where they have phrases like ‘Please do the needful’), the pronunciation of the words is the same. In Chinese, the different dialects can sound like completely different languages. For example, and please pardon my horribly rough phonetics, ‘I love you’ in Cantonese is ‘Ngor ngoi lay’. In Mandarin (the dominant dialect spoken by most Mainland Chinese), the phrase becomes ‘Wor i nee’ (actually, ‘Wo ai ni’ in proper phonetics). These are the same written words, but one who’s unfamiliar with Chinese dialects would probably never know that just by listening to the two.

If you have access to a Chinese DVD that has both Cantonese and Mandarin audio tracks, try watching a scene with one and then going back to the beginning of the scene and switching over to the other track. It’s like going from an English track to a French track.

Cheers and keep up the great work!

I some times find people describing movies by comparing it to another movie. Even in advertising the marketing office promotes a film by position it after a successful film.