Go Eagles!

While Kar Wai Wong was making Ashes of Time, Redux, it seems that he became creatively blocked. So he decided to approach the material in a completely different way. The result is Eagle Shooting Heroes.

While Ashes is a moody artistic meditation on time, love, and memory, Heroes is a complete farce. Both are loosely based on the classic Wu Shia novel Eagle Shooting Heroes. They have most of the same actors and characters, but everything else is different. Instead of killings for hire in the western Chinese deserts, it concerns the assassination of the King of Persia - so everyone wears silly 1,001 nights drag. The plot is still absurdly complicated, but still involves warriors, priests and transvestites. There are magic treasures, hidden masters, lovers matched by fate and by aphrodisiacs, song and dance numbers, cross dressing, wirework kung fu, flying disco boots, and some other stuff.

It is really funny - it could have been more like My Lucky Stars. I'm not sure if you need to see Ashes to really appreciate it. There is almost no overlap, except in the characters' names, and some themes. For example, in Ashes, there is a princess who is also a prince. In Heroes, there's a beautiful monk who is in love with Master (and is played by an actress, Carina Lau, I think). Anyway, they each are great foils for each other, but if you want silly, stick with Eagle Shooting Heroes.