Chow Yun Fat brilliantly plays the ruthlessly tyrannical, late Tang Emperor Ping, in Zhang Yimou's The Curse of the Golden Flower, which I saw recently. The spectacle is incredible but one is left cold at the end of the film - perhaps this was Zhang's intention - to show how empty egoism is. The likable characters could have been explored in more depth so that they could have functioned more as a contrast to the nastiness.
Ping shows how much damage just a single egomaniac in power can wreak, not only on his country, but on those closest to him.
I Don't want to spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet but basically everyone dies, except for Ping and a few court officials and servants left to sweep up the gore and millions of yuan worth of crushed chrysanthemums, at the end. A bit like Hamlet really.
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