Perhaps Weinstein was tickled by director Daniel Lee's pedigree — he's been an internationally known quantity since his 1996 Jet Li vehicle, Black Mask — or compelled by
the cartoonish exoticism of his recent historical epics.
If these
cartoonish figurations, in his earlier idiom, stem from the Beckmann / Markus Lüpertz / Kippenberger tradition of soured angst and caustic irony, the geometric abstractions bait the US market that has avidly bought into them as European
exoticisms.