Two notes on Yang's A Brighter Summer Day

A further note on Edward Yangs's A Brighter Summer Day (1991): The film commentary notes that Yang and his team developed lengthy and detailed biographies of each of the main characters - and there are dozens (+100 speaking parts in the movie), which leads me to think that this work was somewhat ahead of its time in many ways. If Yang were alive today, I suspect he might have tried to resurrect and re-imagine this complex, 4-hour movie as a TV miniseries, giving each character and each plot strand his or her due - and if he didn't do so w/ this movie we can only imagine that he would have thrived in the grand space awarded to filmmakers today, pretty much impossible in the early 90s, especially in Taiwan, with its just-emerging art-film culture. I also need to note two casting mistakes, in my view: the young woman who portrays Ming, the lead female character, never convinced me that she'd be the girlfriend of a gang leader and the enchanting beauty who lured young men into danger. (The woman who played Jade would have been better cast in the lead.) Second, the gang leader and Ming's boyfriend seemed small and puny and not the kind of charismatic figure needed for this role (plus the ridiculous sailors' suit he wears doesn't help nor does his not-tough name, Honey!).