house of flying daggers

w and dr mike wanted to go see the new zhang yimou film, the house of flying daggers, because it’s opening this weekend.

only we saw it last saturday when we were in lost angels.

sorry, suckers!

how was it? it was pretty good. i certainly like hero better, and maybe a lot of that is the absence of christopher doyle’s cinematography. i while i was watching the movie i kept somehow wanting the shots to be more saturated than they were because of this.

this movie is also kind of silly. there are some silly things in here, like a whole team of bamboo tree warriors. in crouching tiger, it was believable that chow yun fat and zhang ziyi could do the tree-fighting thing, because they were master martial artists, right? but a whole division of bamboo tree warriors? maybe it’s just that such a thing smacks more of the silliness of old-school low budget kung fu flicks, and since this is more of the new art-house style, it’s somehow less acceptable, less dignified. if you’re going to do the merchant ivory approach to martial arts films, why have silly things like that?

and there’s a really ridiculous thing at the end, which sort of works, but is really silly.

Posted at December 16, 2004 9:05 PM