House of Flying Daggers
It’s not “Infernal Affairs” and especially not this movie. How should I put it, “Yesterday Once More” shows him as a loving husband, what more can a fangirl ask for? (Also, the people on Amazon seem to hate this movie – understandable, somehow, but then again the reviewers’ english make my head ache when I try to read their comments… Well, what can I say, if I look at my own blog postings 2 1/2 years ago, my chest cringes as well.
Onto the topic, when I first watched the movie, I was 17 or so and the airline dared to show this movie for about one hour and then just shut it off! Aaaah! Now, I think I have seen the first 15 minutes of the movie about 4 times before watching this movie to its end today. Those scenes can totally stand on their own and are a spectacle in themselves: While I have forgotten the majority of Hero, I think I will never forget this dancing scene. And, whenever I tried to watch the movie, I start all over at its beginning but never finished it, heh. (Chinese martial arts movies somehow always are like that for me, I also never finished Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Eek.)
Compared to that, the rest of the movie is pale despite its nice fighting scenes. It’s a sweet love story, sure, but after “The Road Home”, this one really is not comparable in my book, it rather feels like one of those mindless Hollywood action movie to me. Furthermore, as much as I find Zhang Ziyi to be a good actress, her performance of a blind woman is not as good as Audrey Hepburn’s in my opinion.
I also never knew that this movie was so highly acclaimed. Before, I thought that it was merely a shadow of “Hero” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, but actually it wasn’t too bad if one accepts that martial arts movies focus on nothing but great visuals and suspenseful adventures after all. As long as the love story is not as infuriating and stupid as in Wu Ji, it’s enough. Whoever wants to see depth or even historical insights into Ancient China is in the wrong movie after all.
There is also another criticism against the movie that I find difficult to accept: The chinese dialogue of the movie is rather refined while the english translation dampens it a lot. No wonder people would think that the dialogue is stupid?
By the way, the end makes a lot of sense to me. The one guy didn’t do anything, but I would have done exactly the same as what the girl has done – and if I were the other guy, I would also would have tested her love that way. “If she really loves him, she deserves to die.” Surely it’s cruel, but it totally fits into the integrity of this character. Me likes. And so you can see that visually stunning martial arts movies seem to be unable to touch my heart, no matter how nice the dialogue and the story actually are.