![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2005 05:20 pmToday, instead of cutting the grass, I finally got around to watching House of Flying Daggers. I gotta say, this Zhang Yimou fellow knows how the hell to do color. O'course, I liked that in Hero too -- it was a visual aesthetic I could spend all day with. (I should buy me a copy of Hero, speaking of.) I don't know why the fuck Merkin filmmakers can't do this -- where the hell is our visual aesthetic? Do we HAVE a visual aesthetic? (I understand that what we're being sold here is pretty much SCA/RenFaire history, but I'm buying. It's pretty. I want to believe. I'm not even asking any difficult questions about the women's feet.)
With a movie this pretty, you don't need a plot. You can have a plot-free hundred and nineteen minutes and STILL not be bored. But, y'know, these movies come with decent acting, a tolerably good plot, quite (quite) lovely people, and a coherent vision with so fucking much color it feels like something Fauvist, maybe by Matisse.
Yeah, it's a subtitled (I find Chinese soothing when I'm not trying to make it Japanese) martial arts film with people flying through the air on wires. I admit that this is not entirely realistic, but I didn't hear any of you people complaining when the fucking bus jumped over the broken bridge gap thing in Speed. I also noted a distinct lack of complaining about the coach chase scene in Van Helsing even though that was also entirely the opposite of realistic. You can be buying that stuff, then you damn well ought to also buy ninjas with excellent hang time and fantastic, otherworldly skills.
( Don't get the color thing? I'm here to help. Screencaps of the film after the cut... )
With a movie this pretty, you don't need a plot. You can have a plot-free hundred and nineteen minutes and STILL not be bored. But, y'know, these movies come with decent acting, a tolerably good plot, quite (quite) lovely people, and a coherent vision with so fucking much color it feels like something Fauvist, maybe by Matisse.
Yeah, it's a subtitled (I find Chinese soothing when I'm not trying to make it Japanese) martial arts film with people flying through the air on wires. I admit that this is not entirely realistic, but I didn't hear any of you people complaining when the fucking bus jumped over the broken bridge gap thing in Speed. I also noted a distinct lack of complaining about the coach chase scene in Van Helsing even though that was also entirely the opposite of realistic. You can be buying that stuff, then you damn well ought to also buy ninjas with excellent hang time and fantastic, otherworldly skills.
( Don't get the color thing? I'm here to help. Screencaps of the film after the cut... )
