Hero: wonderful Chinese movie!!

[ap_aelfwine]

I went to see Hero last night. Bravo!! Wonderful! Really, really good! :wishes he knew more Chinese than shieh-shieh, ni hao, and wo ai ni:

It opens as a man arrives at the court of the King of Qin, the first emperor, with the weapons of Sky, Broken Sword, and Flying Snow, three assassins and the deadliest enemies of Qin. From there... well, there's sort of a Rashomon like quality, as he tells the king how he came to defeat the assassins, the king challenges his story, he replies... you'll just have to see the movie for the rest.

Wonderful scenery, weapons, and costumes. I'm not fluent enough in the period to tell if everything was dead on, but what I knew all was. Bronze weapons, dagger-axes, properly archaic decor (the cat-mask handles on the great doors of the royal compound are particularly nice).

Stunning cinematography. Gorgeous long shots, wonderful transitions, lovely staging. Very nice martial arts. My shifu says Jet Li hasn't the best kung fu, but he's wonderful on film.

Something that hit me: the difference between the Chinese martial arts movie and the Western action movie is that the Western movie depicts the ridiculous and uses special effects to bludgeon the audience into believing it's real, whereas the Chinese movie uses the impossible as a symbolic representation of the reality of a confrontation between high level martial artists, a reality which couldn't be adequately depicted to an audience in any other way.

Although the most powerful move that I saw was a scene where Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) steps over Moon (Zhang Ziyi) in the middle of their fighting, as if she was no more than an inanimate object, not an opponent with a pair of bronze sabres. (I haven't seen this weapon before, sharply curved, almost sickle-shaped , but the edges seemed to be on the outside. My first thought was of some kind of ancestral butterfly sword, but the blades were narrower and more curved, they hadn't any knuckle guards, and the moves were different, none of the long fist kind of stuff that I've always seen people do with butterfly swords.) In that moment I could feel the strength of her chi in a way I seldom can, watching a movie.

Well, at least that's how it seemed to me. I'm just a foolish gwailo, although hopefully slightly less foolish than some others. :-)

In any event, it's a stunning movie. Go see it!