It's still great. Hasn't lost a thing in the fifteen or so years since it was made. But then, tragic love stories set against a martial arts backdrop in pre-British China never really get old, do they?
Presumably, you should be able to catch it on the SBS website for the next two weeks.
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| Zhang Ziyi might have gotten all the attention when it came out, but c'mon, it's clear Michelle was the real star of the show. |
4 comments :
I adore this movie. It's on the list to watch with P. I love it.
It's great isn't it. Even my Mum loves this movie. About the only people I know who don't are hardcore Chinese action buffs who felt cheated when they plonked their money down at the cinema and got blindsided by a tale of forbidden love, with a small portion of martial-arts choreography on the side.
I guess the one bad thing about the film, was that it spawned an entire genre of look-alikes, made by people who didn't seem to understand that the beautiful imagery and "floaty" wire-work wasn't actually what made it great. I s'pose you get that with everything iconic, right?
If you've seen Kill Bill, did you see all sorts of influences there? (Drawn by Quentin from Crouching Tiger?) Or is it just that he drew inspiration from all those Chinese action films you mention, as a genre?
When you mention the lookalikes, what are you thinking of specifically?
It's been a while since I last saw Kill Bill, but I don't remember too many direct references to CTHD. More like he was just apeing (or paying homage, I guess) to Chinese and Japanese cinema in general. To be honest, Kill Bill was where I started to lose interest in Tarantino. I don't think it was horrible or anything, but it looked to me like he'd just set out to make a film full of (mostly) Asian cinema tropes. By the time I got to the end of the first one, I felt like I'd rather be watching one of the old flicks he was lifting from. At least most of those seemed to be centred around a story, rather than the premise of "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to do this ... ?" It was the same feeling I got in the last half hour of Django. Deathproof was the worst.
The CTHD impersonators: "House Of Flying Daggers" and Jet Li's "Hero" stick in my mind because they're two of the first that I saw. There have been many others that I don't remember the names of. Something, Something, Golden Lotus; and Jade Emperor, Something, Something. They were all shit, anyway.
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