is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Great Flying Daggers!
Great Flying Daggers!
I have a lot to write about right now, but I'm going to write about Flying Daggers instead!
I went to see The House of Flying Daggers today. It�s GOOD. Of course it�s really beautiful like any film by Yimou Zhang. And of course it is also a bit confusing, like any film by Yimou Zhang. (For instance, I really need to see Hero again, because I am not sure whether it was making an argument for or against totalitarian politics. The flawed DVD I watched it on didn�t help. But it didn�t really hinder either. It is the way of Yimou Zhang to make us question the storyline.) Anyway, I think I understand the point of Flying Daggers better than I did Hero (and so now I REALLY need to see Hero again), as I think it was made fairly obvious, but then again as I walked out of the theater it made me sad to hear people saying �what. ever,� as if they totally missed the way the film�s antipolitical point was hammered into them throughout the movie and then even moreso at the end.
So, yeah, the last scene is a bit drawn out and possibly even funny in how long it can take someone to die. But I think the whole point of the film was that there is an undeniable way in which important human feelings such as LOVE will not always lose when it comes time to make decisions between it and �the good of mankind� or �the cause to which you have pledged your life� or the something else traditionally thought to be very compelling. It might also be the thing that makes you fight to the death more than any principle. In addition it might be the thing that makes you give your own life in a foolhardy gamble to ensure that someone else can keep on living. And it just might make you rethink the function of your own facelessness in an epic battle where many many lives will have to be lost. You will lose your life because the planner of wars doesn�t count individuals, he counts successes and losses. Maybe your life will be memorialized as contributing to a greater purpose. But is it your purpose?
The film starts by making us believe it is about a conflict between a government and a band of Robin-Hood-type thieves, and our only question is: who is the good guy? Yimou Zhang always makes it hard to tell such things, so from the start you are waiting to be tricked and then have your eyes opened. And tricks do occur. But they aren�t about the political questions. The movie is a love story about how love moves people�in their very uniqueness as human beings, because when you love someone you love them for their uniqueness and not for the things they share with the rest of humanity�to transcend or perhaps even betray the so-called �larger� things like politics, ideals and principles that necessarily reduce us to less than unique so that we can experience our commonalities (as well as our deathly conflicts over what the commonalities ought to be). If House of Flying Daggers fails to make a political statement it is because it is not a film about politics at all!
(Ken Chen has written a longer review of House of Flying Daggers and Hero that I think is interesting but I haven�t yet decided whether I agree with it. Not that what I think matters to his review! It will be in the next h2so4 web update sometime soon�.)
In sum: House of Flying Daggers is really worth seeing, even if you end up disagreeing with everything I�ve just said. There are some scenes of breathtaking beauty in it, and some really good martial-arts inventiveness, including a fighting-in-the-bamboo-in-the-air scene that might be better than Crouching Tiger, etc. And of course you have Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro hotness. In fact this might be the HOTTest movie I�ve seen in some time. Don�t take the kids with you.
12:33 a.m. - January 31, 2005
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