Roger ebert house of flying daggers
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Movie imagery, which has grown brutal and ugly in many of the new high-tech action pictures, may yet be redeemed by the elegance of martial arts pictures from the East. Zhang Yimou&#;s &#;House of Flying Daggers,&#; like his &#;Hero&#; () and Ang Lee&#;s &#;Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon&#; () combines excitement, romance and astonishing physical beauty; to Pauline Kael&#;s formula of &#;kiss kiss bang bang,&#; we can now add &#;pretty pretty.&#;
Forget about the plot, the characters, the intrigue, which are all splendid in &#;House of Flying Daggers,&#; and focus just on the visuals. There are interiors of ornate elaborate richness, costumes of bizarre beauty, landscapes of mountain ranges and meadows, fields of snow, banks of autumn leaves and a bamboo grove that functions like a kinetic art installation.
The action scenes set in these places are not broken down into jagged short cuts and incomprehensible foreground action. Zhang stands back and lets his camera regard the whole composition, wisely following Fred Astaire&#;s belief that to appreciate choreography you must be able to see the entire body in motion. Tony Scott of the New York Times is on to something when he says the film&#;s two most accomplished action scenes are likely to be &#;cherished like favorite num
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House of Flying Daggers 15
All screenings will feature a video introduction from Head of Programme at FIRST International Film Festival, Gu Pengyuan (aka Xiao Gu).
Given the huge critical and commercial success of Hero (), it is unsurprising that Zhang Yimou continued with wuxia cinema. In their final collaboration, Zhang Ziyi plays a blind dancer enlisted to help two police officers (Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro) bring down a rebel group during the declining years of the Tang Dynasty in the 9th century. The resulting love-triangle is, at times, as fiercely contested as the political machinations and deadly fight sequences.
Narratively more straightforward than Hero, House of Flying Daggers is perhaps a form of retreat back into Zhang&#;s comfort zone of visual aesthetics (the film was Oscar nominated for cinematography), tragic romance, and flowing performance (both dancing and combat gracefully mirroring each other). This is, then, a fitting end point for our Zhang Yimou retrospective: an experience of almost pure cinematic pleasure.
Cast:
Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi
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House of Quick Daggers
album by Zhang Yimou
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Plot
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