movie reviews
House of Flying Daggers adds another visually stunning martial arts film to a burgeoning genre, and Before Sunset, a surprisingly good sequel, continues the fateful conversation that began in Before Sunrise.
House of Flying Daggers is the most recent example of a martial arts visual masterpiece in a genre—action movies—that is becoming increasingly brutal and bloody. While it is not a pioneering or original film, (director Zhang Yimou also directed Hero), it is an elegant and visually stunning addition to its already popular brethren.
As is Yimou’s style, the emphasis in House of Flying Daggers is on the beauty of the scene. Many shots are even set up in front of perfectly symmetrical backgrounds, creating an illusion of a work of art. But a film cannot succeed on its beauty alone, and the film has an intriguing plot for viewers to follow in between action scenes.
House of Flying Daggers centers on Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a police officer who is sent to help quell the underground resistance movement led by a group of assassins known as the House of Flying Daggers. His primary subject of investigation is Mei (Zhang Ziyi), a blind dancer, with whom he eventually escapes from the emperor’s soldiers. Presumably, Mei does not know that Jin is her political adversary, and, presumably, they fall in love. But politics and romance are not terribly compatible, and multiple levels of discovery and betrayal develop, culminating in a visually and emotionally stunning climax.
The mesmerizing cinematography contains many clever shots and the result is a fluidity in the fight scenes that takes the audience through every element of the fight sequences. The movie may not be as good as Hero, but it a worthy addition to Yimou’s repertoire.
—reviewed by Carl Falcon
Before you watch Before Sunset, you need to know what happened before, in Before Sunrise. In that GenX fairy tale, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an adrift American meets Celine (Julie Delpy), a prototypical intelligent French woman—hot body, hotter accent—on a train bound for Vienna.
Jessie employs his long-hair-and-goateed charm to convince Celine to stop in Vienna, where they share a magical night of flirtatious and philosophical conversation. But it all ends—you guessed it—before sunrise. What an apt title.
Since Before Sunrise was released in 1995, Jessie and Celine have, like the rest of us, aged a decade. As the beginning of the sequel explains, Jessie is now an adrift writer promoting his first “novel,” based stringently on his one night with Celine. At a Paris book signing, the former lovebirds meet, and continue their conversation.
The thorn in Before Sunset’s romance is that Jessie has a plane to catch, so their 80-minute conversation is shown in its entirety in this 80-minute movie. This creates a very natural urgency between Jessie and Celine—they have to figure out how to break the ice, and get through the baggage they picked up in the intervening decade to truly figure out how they feel about each other.
Those 80 minutes, like 10 minutes doled out for an oral presentation, seem like a lot, but disappear quickly. After requisite yet pointless small talk about their jobs (Celine is an environmental activist) and politics (they both hate George W. Bush), they start talking about the huge impact their two-day relationship has had in both of their more-than-10,000 day lives.
Unlike its fairy tale predecessor, Before Sunset is a very natural love story with mature characters complete with many endearing qualities and several flaws.In my condemnation of Closer a few weeks back, I conceded that while the fim might be a realistic depiction of people’s fuck-lives, it wasn’t what I enjoy watching. I love watching Before Sunset.
Its sharp dialogue and victorious (at least momentarily) love might be part of a heightened reality, but I love looking up at it.
—reviewed by Bradley Iverson-Long
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