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Watched House of Flying Daggers last night on a friend's big screen. Man did it suck!

I excused myself after forty torturous minutes. So far Duncan Shepherd has said it best for me:

House of Flying Daggers

Martial-arts bodice-ripper about a blind showgirl (the jug-eared China doll, Zhang
Ziyi) who is neither blind nor a showgirl, but an agent of an underground movement
(and, evidently, a 9th-century forerunner of Zatoichi) opposed to the tottering Tang
Dynasty. Zhang Yimou's follow-up to his Hero dispenses essentially more of the
same -- more, that is, of the sameness -- more of the monotonousness. And the
addition of more and more and more ultimately equals less. What's done has been
done. To death. A lot of wonderful work went into the color, the fabrics, the sound
effects in the opening brothel episode, but once the initial impression has been made,
once the viewer can be presumed to be in the palm of the filmmaker's hand, there is
a falling-off in those departments. Always, the splendor of the settings -- the birch
forest, the bamboo grove, the flower meadow, the red and yellow tapestries of
autumn leaves, the climactic snowstorm -- overpowers the whimsicality of the action.
(The weapons for which the rebels are named are not just "flying" daggers; they're
"smart" daggers, changing direction in midflight like guided missiles.) To put it a
different way, the variety of the settings overpowers the repetitiveness of the
action. With Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau. 2004.


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Topic - Watched House of Flying Daggers last night on a friend's big screen. Man did it suck! - clarkjohnsen 23:08:46 01/15/05 (14)


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