| Product: |
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (DVD) |
| Date: |
29/06/01 (26 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: high-action, compelling story, fantastic scenery and music
Disadvantages: subtitles
Zero gravity is the most amazing ingredient of Ang Lee’s martial-arts adventure. Its characters are early 19th century mandarins, warriors and brigands. They don't walk if they can run, don't run if they can leap and don't leap if they can float. One minute their feet are on the ground. The next, they're airborne, as if gravity never existed! Truly amazing - I've never seen anything like it!
The fantastic mountain scenery of mid-China adds to the magical properties of the film and the amazing skill and reactions of the cast in the fight-choreography is incredible! Fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping should be credited with a truly outstanding performance! I myself have a black-belt in karate and have also done sword-fighting for several years. The fight scenes are well performed, with good technique (which I can look upon with envy!!). I find it very impressive that almost all of the scenes are shown at actual-speed without being speeded up as is characteristic of many martial-arts films. Ping uses his cast like puppets having them suspended on the ends of wires! In this way he achieves stunt work that looks weightless, fantastic and absolutely impossible once digital artifice has erased the wires from sight!
The story shows a masked cat-burglar who steals a samurai sword. She promptly decides to run up a sheer wall to escape, leaping on and off the stones with great ease! Her determined pursuer takes a huge hop, skip and jump across an entire town roofscape! Later on in the film an ambushed nobleman takes to flight and skims the surface of a lake like a feather in a gust of wind! In an amazing scence near the end of the film when the two duelists come face-to-face at last, they use the springy tree-tops of a bamboo forest like a trampoline to catapult themselves at each other.
The photography and music are wonderful, and the love story compelling to the end, with a good fill of high-action martial arts skills! <
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Additional features if you watch the DVD version include a "Making of" featurette and interview with star Michelle Yeoh which is interesting and certainly well-worth seeing! However the film is subtitled and some younger viewers might have trouble keeping up with the subtitles while trying to watch all the action. This problem is compounded if you want to watch in widescreen where the subtitles appear too far down the screen making it difficult to read with clarity!
All in all I can now understand why this film has been the winner of numerous academy awards and Oscars for best foreign film and would definitely recommend it to viewers!
Summary:
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Last comments:
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- 11/07/01 I agree with you regarding this film. It blows you away with the excellent reality of the fighting. I never thought about the fact it wasn't speeded up until I read your review. That's when I realised why the film semed much more realistic than other martial arts films, even though they do have the spiritual ability to defy gravity.
I would recommend not watching the film dubbed to english, as they have changed a lot of the words, from the subtitles anyway, and it just doesn't seem right.
Thanks for reminding me what a great movie this was. |
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- 29/06/01 Good opinion. I watch a lot of films but haven't watched this and don't plan too, im not in too all the fighting and stuff! |
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