Thoughts on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Saturday, May 28, 2011 12:02 AM By Simon

-Ang Lee: doing it better since the dawn of cinema. Bitch.

-Wire-fu so gracefully done--choreography by Yuen Woo-ping (who's officially my new hero, and is perhaps the chief argument for why the Oscars should have a choreophraphy category)--I want to describe it as Edgar Wright did for Scott Pilgrim: a musical where, instead of song, people break out into fights. There's even a love song, between Zhang Ziyi (where did she go? She was kind of big for awhile after Memoirs of a Geisha, and then Hero, but then she stopped showing up or something) and Chang Chen, as a spoiled secret-warrior governor's daughter and a desert bandit, respectively.

-Michelle Yeoh is so badass, it's ridiculous. I mean, here I was, only thinking of her as the flower lady from Sunshine, and meanwhile, here she is. I've gotta look up more of her movies.

-I can't stop thinking of Chow Yun-fat in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where his entire presence was so confusing I've grown a general weariness to any further appearences. Which is hardly fair, like, it's not his fault that movie sucked the air out of the room, and he's a good actor, and he's good in this, balancing the zen monk and the romantic hero thing perfectly, but it's like aversion therapy or something.

-Mandarin gives me a headache. I'm trying to learn it, but good zombie Xenu, this movie makes it sound terrifying. I could only keep track of the most basic and repeated patterns in dialogue, and that's not accounting for the actors' accents (Yun-fat, Yeoh, and I think Chen, none of them are native speakers), or any of the dated language, and shit, no wonder China's kicking out asses.