Sunday, January 09, 2005

House of Flying Daggers

House of Flying Daggers
rotten tomatoes review
review
review

I saw House of Flying Daggers last night. I was compelled to see the movie after watching the trailer at apple.com at for about the fiftieth time.

If you include the first Matrix movie and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have an international foundation class of the Wu-Xia style of film.

The triumvirate of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" "Hero" and now "House of Flying Daggers" is a three-pronged attack on your visual cortex. Each has particular strengths, interesting weaknesses, and are complemetary movies. The shifting political, visual, social, individual, romantic, and militant templates of each find that sort of chaotic balance that can be expressed so well in moving pictures.

I especially like the comparison to opera in one of the reviews. House of Flying Daggers does have some strongly operatic themes. It prompts the question of defining what "operatic" means in the modern context of film, and whether or not Wu-Xia is opera, a subset of opera, a superset of opera, or something different.

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