'Conviction (1)'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Heh.
The movie's funded by Communist China ("Beijing New Picture Film Co."). The first Qin Emperor has become an official cultural hero in Communist China. It felt a bit allegory-ish while I was watching it, so I looked up the details. The first Qin Emperor is famous, by the way, for burning all the Chinese books he didn't approve of -- every single copy. He also buried scholars alive.
Somehow, I do not find any of that surprising. I loved the movie while I was watching it. It didn't hit me until the ride home just how propagandistic the thing was.
Yip. That's why I ultimately love CTHD more. Hero is a more beautiful movie, but CTHD has a better text and subtext for me.
For the record, I did like Terminator III. And I managed to watch the whole thing without being distracted by the fact that the lead character is governor of California.
I think I should rent Predator. That movie has two governors in it.
I think I should rent Predator. That movie has two governors in it.
Vote Carl Weathers in '05!
I really dislike T3.
I really liked Hero, but my heart went out most to Snow and Broken Sword. Oh, god, and poor Sky who's just going to hear about all this on the rumour mill.
Something I did notice -- although the subtitles only said "our land" when they were specifically talking about the country, the Mandarin phrase was used a whole lot in the minutes following. Kinda cool.
But yeah, I had a profound sense of sadness knowing how it was going to end as soon as Qin sussed Nameless.
Can you make a wuxia movie with a happy ending?
I think there seems to be a requisite nobility and sacrifice that lends itself to that sort of ending. But a movie like Wing Chun is wuxia, and a pretty happy wrapup.
For me, Hero went past that sort of expectations of the genre into the same sort of place as Amistad, or The Last Mohican, or Schindler's List -- where lots of real people really died. If it had been a little less lyrically beautiful, I might have cried for what of history it made me remember clearly.
I was pretty confident early on they weren't going to successfully kill the Emperor. It wouldn't have matched the arc of the story. But I STILL think that Falling Snow died ignobly, if beautifully photographed. As the Emperor said way back, they're greater-souled than that. I would have been happier if the final quarrel wasn't framed as Snow's being obviously wrong.
I disagree with the framing of the final fight scene. I think that the movie could have pushed the "our land" harder. I'm glad it didn't, because any harder I couldn't have liked it. I was convinced that Nameless and Broken Sword believed deeply in their way, but I didn't find as much textual condemnation of Falling Snow as I'd expected. She never changed her mind -- I didn't think the suicide of the earlier POV was ignoble -- why this one?