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 is a puppet-master with human beings on the ends of his wires! 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, careering 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! Near the end of the film the two duelists, face-to-face at last, use the springy tree-tops of a bamboo forest as 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! Additional features of the DVD 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! The film was released on DVD in the UK on June 18th. 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!
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Production Year: 2003 - Martial Arts - Director: Paul Hunter - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott, James King, Karel Roden
Production Year: 1972 - Martial Arts - Director: Bruce Lee - Original Language: English\Cantonese\Chinese - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Chuck Norris, Robert Wall, Jon T. Benn
Production Year: 1991 - Martial Arts - Director: Tsui Hark - Original Language: Cantonese - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Donnie Yen, Jet Lee, Rosamund Kwan, Yuen Biao, Mok Sui Chung
Production Year: 1981 - Martial Arts - Director: Kenji Misumi, Robert Houston - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ohki, Akiji Kobayashi, Shin Kishida, Masahiro Tomikawa, Tomisaburo Wakayama
Martial Arts - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Bruce Lee, Sho Kosugi, James Ryan, Jim Kelly, Jimmy Wang Yu, Bolo Yeung, Christopher Lee
I had better write a good comment seeing CurlyLady's a black belt. Truthfully I would anyway. I have seen snippets of this film and was put off with the dubbing/subtitles, but after reading this opinion it sounds like my sort of film, full of action and well presented. Thanks again CurlyLady.
joecon 05.07.2001 13:53
Enjoyed reading your op. I have the UK DVD version here but my copy is dubbed, not subtitled and I enjoyed watching it with my children - Joe
mark20uk 27.06.2001 01:22
sounds really cool! Do you watch many martial-arts films? If so I look forward to reading your other reviews :o)
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Advantages: Spiritual and moving, stunning locations and fight sequences. Disadvantages: Subtitles - the translation into English quite probably loses certain meaning.
Advantages: Beautiful shots; excellent performances; fantastic fight scenes Disadvantages: Incredible? Felt like quite a long film - perhaps too long? Some may not like the subtitles
![Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon [DVD] [2001]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78543493.jpg "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon [DVD] [2001]")
Jun 23rd, 2001
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