Caroline-P Reviews

House of Flying Daggers (2004)

Beautiful - and none the worse for being incomprehensible

[9/10 · 20 August 2004]

I saw this film in China and loved every minute of it, although - it being in Mandarin with subtitles for Cantonese speakers - there were major limits to my understanding of events. In fact I'm writing the opposite of a spoiler as I can't reveal - because I never worked out - exactly WHAT the plot involves.

But, oh, doesn't it look beautiful!

From the opulently clothed and delicately coloured palace interiors of the opening, to the misty forests and plains which see most of the action, Zhang has created a series of Chinese paintings, each a masterpiece of colour and composition with the balletically weightless protagonists soaring through.

Never was violence more magical or elegant... until the unexpected force of a head-butt warns you that things are getting real and dirty in the enchanted forest, and Takeshi Kaneshiro turns from elegant Chinese dilettante to the maddened Samurai swordsman of Japanese prints. Yimou Zhang's stunning film is rooted in the pathetic fallacy, the seasons reflecting, magically, the developing love triangle at its heart. And yet, mixed with the metaphors and wrapped around the romance is excellent wuxia genre action.

As for the plot - don't listen to those that insist on panning it. Well, OK, maybe you're best off allowing it to be a bit of a mystery. But what's so wrong with that? I never made head or tail of Crouching Tiger either. Don't analyse, just enjoy. I certainly did!

Around the World in 80 Days (2004)

What on earth went wrong?

[1/10 · 25 July 2004]

Something must have. Nobody could have intentionally made a film as bad as this one is.

Where to start? Well Jules Verne will be spinning in his grave to be included in the credits as scriptwriter. "Based on characters created by.." would be more appropriate. But so what? A lot of great films are very loosely connected to books of the same title.

In this case however, the plot was terrible, the script terrible, the acting terrible, the jokes terrible, the segues from episode to episode terrible. And worst of all was that you were left with the underlying feeling that there could have been quite a good film here if only...

As it is, the only good moment is Owen Wilson playing Owen Wilson playing a Wright brother. Sure, he's the same Owen Wilson as ever, but in a film where even the reliable Jackie Chan lets us down with a thump, this comes as rather a relief.