House of Flying Daggers (Lovers)

This is another movie from Zhang Yimou with beautiful Ziyi Zhang (yes, not Zhang Ziyi anymore). It seems that this movie is well received here, nominated for many prizes.

I see this movie as one of a series of serious attempts by Zhang (Yimou) to make real entertainment movies. I suspect that his final goal is to create blockbuster movies not from Hollywood. In this movie, you can find an interesting or even a bit weird mixture of various ingredients in typical entertainment movies. First, there is a twist after a twist in the plot, like modern psycho thriller movies. Every main character (except for one) is not as he or she seems. The meaning of their words is turned up side down as the story unfolds and the true identity of the main characters are revealed. Second, he uses many cliches in describing the main love story (which are not necessarily bad things. It is clear that all these are intentional). Finally, there are tons of over-the-top actions like CTHD (Green Destiny).

I am not sure if all these are very successful. In particular, the love story sometimes gets too cheesy (Especially some dialogue between the main characters). When I watched "Road Home"(Hatsukoi-no-Kita-Michi) a few years back, I was rather impressed by Zhang's superb ability to make such a simple love story, which is destined to be polluted with cliches, entertaining and even moving. But this time cheesiness occationally wins over, unfortunately. My impression is that he is still learning rules of entertainment movies and enjoying experimenting many things which are new to him (action is one of them). We need to wait for another one or two movies to see whether he can establish his own style of entertainment movies or not.

Zhang(Ziyi)'s acting is getting better. Of course this movie would lose its charm without her presence. (By the way, at some point, I gave up to count how many times her bear shoulder is shown off). Lau was OK. Kaneshiro was not that great. In the first scene, he didn't look like a drunken man when he was supposed to (well, to be precise, he acting a guy who acts like a drunken man there. But that's no excuse).

I should not forget to mention how beautiful some shot is as many critics who applaud this movie have pointed out. The movie is full of beautiful scene and vivid color, Zhang's signature style. In particular, "Echo Dance" is breathtaking.

Overall I enjoyed this movie very much, however it still fell short of great entertainment. It's slightly overrated as of now and may not be worthy of all the prizes it may eventually collect.