Hero

[The Perineum Falcon]

Thanks, petey. You're a swell guy.

[Alethia]

I saw 30 minutes of this movie and walked out.

Bite me, Tarantino.

ur loss.

[cine]

I saw 30 minutes of this movie and walked out.

Bite me, Tarantino.

ur loss.

Yeah, really. I can't wait for House of Flying Daggers.

[MacGuffin]

Miramax Home Entertainment has announced the region one release of martial arts drama Hero which stars Jet Li, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang. The film will be available to own from the 30th November this year, priced at around $29.99. The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen along with both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 6.1 tracks. The disc will offer both the Chinese (with English subtitles) and dubbed English versions of the film, along with a 'Hero Defined' making of featurette, storyboards to four exciting scenes and an interview with the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.

[pete]

Jet Li took out a page in daily variety I guess to thank QT and Miramax.  Don't know why.

http://www.contactmusic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/0/A1425B55A0D2857E80256F0900068561!opendocument

[modage]

Hero itself was a terribly flawed movie, the pacing suffered because the director was an arthouse guy with no real understanding of how to tell a martial art story, and was trying to hard to subvert it at the same time (imaginary fights...etc.), so it ended up with a lot of moments that were carried solely by the high production values (good music, art direction, martial arts execution, cinematography...everything but the concept itself) and good acting.

thats what i was trying to say.

[Myxo]

I love western audiences trying to critique films created with decidedly easten approaches towards filmmaking. I thought it was slow in parts as well but so are alot of films which come out of the east. I'm not surprised at all to see different pacing or an alternate way to tell their stories.

[cine]

I love western audiences trying to critique films created with decidedly easten approaches.

and i especially hate when they're biased towards the ones based on truth.

[Myxo]

Oh, and on a related note:

I can read a very small amount of chinese enough to know full well that a large amount of English subtitles in this film don't do the language of origin justice at all. I admit I don't speak it well enough to do a play by play or anything like that but one of the chief reasons it feels a little clunky in parts definetly has to do with the translation.

[pete]

I love western audiences trying to critique films created with decidedly easten approaches towards filmmaking. I thought it was slow in parts as well but so are alot of films which come out of the east. I'm not surprised at all to see different pacing or an alternate way to tell their stories.

SPOILERS

haha, well, this is coming from an entirely eastern viewer.  so eastern that I translated (granted a very minimal amount) for the director when he first showed his film to the first audience here in the US.  And lemme tell you, the Chinese people in the crowd laugh whenever someone says "how swift thy sword" or whatever, because in Chinese, it's literally, "WHAT A SWIFT SWORD!"  The subtitles clearly saved the movie.
Zhang Yimou is not all that "Eastern".  You wanna see someone decidedly Eastern?  How about Tsai MingLiang or Hou HsiaoHsien?  Zhang has been accused of exoticizing his films for the foreign arthouse audience since his second film.
Zhang is a master, but a limited master.  His movies are soulful when they're about the real working people, and he kinda sucks when he tries to do anything else.  For example, his Wong Kar-Wai wanna be "city picture" Keep Cool was real embarssing, his comedy Happy Times that came out right before Hero was not funny, and his Shanghai Triad was extremely boring and cliched.  That does not detract from the greatness of To Live, the single most soulful film ever made, but his understanding in the stories outside his element is very limited, and it shows.  Well, I guess one can still give him props for trying, since most current masters don't really go out to dare themselves like this.

But back to Hero.  I'm not sure if I disliked it for the same reason everyone else here dislikes it, but whatever, let's delve:
I think Hero is an extremely superficial movie.  The ways for Zhang Yimou to portray this honor, chivalry, bond, and respect that comes out between the fighters (something even clowns like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung can do so well) are extremely obvious: black and white imaginary fights, a lot of bowing and other exotic gestures, and slow motioned shots of self-sacrifice.  He cannot back this up with some content, with some understanding, or soul that's SO prevalent in the genre.  Because he hardly possesses any imagination to see what it's like to be a fighter.

And then he attempts to intellectualize these abstract aspects of martial arts through a series of metaphors, I suspect, for himself, so he can better set the rules of fighting in his universe: kungfu is like music, it's like chess, it's like calligraphy, maybe a little bit like water?  His depiction of these things are also extremely bland and elementary: the word "sword" can be written in 19 different ways, so Broken Sword's power comes from the "20th way."  The fighters test each other out by standing face to face for an hour (that's something the subtitle neglects to mention, I suspect, because it's just too funny.)

In most great films, they use martial arts as metaphors for something else: in Once Upon a Time in China it's the "old way of living", in Dragon Gate Inn it's when people reveal their true selves, and in most chopsocky films, it's merely a way to settle problems, like gunfights out in the West.  Even in a subpar film (in originality, not in aesthetics) like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, kungfu provides kinship, a way for characters to bond.
But in Hero the characters simply fight for the sake of fighting, nothing is ever settled, proven, or accomplished--nobody really is hurt, nobody really is at risk, and nobody's belief is changed.  Zhang Yimou comes up with at least four or five metaphors for kungfu, but can't come up with one reason for kungfu to exist.

To make things even more superficial: characters are developed by reading and writing!  How does Jet Li abandon a lifetime of hatred and patriotism as he knew it?  By reading!  How did the King come to understanding his enemy?  By reading.  When did Broken Sword realize that the King was actually a good guy?  By writing!  These "character developments" are cerebral in very elementary fashions: that Nameless's great decision to betray his friends, to dishonor his deceased parents, to give up his life, and to abandon a lifetime of work comes from the oldest justification for imperialism (that the US government is still buying today): to bring "peace" through war?

That's the thing missing with this film: heart, a total lack of heart.  The biggest moment of the film, when Jet Li's Nameless decides to abort the mission, should be an emotional one, it should highlight the extreme sacrifice he's made and talked about throughout the film, yet when that moment comes, the director instead focuses on "did he or didn't he stab the guy?"

this is what makes Hero an unsatisfactory movie.  A director whose understanding in the genre is about as good as some kid on Xixax, tries to make a martial arts movie that's seemingly "different" ("it's about NOT fighting!  It's about peace" so the director likes to claim) and it ends up being forcibly different in all the wrong places, in the superficial formalistic elements of the film, while lacking any heart.

[Myxo]

I didn't say I thought it was a good film. Just that,

A: Something is lost in the translation.
B: I liked it for what it was.

[pete]

well, I didn't say it was a BAD film (it was really well-made) just that

a) its problems weren't in its "Eastern"ness as you mentioned earlier
b) it was badly directed.

[SHAFTR]

I'm starting to think I'm the only person who liked the film.  Obviously comparisons can be made to Crouching Tiger & Rashamon, but I enjoyed  those movies.  In the end, I was very pleased with Hero.  The fight scenes worked, the twists threw me offguard and the acting was superb, not to mention Doyle's cinematography.

The gripes about the chanting, etc or the over to topness of it didn't bother me.  I thought of the entire film much like the flashbacks, they were stories being told.  Lets not forget that the film is bookmarked by an opening and closing that is outside of the time and context of the film.

****1/2 out of 5 stars.

[Alethia]

I'm starting to think I'm the only person who liked the film.

i never said anything against it.

[Sleuth]

and I toadally loved it