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Review: 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'
You probably won't ever see a better kung-fu movie than Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or a more original, mournful or beautiful cinematic vision in this movie-crowded season.
Perhaps it's more accurate to call it an artful collaboration -- part martial-arts spirituality, Western epic and Broadway musical -- between Lee, actors Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and mythical combat choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, who designed the dance-like scenes in The Matrix and sparked a revival of martial arts as spiritual and cinematic ballet.
The story unfolds in China in the time of Confucius, centering on the loss and search for a magical 400-year-old sword called Green Destiny. Its theft sets off a complex interaction between a sword-wielding warrior, his ally and a bandit (who falls in love with a desert thief, another beautifully shot sequence); the latter two happen to be women. So does their common nemesis, a creepy and lethal outcast right out of the witches gathering in "Hamlet" named Jade Fox.
Brilliantly bizarre and sometimes astonishingly beautiful, the movie takes martial arts far beyond the eerily-choreographed levels of The Matrix. From Walker, Texas Ranger to Jackie Chan to Charlie's Angels, martial arts is replacing the fist, .9mm and taser as popular culture's favorite form of combat. In fact, kung fu offers creative moviemakers a lot of possibilities: it has a richer history, and comes from deeper traditions than any of those other weapons.
But no one has yet portrayed it in this way. "Crouching Tiger" is gravity-defying: the fighters soar over rooftops, somersault around rooms, sail through trees and walls, in and out of rivers and lakes.
It's closer to the more spiritual sagas of earlier Hong Kong movies than to the popular and very funny Chan series. It feels very modern, though. It's unusual to see a movie like this featuring women in such strong and distinctly different roles -- but it also honors traditions of loyalty, learning and responsibility. In an era when the cultural gap between teachers and students has probably never been wider, this movie reflects a time and a culture when their bonds were unshakeable. Making money or being popular is the last thing on these warrior's minds, good or evil. They are obsessed with honor, growth and vengeance. In "Crouching Tiger," students love, even venerate their teachers and will sacrifice their own lives for their teachers' approval and honor.
Cellis Yo-Yo Ma's haunting score gives "Crouching Tiger" an even more brooding and enchanting quality. Yet for all its gravity and style, "Crouching Tiger" also has a sense of humor. It takes a skilled and supremely confident filmaker to pull off a quite literally dazzling movie like this.
Katz is clearly on top of the trends here: he's noticed the surge in popularity of the .9mm gun. Using bullets ten times smaller than the popular 9mm which it replaces, the .9mm is a thousand times less deadly. People who have been shot with .9mm guns say it feels like the biggest fucking mosquito they've ever seen just bit them, hard. You need a good pair of tweezers to get the bullets out.
In a private interview with Katz, he told me that he was impressed by the fact that the .9mm was 2.4 times bigger than that other famous microweapon, the .375 Magnum. When I pointed out to him that .375 was actually an inch measurement, he turned an unusual shade of crimson and mumbled something about NASA and Mars probes before changing the subject.