peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2011 10 21 Hero

Hero (2002)

Fri, Oct 21, 2011./noise/movies | Link

The things that Tony Leung makes me watch. Maggie Cheung plays his wife-like attachment, similarly lethal with a sword, fancifully swatting arrows with her drapery. And that is Ziyi Zhang as his woman-servant. Jet Li flexes every muscle in his body and exactly none in his face. Quite beautifully shot (thanks to Christopher Doyle) but vacuous; martial arts here is some kind of ballet, and the philosophy is that the power of the status-quo collective should not be disrupted by any free thinker. I hope "I learnt this from calligraphy" sounds better in Mandarin, and is not a mistranslation of Mao's "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (brush)".