Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

Didn’t enjoy House of Flying Daggers as much as Hero (see my comments on Hero). It had a more conventional plot, but I found I didn’t really care that much about any of the characters. And while the visuals were impressive, it didn’t have the incredible use of colour in Hero. It was less stylized – more like the first flashback in Hero than the later ones. Which was still pretty amazing, but it was the later Hero flashbacks that really stunned me.

I was also very bothered by an early scene in House of the Flying Daggers, in which some horses fall over. It looked as if the horses had been deliberately tripped, rather than being trained to fall in an impressive but non-dangerous manner. I couldn’t find anything on the Internet Movie Database that actually said whether any horses were injured (there was no Humane Society clause at the end of the film, but then I don’t think it was filmed in a location that has a Humane Society or equivalent). However, the IMDB did say, in its alternate versions bit, that the UK version was cut by 18 seconds “to remove three instances of real animal cruelty (in this case, three horsefalls)”. This is enough to make me unsure whether I will see any of Yimou Zhang’s future films.