2001-02-05 - 981368748

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Cranky Me

Mmmm, weekend. I haven't done squat so far all weekend and I love it.

OK, that's not entirely true, I just haven't done anything productive. I watched some DVDs, enjoyed the company of Julie, Liralyn, Danno, and Jill, and I finally saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Which was cool enough to be the subject of my diary.

My overall reaction to the movie was blank amazement. It's the first martial arts movie I've seen that didn't have any slapstick humor in it, which I rather liked. I was also pleasantly amazed by the production values. It was definitely a wire-fu movie, but the wires were handled remarkably well. Throw in the presence of Chow Yun Fat, the coolest man in the world, and you have a pretty good recipe for success.

The ending was pretty depressing, though, and it didn't have any moral I could pick up on. Or perhaps it did; I suppose you could argue that sexism was the root of all the evil in the movie. But it's all off-screen, background narrative sexism. From the moment the movie begins, people are on a collision course with bad news. Nobody goes home happy.

Despite the excellence of the movie, I resent it for that. As Neil Gaiman pointed out in Sandman, you can get whatever ending you want to a story, just by picking the point where you end it. This is one of the major differences between stories and real life.

In real life, tragedies happen, just as they did in the movie. But life goes on. We all miss Nev, but we all have stories that go on past his untimely death and include many a pleasant interlude.

I want a story to remind me of that. I want to relearn again that good people can overcome the bad things that happen to them and live happy lives. I don't need to be reminded that people sometimes fail to do that. I spent five months of my own life failing to do that once, and I think that was six months more of it than I wanted to experience.

So thanks for the movie, Ang Lee, but cheer up a bit, eh?

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