laojim

This little film has the most hard hitting ending that I have seen. Certainly it is among the best. It's well worth sitting through it if only for the last few seconds. It makes the point that this film needs to make and that is a point that we all need to keep in mind. Don't take my word for it go and watch it yourself. As for all that movie buff stuff what do you need to know. I have met similar people in life. I did like the heavy who looks for all the world like Vladimir Putin. One can't help wonder if that is coincidental. Go watch it.

I found this to be a pleasant movie, but I couldn't help wondering if it had been made as a pilot. It has a number of fade to black moments which lead to fade from black moments as if that is where the commercials go. More importantly it didn't have any ending. It wound up most of the threads of the narrative without reaching any sort of conclusion which means it is either one of those stories for which nobody thought up a conclusion or it is a story to be resumed at a later date. Still, a nice tale while it lasted and the music was just terrific.

One notes that other reviews put this in the Three Kingdom period, but I don't see anything in the sets or the story that has anything to do with that period of history. We have here an ahistorical period of Chinese history during which it rains constantly for no obvious reason, a fact that is only observed by an incidental character who says that if the rain doesn't stop the river will rise, a fairly obvious observation.

This endless rain is computer generated and it quite convincing. Computers also have generated the throne room of the palace of our heroes. It is ornamented with transparent brush paintings and similar panels separating the nobles from the throne. The most interesting thing about all this is that it looks more Japanese than Chinese because the Japanese have always had a taste for minimal decoration while in China the decoration is more likely to be bright and chaotic.

I have seen similar transparent brush paintings in Second Life, in which nearly everything in a certain area was done in that manner. I have also made some such things in Active Worlds in which there are a couple of ways to make such transparent objects. I do, therefore, find this all very interesting and quite marvelous.

It is, I think, fair to say that the story telling in the film is rather simple in the manner of a Western novel in which the characters do what they do because of what they are like clocks wound up and set to work. Nobody really changes or learns from their experience. All the action is, therefore, not so much drama as the playing out of the inevitable. This seems to me to be the case for nearly all the characters except for a very few who are more concerned with working their way out this labyrinth of fate. It works as what we now call an "action movie" which often unreels the inevitable. Still it is a stunningly beautiful movie with a certain excitement in the plot.

I highly recommend seeing the movie as a spare and elegant world in which the action takes place.