Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I haven't even gotten a lot of reading done, although I did manage to plow my way through Sean McMullen's The Miocene Arrow. Actually, "plow" sells it short; it's an excellent book, even better than its predecessor, Souls in the Great Machine. The ideas content is not quite as high, but the plot is very strong, being a chronicle of a civilization changing radically as a result of outside influence. (In some ways, it's the story that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace should have been.) It's also got a heart-wrenching star-crossed love affair.

I did more today than I did in the last two days combined. I met my Dad for lunch, and we went to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (whose title, it seems, no one can remember until they've said it out loud about twenty times; I sometimes referred to it as "Crouching X, Hidden Y"). When I first saw the previews for it, I thought it looked pretty cheesy, with people so obviously being pulled aloft by wires. It turns out to be a deeper film than that, although the use of wires still looks kind of cheesy. (If the characters are going to fly, then why don't they just fly? If they're making mighty leaps, it doesn't look very realistic.)

The story takes place in ancient China, and begins with the famed fighter Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat Fat) deciding to hang up his sword - literally. He asks his true love Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) to take his sword, Green Destiny, to present to a venerable merchant in Peking. While there, Shen Lau meets Jen (Ziyi Zhang), the daughter of powerful Governor Yu, and shortly thereafter the sword is stolen, apparently by a vicious thief named Jade Fox (Pei-pei Cheng), who killed Li Mu Bai's master many years earlier.

Although she's not the headlining actress, the story is primarily that of Jen, who has become a mighty warrior herself, but largely kept this fact hidden from her family. Engaged to be married, she's still in love with Lo (Chen Chang), a desert thief she'd met several years earlier. Although skilled, she's also reckless and torn between the two sides of her life, which leads to a lot of trouble for everyone involved. Much of the story is Jen's, and to some degree the prevalent theme is "power corrupts" (and even when it doesn't absolutely corrupt, it can still wreak a lot of carnage if not kept properly in check, which can cause a lot of heartache).

It's a complicated story, also involving Li Mu Bai's desire to avenge his master, and his unexpressed love for Shen Lau. The story effectively offsets the lengthy and astonishingly complicated martial arts fighting scenes, involving hand-to-hand combat and a wide variety of weapons.

The story is quite quirky, introducing major new elements more than halfway through. Its biggest problems are little plotting issues (why does Shu Lien let the thief go in their first encounter?), and a lack of closure of Shu Lien's story at the end. On the plus side, the sets and landscapes are beautiful, and the attention to detail makes the whole world of the film seem very real.

Obviously I'm not gushing about the film as much as some critics have (a few think it has Best Picture Oscar potential), but it's still very good (well, unless you loathe subtitles). Even if you don't care for martial arts, it's still worth seeing.

In the evening I got together for my annual dinner with my friend Bruce. Bruce and I met about 12 years ago through an APA we were in at the time, and indeed he's very nearly the only person from that group I'm still in touch with (although I still hear from James S----- from time to time).

We got together at our usual rendezvous spot of Quincy Market in downtown Boston - I was early, Bruce was late, so I read this week's comic book haul while waiting for him - and we had our traditional Italian dinner. Usually we talk about a wide range of topics, but this year we both seemed to be in the mood to geek out about comic books, helped by the fact that I've been buying a lot of late-1960s Avengers and Fantastic Fours lately, which is around when Bruce started buying comics.

It was a very enjoyable evening. We've been doing this for four or five years, I think (including one summer when we went to a Red Sox game together), and it's a blast.

One of my favorite exchanges of the evening:

Bruce: Do I recall reading in your last letter that you were dating someone?

Me: Yes, I was dating someone...

Bruce: I understand there's a lot of that going around.