Hero

Martial arts that is faster than the mind can follow and as vividly colorful as streaming rainbows is Zhang Yimou’s film Hero, an exciting historical Chinese tale that takes our eyes where they are unaccustomed. With a cast (Jet Li and Zhang Ziyi) and genre (action-adventure) recognized and enjoyed by world audiences, Hero achieves great success overcoming its enormous production costs of around $30 million.

The plot takes place in ancient China during the reign of Qin dynasty in its conquest of the six kingdoms in order to unite all cultures into one empire. Nameless (Jet Li), a prefect of a small jurisdiction, earns an audience with the King of Qin’s palace to tell his tale of how he defeated three of the King’s most feared assassins. However, all is not as it seems. The movie takes an interesting approach by unveiling Nameless’ tale through his and the King’s perspective revealing Nameless’ true intentions of why he is killing assassins to be within ten paces of the King. This type of flashback method is popularly known in the film industry as “Rashomon”, and it is effective in presenting mutually contradictory points of view.

During the unfolding tales, a pallet of four colors (blue, white, green, red), one per scenario, accentuates mood and beauty that is shared with the fluid movements of the actors and cameras. Apart from the mesmerizing aesthetics, the film did not strike the right moral chord as the plot suggests that it is a virtuous deed for a King to massacre millions of people for a greater good, “unification”. That would be like saying it would be acceptable for the United States to conquer the entire world to become one country, where everyone has to identify themselves as one nation and inherit US’s ideals and customs.

Overall, Hero is pleasing to the eyes, but it could use some plot reshaping, which director Zhang Yimou learned to do in his next film House of Flying Daggers.

-Joshua Lee

Amelie

Amelie uses a unique style of filming which follows its principal character, Amelie Poulain, around Paris as she sets out to make the world a better place.

The movie opens with Amelie’s birth and childhood. Amelie’s childhood is primarily focused on the relationship she has with her parents although a few other mishaps and exploits are thrown in as well. This includes a scene in which she exercises the precursor to her strong sense of justice we see later on in the film.

The first half of the movie focuses on Amelie’s determination to make the world a better place by serving the principal people she interacts with. She brings back childhood memories for a stranger, describes the world to a blind man, re-inspires a close friend, matchmakes one of her coworkers and customers, uses a garden gnome to convince her father to travel, and even serves vigilante justice to a cruel vegetable shopowner, Somewhere along the way, the audience slowly realizes along with Amelie that she is not completely content simply serving others. She has a desire for a relationship herself. The second half of the movie primarily focuses on Amelie’s desire to connect with a young man, Nino, who is unfortunately unaware of her existence. Amelie sets out to help Nino in his mission to discover the identity of a mysterious man in photographs however, along the way, she realizes she wants to be with Nino as well. She interacts with him incognito so that she will not give away her identity.

The characters are described primarily by what they like to do and what they don’t like. Although at first appearance this is very random, it actually serves to create a very complete picture of each character. The characters are rich with detail and motives.

Amelie makes use of various cinematographic effects to convey its story. The most noticeable effect is a filter that changes the color of the lighting in various settings but use of various angles and zoom are also very prominent. Framing is also used as well to depict perspectives of characters. Heavy use of mise en scene is present as well.

I truly enjoyed this movie because of the manner in which the cinematographic effects and editing came together to reveal each character's perspectives and thoughts. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a movie to inspire their lives.


written by Blair Kim