Entry 8:

Dear Phillip,

Crouching Tiger makes the top of my list, too, though I had some reservations. Unlike you I adore martial arts movies--not indiscriminately, but certainly my life would have been poorer without certain films of King Hu (A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan, Dragon Gate Inn) or Chang Cheh (Seven Blows of the Dragon, The Five Deadly Venoms). It used to be so nice to go down to Chinatown and see the latest Shaw Brothers epic (invariably coupled with a sex comedy) on a summer afternoon, but all the theaters have closed now, replaced by hole-in-the-wall video stores. (Another great thing about martial arts movies was the way the stunning posters brightened up that neighborhood.) At best there was always an element of mysterious beauty along with the kicks. ... Anyway, my reservations about Crouching Tiger had more to do with critical claims that Ang Lee was doing something unprecedented when really he's drawing (as he'd be first to admit) on a long and rich tradition. Including the foregrounding of powerful women (check out Xu Feng, Angela Mao, and other stars of the '60s). But I agree completely about Michelle Yeoh. This is screen magic.

Ditto on Traffic. The cross-cutting works fine, just as it did for D. W. Griffith in 1916, but each of the stories taken in isolation is fairly banal. Think of what it could have been if the script had really explored the ramifications of the drug trade in more complex fashion. (True, it might have taken another hour or so of screen time.) There was no suggestion, for example, that the war on drugs has economic benefits for police forces, communities, prison employees, etc., or any hint of the hard ideological lines that have kept drug policy in total stasis for decades. One was left to imagine that the only problem is a certain muddled indecisiveness on the part of American officials. (Thinking about genuinely complex movies about such issues, I recall Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City. I also recall that it bombed commercially precisely because of that complexity.)

So, yes, I will be rooting for Tiger, for subtitles, for fantasy, for Chinese tradition, for Michelle Yeoh (and Chow Yun-fat, too).

Best,
Geoffrey