Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Variety magazine used to refer to martial arts movies as "chop socky flicks." Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon would, then, be a really big chop socky flick. It's got all the cheesy, goofball stuff you'd expect from the Taiwanese kung-fu movies of the '70s, but with an enormous budget to back it up. Chow Yun Fat stars as a master of the Wudan school of martial arts. The big bonus to being a Wudan master is that you can fly, which is the kind of thing that looks great on a big screen, especially if the characters are flying over misty Chinese landscapes while fighting with ancient, magical swords. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is big-time fun, but don't go expecting to see Citizen Kane. This is more like a Saturday-morning cartoon raised to the level of Wagnerian opera, with all the amusement and stupidity that are found so abundantly in both of those art forms.