Month: December 2004

*Flight of the Phoenix* opens with this big old ugly-beautiful C-119 cargo plane flying over the desolate-beautiful Gobi Desert, swooping and soaring and, frankly, showing off in its magnificent defiance of the harsh world below. And blasting on the soundtrack, while the titles flash, is Johnny Cash’s weary-exuberant anthem ‘I’ve Been Everywhere.’ The combined effect is hauntingly memorable — I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, can’t get the song out of my head — half audacious arrogance, half genuine love of traveling the world and seeing what there is to see out there.

If there’s a scarcely populated niche in the Hollywood ecosystem, it’s the one where popcorn movies for grownups roam lonely: you know, films without fart jokes or stuff blowing up real good starring actual adults that nevertheless are not about people dying of cancer or lying compulsively about sex or surviving against terrible odds in rubble-strewn war zones while Nazis hunt them down in a way that speaks metaphoric volumes about the human condition. Sometimes you just need a fun, diverting movie free of delusions of grandeur and Oscar clips but not free of lots of pretty people to look at.

Reason No. 143,854 why invading Iraq was a bad idea: It woke up the ‘patriarch’ of all vampires, who was slumbering in the desert, and boy is he pissed.

It’s impossible not to compare Zhang Yimou’s *House of Flying Daggers* with *Hero,* his previous film, because although two years separate them, we got them in a one-two punch here in the States. And I was still reeling from *Hero* when I sat down to watch this new one, and although I kinda didn’t think it would be possible, *House of Flying Daggers* is even more beautiful and more romantic and more exciting and more spectacular and more *everything.* I’m almost afraid to know what Zhang will conjure up for his next film — I might explode out of sheer delight.

If it was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film — as this one was last year — then it must have Nazis in it. Sure enough, here they are, swarming all over Prague, forcing cosmopolitan medical student/resistance member Eliska (Ana Geislerova) to run for the hills, literally. Hiding out in the titular Czech … more…