House of Flying Daggers Movie Streaming
Friday, February 12th, 2010 |
House of Flying Daggers Movie Streaming.
Movie Title: House of Flying Daggers House of Flying Daggers is available for streaming or downloading. |
Soon following the success of ‘Hero,’ director Yimou Zhang made another film featuring beautiful Zhang Ziyi. One of the good news for Zhang Ziyi fans (including me) is that ‘House of Flying Daggers’ features her almost all through the film. And this time director’s stress is clearly given to the romantic side of the story — and as if to match his intention, ‘House’ looks more beautiful, colorful, and gorgeous, than ‘Hero.’ And there are actions, and some of them are quite unique.
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The film is set in 859 AD, last days of the now corrupt Tang Dynasty in China. One underground sect called House of Flying Daggers are openly challenging the authority of the government, and to crush these rebels, two officers Jin — also known ‘The Wind’ (Takeshi Kaneshiro, ‘Chunking Express’) and Leo (Andy Lau, ‘Infernal Affairs’) think of a good plan.
Jin goes to meet a blind courtesan Mei (Zhang Ziyi), who is suspected to be connected with the secret clan, and he gains the confidence of this beautiful dancer by some tricks — tricks meaning ‘love.’ Make her love you, and you get her secret. Hopefully she will lead Jin to the hiding place of the ‘House of Flying Daggers,’ but before the plan starts, Leo warns Jin: ‘Don’t fall in love for real.’ But who can resist Mei’s beauty? Or Zhang Ziyi’s for that matter?
Buy,Download, Or Stream House of Flying Daggers! Click Here
The rest of the story is very melodramatic, and the film sometimes needs a good amount of suspension of disbelief (especially for Western audiences, I’m afraid). But, though melodramatic, it is aptly so, as this is basically about a romance, or a love story. Those who love the romantic mood in films would understand what I say. It’s all about the tension and mood, and ‘House’ has lots of them.
Actions are done by Tony Ching Siu-Tung, whose CV includes the action director of ‘A Chinese Ghost Story.’ He gives superb martial arts actions here again, without using too much of now-too-trendy wire actions. As the film title shows, there are some effectively shot scenes of ‘flying daggers’ which, with a good use of CGIs, gives a few of thrilling moments. And like I said before, the battles in the midst of a deep bamboo forest are not to be missed, if you are a real Hong-Kong film fan.
Costumes are provided by Emi Wada (as in ‘Hero’), whose colorful dresses are just wonderful. Particlularly those long-sleeved dancing costumes for Zhang Ziyi not merely enhance the exotic beauty of the dancer, but things to be treasured on their own merit. And Kathleen Battle sings the theme song at the end of the film.
But first and foremost, to me, the film is made for Zhang Ziyi. Did I say she is beautiful? She is, and breathtakingly so, when her character betrays her hidden emotions before the camera. And sometimes the film reveals the character’s very sensual side — I say, for a Chinese film, of course, but it was a little surprising.
Of course, top-credited Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro are the stars, and they are very good. The film is always beautiful to see, from the first to the end (the snow field was shot in Ukraine). And if you’re a fan of Zhang Ziyi, this one is not to be missed for it’s not too much to say that it belongs to her.
Since none of the other reviews for this movie seem to focus on the Blu-Ray disc, I decided I’ll throw my $.02 in.
The movie is a very good, well told story. The other reviews tell you that. What they don’t tell you is that the Blu-Ray version is a waste of money.
The first issue I had when playing the movie was the menu. Something told me that when the menu come on and it looked no better than DVD that something was amiss. I had hoped it was just the menu. I was wrong.
I then started the movie up with subtitles and when the actual movie started I raised my hand to my head and began to scratch it. The video looked HORRIBLE. Pixelated and blurry and lacking detail.
I paused the movie just before the drum scene. I then put the DVD into my Oppo 971 DVD player, switched the input on my TV to the DVD player and skipped to the same scene on the DVD. I was amazed. The DVD upconverted to 720p using the Oppo 971 looked BETTER than the 1080p image coming from the PS3 through HDMI! The only difference is that the PS3’s image is a bit brighter. This may be because I haven’t calibrated the color for the HDMI input and not a true representation of the transfer.
The sound is really good, but not a whole lot better than the DVD. It certainly isn’t worth the price to upgrade to Blu-Ray when the sound nearly imperceptibly changes and the video looks this bad.
Looking at reviews on-line for the disc and given they were giving the movie decent video ratings, I thought it may be a problem with my setup, so I called Sony’s PS3 support line and basically was told that as long as my other movies looked good (Corpse Bride looks simply stunning in Blu-Ray) that it was likely the way the movie was authored. Pretty sad that Sony, who are the biggest backers of the format, can’t even author a movie properly. I have since learned from sources other than people trying to justify the expense of their $1000 players that HoFD is widely regarded as Sony’s most poorly authored Blu-Ray title. Part of the issue may also be that Sony has an aversion to VC-1 (which is supported by Microsoft) and instead focuses on using MPEG-2 to encode the video. Talledega Nights also uses MPEG-2 but looks light years beyond HoFD.
Do yourself a favor if you want to purchase this on Blu-Ray; save yourself some money and buy the DVD version instead. The content doesn’t change and it honestly looks better than the Blu-Ray disc. If you want something to show off the clarity of Blu-Ray, pick up Corpse Bride.
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