Wong Kar-Wai, the Chinese director, is also like that. His movies are beautiful to look at, but are often overlong and sometimes...boring. (Style over substance can be wonderful if done correctly and if it doesn't take itself seriously. Quentin Tarantino is a master at it; "Kill Bill" is a total exercise in style and it managed to be one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen.) There are exceptions, though. I really enjoyed "In The Mood For Love" ...what an incredibly lush and romantic movie. Tony Leungtravis_nw8 said:
won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival for this movie. Another Wong Kar-Wai film, "Chungking Express" was also quite good. A very young (and adorable!) Takeshi Kaneshiro (he's in "House of Flying Daggers") is in that movie, btw. I am currently on an Asian movies fix (rediscovered a crush on a certain actor
), so I'm recommending: "Infernal Affairs" - very popular movie from HK; Scorsese just remade it into an English movie called "The Departed" with Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio. Both are excellent movies, but "Infernal Affairs" has the better ending, imo, featuring a spectacular shot of the HK landscape.
"Hard Boiled" - if you don't like action movies, stay away from this one. But if you want to see the most amazingly choreographed, insane, and even beautifully poetic gun battles ever, check it out. Plot is somewhat thin but gun sequences are spectacular. The last forty minutes of this film is basically that computer game DOOM in a hospital. Chow Yun-Fat is in this. So is Tony Leung (who I mentioned earlier); it is very appealing to see him leap through the air with guns blazing, especially after just watching him as such a dapper and romantic sop in "In The Mood For Love." He is AWESOME. This was the last movie John Woo did in HK before he went to America to make crappy movies like "The Bulletproof Monk." (However! He is going to be making a movie called "Battle Of Red Cliff" coming out in 2008 - VERY promising cast list: Chow Yun-Fat, Andy Lau (they call him the "Tom Cruise" of Asia), Tony Leung (yaaaaay), and Ken Watanabe (he was Katsumoto in "The Last Samurai" and the Chairman in "Memoirs of a Geisha").
Also, I may be the oddball here, but I do not like those Chinese martial arts films like "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers." It's not a racial thing; I AM Asian. But I assure you, there are WAAAAAAY better films than these being made in HK and China. "Hero" and "HOFD" are also exercises in style at the sacrifice of substance. On a technical level, these movies are flawless. Beautifully costumes, cinematography, and choreography. They are beautiful movies to look at. But the plot is very thin, imo, and at times too thin to keep the movie moving along. I found both movies rather pointless at times. I hope Zhang Yimou (director of both those movies) goes back to what he was doing in the 1990s when he was making truly beautiful movies like "Raise the Red Lantern". That was a much better (and deeper) movie than his latest martial arts efforts, which are imo superficial and sometimes pretentious.
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