Memory Hierarchy

Aeschylus was not subtle at all.

The other day I saw Zhang Yimou's Hero and was reminded of Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, another "triumph of cinematography" that hid its emptiness behind sumptious yet over blown colors. It would be interesting to compare and contrast how Zhang and Kieslowski used over saturation of colors to cover up their movies but that's a job for a real movie critic (there's gotta be a movie critic out there who was not taken in by either director like the majority of the sorry trade). From Hero, it's obvious that Zhang is a Leni Riefenstahl without her talent. Creepy sentimentalism at the end, coupled with starry-eyed emperor worship makes it obvious that Zhang would've been a loyal subject to Japanese Tenno had he born in earlier times. At worst Kieslowski was indulgent about his meandering psycho-babble in Three Colors but he never prostituted himself to a tyrant. In fact Kieslowski bravely challenged tyranny as shown in his earlier Decalogue.

Beat Takeshi's Blind Swordman, Zatoichi had only two colors: drabby landscape in country and town and red blood that flowed freely as swords flew around. Unappetizing as it looked, it was far superior to bloodless Hero. Besides it had a really groovy soundtrack that Hero's no-doubt-highly-compensated Issac Perlman couldn't match. For all those swords and body parts, Zatoichi is a western and a noir that deserves to be topping the box offices, rather than Hero.