Hacker Cinema
Hero
英雄
2002 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Zhang Yimou
During China's Warring States period, a district prefect arrives at the palace of Qin Shi Huang, claiming to have killed the three assassins who had made an attempt on the king's life three years ago.
12 positive16 neutralfrom 28 commenters
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34 comments on Hacker News
No one in Asia wants to visit nyc because of friends, sienfeld or sex and the city. These shows to them are mostly raw garbage. The reason is because these shows are culturally focused. Its catered exclusively to the type of American humor and values that most people in Asia do not give two shits about.
They want to visit Hollywood because they want to see the technology that built these blockbusters because internationally everyone understands heroism, sacrifice and special effects. Additionally these movies aren’t watered down. The writing and the effects have gone through years of development to get to that point. It just doesn’t cater to your sensibilities. The term is snobbish.
The writing for Seinfeld and friends and sex and the city took years to get where they are. These aren’t inborn cultural talents. You can easily compare stories from past American movies to see how cheesy and stupid they are. It takes development for stories to come to where they are today and it’s a back and forth between the audience and writers. As writers write more stories audience members learn and become more sophisticated and twists and humor that worked in the past become cliche. Why do you think you’re too snobbish to appreciate something like avengers? You think someone in the 50s wouldn’t appreciate it? Fuck honestly if the whole mcu up till end game came out in the 50s that whole thing would win a Nobel peace prize.
China is 100% going through this learning process right now. The audiences sophistication and the writers as a result are growing at a breakneck pace. I think movies from China that might appeal to who you are is crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as these movies share the more universally appreciated parts of Chinese culture and since that is what you’re interested in, I recommend them to you.
I encountered this with Hero, when the single giant calligraphy character that is critical to the film had a different subtitle in the cinema and on the DVD. One of these days I'd love to read a deep dive into how that aspect of the film is understood by native speakers. Which I suspect might be longer than the film itself, dealing as it does with the politics of Chinese unity.
> there's not exactly a US market enthusiastic for "cool" Chinese military propaganda films either.
Hero debuted as #1 in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_(2002_film)
Not an artist myself, but it reminds me that maybe ten years ago or so I produced a series of "movie abstracts" which were whole movies accelerated to last 10-15 seconds by temporally averaging frames (the tmix ffmpeg filter).
I don't think I have them anymore, it was just for showing to friends. But the result was interesting, especially for some Wong Kar-Wai movies or, as I remember, Hero, where colours play an important role.
I miss the Zhang Yimou that directed Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Those were some of my favorite films of that time.
Well, I had to look at the WP page just to check if I'm imagining things and nobody else thought about this (mind you, I'm a great fan of wuxia, and Hero is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with each minute being extremely satisfying on all levels). It turns out there are others[0]:
> Nevertheless, there were several film critics who felt the film had advocated autocracy and reacted with discomfort. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice deemed it to have a "cartoon ideology" and justification for ruthless leadership comparable to Triumph of the Will. Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote an otherwise positive review but concluded: "The movie, spectacular as it is, in the end confronts what must be called the tyrant's creed, and declares itself in agreement with the tyrant."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_(2002_film)#Critical_response
I think that's reading too much into the movie. It's not an apologia of modern day China, it's a wuxia fable about imperial China, and the message of unity is not a bad one.
> A federation of states, in an integrated form like the USA or weaker like the EU seems to work much better in terms of benefits to their citizens than authoritarian empires in Chinese or Russian style.
That's a lot of baggage to unload into a wuxia movie. It's a movie, a folklore fable more in the style of a Chinese Rashomon (to which it's been compared) than a way to introduce political discourse. I wouldn't overanalyze it, just like I don't watch samurai movies to criticize them because Japanese feudal society wasn't democratic.
I can guarantee you "Hero" is not communist propaganda. I thought we were past this level of paranoia with the Cold War over.
I sure hope they never ban "Hero", it's one of my favorite wuxia movies! I don't see it as propaganda at all, regardless of the ambiguous interpretation of its ending.
As far as I can see it has many people from Hong Kong in its cast -- including the awesome Maggie Cheung -- and the production company was from Hong Kong. Regardless, I don't consider "sponsored by the state" to be a naughty word, nor do I consider "fully privately sponsored" to be a badge of honor.
I see your point and I agree with most that you wrote. I don't believe the article I linked to is dangerous, though. It clarified many things for me (not to mention putting Brodsky in a new context, personally I found it quite shocking).
I remember watching the Chinese movie Hero (2002), sponsored by the state. The main premise of this beautiful movie is that dictatorship has its value that must be respected, and only people with deeper insight can understand it. Banning such works serves no purpose, but it's important for people to learn to spot manipulation and propaganda.
It's funny that you mention this because one of my fav fight scenes in any movie is at the beginning of Hero, the 2002 movie with Jet Li. When Jet Li and Donnie Yen's characters face off at the beginning of the movie, they imagine the fight in their heads, with a shift to black&white noting the shift to an imagined fight. Their "simulation" leads to both sides recognizing that Jet Li would win, and Jet Li finishes his opponent off with one swift movement. The scene actually takes place at a chess courtyard, with an old man playing music as they "fight".
Video of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeeoEpmyb2Y
true Hero is such a beautiful piece of artwork in so many dimensions. its the movie I watched the most often. 》5 times
Yes. A lot of Western action movies owe their inspiration to Chinese movies (and I suppose, viceversa). In this case Hero (2002) -- or a similar movie, since I doubt it invented this trope -- is likely an inspiration for A Game of Shadows (2011).
_Hero_'s always been one of my favorites. A lot of kung fu movies try to strike a balance between aesthetics and realism - I really enjoy a movie that picks one (in this case the former) and goes all in on it. It's got a fight that takes place entirely on the surface of a lake, and another that takes places in a forest of falling leaves that change color several times throughout the scene. It's an incredibly beautiful movie.
In the movie Hero[0], two kung fu masters fight a battle purely in their minds. And when the mental fight was over, they only execute one physical move to finish the battle.
Think of this as the computer equivalent of that scene.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
> It's not their brain washing, it's yours.
The main difference I found between China- and Western-style brainwashing is that, in general, in the West people have much more negative attitude toward killing others, no matter what narrative is presented. Whenever USA tries to wage a war, there are many demonstrations against the war, and societies at large are anti-war and opposed to all forms of killing.
The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to believe in consequentialism to a larger degree. They argue that sometimes killing is necessary to prevent more killing, for example. This is presented in a way very accessible for a Western person in the wuxia Hero (2002) where it is the main point of the movie.
All in, I consider the Chinese more brainwashed because Western people have access to all kinds of propaganda - American right & left, Russian, Chinese - whereas the Chinese have much more limited sources because the government is putting an enormous amount of effort in controlling the sources of information, and given the size of the population, they're extremely successful.
Imagine if the compression for the movie “Hero” couldn’t exploit the color themes in each act of the movie. That would be a might bigger.
You've recreated the Ultimate Ideal from movie Hero (2002)
1. Mastery of a weapon and combat (the nuclear weapon)
2. Weapon not in hand, but in the hearts and minds (loyalty and devotion to the cause)
3. The ultimate ideal - the weapon disappears altogether, and the warrior is at peace with the world.
The grease pencil has been around for longer than 2.8, but it got some serious love recently. The Blender Institute even made a 2D movie with it (Hero) as a showcase for the improvements.
Wow, is hero out of stock? I remember that as being a quite popular and talked about movie, not at all some niche cinema thing
If not for my friend who sails a lot, i would have needed to turn to the Pirate Bay to get a copy of the film The Fall with Lee Pace in it. One of the most beautiful films ever made and it’s not available to stream anywhere. Or purchase in hard copy unless I go for an $80 used copy on eBay or amazon. It’s out of print and no studio seems to be interested in putting it out there. Went through something similar for the film Hero with Jet Li, but eventually found a new old stock copy for a reasonable price. Sometimes things just aren’t legitimately available anywhere, streaming or not.
For an accessible and convincing (albeit controversial) presentation of this concept, see the movie Hero:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_(2002_film)
> What is the grease pencil?
The grease pencil is Blender's 2D drawing system. Initially, it's purpose was to allow artists to sketch scenes out onscreen, in much the same way that CGI artists a few decades ago used literal grease pencils [1] to draw on their glass computer monitors.
Nowadays, the grease pencil is a full 2D art system, allowing for hand-drawn 2D art to coexist with 3D assets or tracked with camera footage. The Blender Foundation made a short film called "Hero" [2] to show it off.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grease_pencil
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmSdY56VtY
> How do I select all (UV) verticies?
On the bottom edge of the UV editor window is a menu bar. From the left, the menus are editor type (shown as an icon), "View", "Select", "Image", and "UVs". Farther to the right in that bar is the widget that lets you set whether you are selecting verticies, edges, faces, or islands. In the "select" menu is "(De)select All", and a label indicating that the keyboard shortcut is "A". (This shortcut is universal to all of Blender's editors (except the text editor, where it is Ctrl+A).
If you have anything at all selected, then "(De)select All" will deselect everything. If you have nothing selected, it will select everything.
> How do I select multiple via box?
In Blender, this is called "border select". In the same "select" menu I described above, it's the bottom option (the one nearest your cursor when you open the menu). It also has a universal shortcut, indicated in the menu: "B".
> How do I do numeric input?
There are two ways I can interpret this. One is "given a number box, how to I change the value"? There are three ways that you can change the content of number boxes in Blender.
1. Click on the arrows on the left or right sides to decrement or increment the value.
2. Click in the middle, type a value or math expression, and then either click outside the box or type "enter".
3. Click and drag the box, from the middle, to the left or right.
The other way I can interpret the question is "how can I specify the coordinates of a UV vertex"?
Once you have one or more verticies selected in the UV editor, you should see some properties and editing widgets in a tall rectangular area on the right edge of the UV editor window. If you don't see it, you can reveal it by either clicking on the "+" button near the top of that edge, by going to the "view" menu and selecting "properties", or by hitting the "N" key while your cursor is over the UV editor.
In the top of the UV properties shelf I just described is a section called "UV Vertex". (It's called that even when you are in edge, face, or island selecting mode.) It has two numeric boxes in it labeled "X" and "Y". These have the coordinates of the most recently selected vertex. Changing the contents of those boxes moves the selected vertex to those coordinates, and moves all other selected verticies by the same amount from their previous locations.
Three Chinese movies I've seen get fairly widespread acclaim are: 1. Hero 2. Flowers of Shanghai 3. The Legend of the Drunken Master
> It represents a typical scene in the upcoming Gooseberry open-source movie project
Gooseberry has been released -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-rmzh0PI3c ... they have done multiple movies since then including agent 327 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0zPOpADL4 and Hero -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmSdY56VtY
GPU acceleration really helps cycles (Blender's open source raytracing engine)... however, the gooseberry benchmark uses up too much ram to make this render purely off the GPU.
I've already encountered a minor version of this with the film "Demolition Man": when I first saw it on UK TV, it mentioned Pizza Hut at one point, but more recently it was on again and that line was overdubbed really badly to say "Taco Bell".
It's a weird thing to watch an film turn out differently to how you rememebered it when you're not told it's a different cut. Feels like low-grade gaslighting.
(Another example is the translation of "天下" - Tianxia - in the film Hero, which is both critical to the film and translated differently in different versions)
Zhang Yimou definitely has a type (which Hero conforms to), and his popularity means that he's almost synonymous with "Chinese export film", but I assume others have their own styles.
The most blindingly obvious in-your-face tinting was the movie Hero, where different interpretations of past events were tinted with a strong primary color.
Hero[0] (2002) has each section of the movie tinted differently, it's visually outstanding (and a pretty good movie overall)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_%282002_film%29
The movie was Hero, a 2002 movie starring Jet Li. I tended to get a different feeling from that line. The nameless protagonist had asked for calligraphy from his opponent. However, the protagonist did not ask for any of the existing ways to write "Sword", but rather for a new expression of it. When it was written, the protagonist spent a sleepless night examining it, learning every detail and every symbol behind the writing of this single word. It is in this context that the king interrupts the story and says how silly it is to have so many ways of writing it.
Rather than being a statement of how it should be, I took it to be a statement of ignorance on the part of the king. The king did not understand how there could be subtleties in words, and wished only for simplification of the language, rather than looking for the meaning behind existing words.
Agreed, though at times "Hero" is borderline heavy-handed with color. However it manages to remain beautiful. One thing I've learned, though, from a set-designer friend, is that nearly every movie is highly attuned to color and lighting.
If you're looking for other films that use color in interesting ways, check out the "Three Colors Trilogy" by Kieslowski.
I find just seeing the color palette says a lot about a movie. And of course "Hero"/"Ying Xiong" is amongst the compressed movies: http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying-xiong-2002
I don't know if you've seen Hero but that is an amazingly beautiful film. The sets, the lighting, the costumes, the actors, everything is gorgeous. You could take almost any still from it and blow it up and put it on the wall. It is set in the Chinese equivalent of the Western mediaeval period, and has all these perfect little vignettes, like a miniature visual essay into the nature of raindrops falling on a sword.
But the political message which only really sinks in afterwards is "China should stop fucking about already and just invade Taiwan" and then you think, wow, someone really wanted to get that message across to Western moviegoers...
> People say they don't see the point in the theater any more and I think thy're insane for not wanting to see a film the way it was meant to be seen.
Some films are meant to be seen on a huge screen, but some films aren't. Off the top of my head, '7 Pounds' doesn't need to be seen on a 30' screen to be appreciated. Films that are especially character-driven with little 'action' don't need to be seen on a huge screen (barring other things like shots of vast landscapes that set the tone for parts of the movie,etc).
I've seen Hero. There are films that make great use of color. Even looking at blockbusters like The Matrix, the mood of the film is set by the tone of the colors used and the lack of saturation throughout (and the 'lady in the red dress' scene wouldn't have made as much sense in b&w). Films like Amelie and (arguably it's spiritual successor.. though a tv series) Pushing Daisies also make great use of color (though it's much more in-your-face in Hero).
Color arguably isn't essential, but an awful lot of work goes into it. There are, literally, books written about nothing but the use of color in film. Hero was a particularly dramatic example in recent years, if you haven't seen it.
Well..the cinemas are making some money out of 3d for a while - even with a tv, it's a lot different when it's 30 feet tall. People say they don't see the point in the theater any more and I think thy're insane for not wanting to see a film the way it was meant to be seen.