Do not see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from the front row. Otherwise, between trying to read the subtitles, and follow the frenetic action sequences, you'll be left with either whiplash, a splitting headache or both. Seeing that it was a Tuesday night, I didn't think our late arrival to the theatre would matter. I was very wrong. The only place the four of could get seats was in the front row.

The film is indeed the feast for the eyes everyone says it is. Quite good fun. You get an odd audience for it here in New York, it being basically an art-house, period-piece kung-fu film. A good percentage of our packed audience last night felt compelled to frequently read the subtitles aloud. While the amazing, beautifully choregraphed fighting scenes elicited delight, the almost weightless scenes involving people running across the surface of water, or drifting among treetops struck people as ridiculous. Both types of scenes stuck me as ridiculous, but the movie is a fairy tale, and this seemed to sail over the heads of many watching it. It's amazing how conditioned people are to accepting superhuman feats of violence and combat in movies, but if you step outside those boundries the same people will respond with "that's not possible."

Still, our crew did enjoy it, and being all Clan Lord players, we had to make a few obvious Clan Lord jokes about being PND ("periliously near death" for you non-clanners, which is basically the worst thing that can happen to you,) needing a spore and an Uli flower, departing and the likes. I'll probably go see it again, only so I can sit back a little further from the screen and actually watch the action sequences and see what's going on. Maybe I'll take Conny when she visits.

After the movie, we three Alexes (Me, Alexis, and Ziff is also an "Alex") and Greg stopped by Broadway City, a big arcade near Times Square. There we had a beer, sent air hockey pucks flying into the crowd, and generally had fun like a bunch of 12 year olds. Ziff was stunned at the alarming rate money was being sucked out of us, but I think he still had a good time in spite of that. He's just not used to the outrageous cost of New York City.

We came back to my apartment for a final round of beer and some pizza, and a bit of geek time watching goofy short video clips on the computer. The crew staggered out around 1:30AM, a potentially early night for me. But, being ever foolish, I turned on ICQ and chatted a while with Kim to torment her with my smitten insufferableness. She's a patient soul, that one.

My distant treasure still continues to amaze and delight me, even through the tenuous and fragile link of the Internet, which is our primary bond over the four thousand miles that seperate us. Even apart, we still manage to do things that bring us closer together, and both push us to new places neither have been before. As we spiral more tightly into the dance of our passion, we enter a private world that is uniquely ours. No words can help me explain it to someone outside of it, and with her, no words are needed to explain it at all.

posted 10:22 AM | link |