Word: duelist
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...Still and all, the Subway Cinema lads haven?t lost their eyes. Even their conventional choices display pinwheeling formal expertise. Simply by being shown on a New York movie screen, these films underline the cinematic stodginess of most American films. Compared to a movie like the Korean Duelist or the Japanese Cromartie High School, the Hollywood product looks pretty paltry...
...Duelist, also known as Detective, is South Korean director Lee Myung-se?s first film since his international hit Nowhere to Hide. It was an expensive flop at home, and I think I can see why. But it has a ravishing physical beauty well worth attending...
...filmmaker can do two cool things with genre conventions: honor them or subvert them. He can praise or bury them. Duelist tries both. It is simultaneously an evocation and an interment of the martial arts film. Lee?s cunning management of crowds and his spectacular use of camera and setting lend to this live-action film the aesthetics of anime. At times the film stops in wonder at its own devices. Which is a shame, since Duelist is so smart and pretty, it doesn?t to tell us how much it admires itself. The movie?s preening is demeaning...
...that is to sell the film short. Duelist?s hyper-romantic impulses and lush symphonic music, plus the backlighting, the stately swordplay, the fat snowflakes, not to mention more slo-mo shots than in a Wong Kar-wai retrospective - all these effects heroicize the enterprise, making it something to gaze upon but not enter into. Indeed, one doesn?t watch Duelist so much as window-shop for fabulous cinematic fashions. Its art direction and lovely mannequins take film style to the outr? limits...
...school, Cuomo impressed his classmates and teachers as an intellectual duelist of fiendish cleverness. Arguing with Cuomo is like arm wrestling with an opponent who has some built-in advantage: it is hard to get any leverage. He tied for first in his graduating class and was chosen to serve as a legal assistant for a judge on the New York State Court of Appeals. He spent his time staying up late to ponder legal briefs and commuting to Queens on weekends from Albany...