Though Hero employs current moviemaking technology and follows the recent trends in martial arts choreography, from Yimou's remarks in this interview with the Chicago Tribune it's plain he has the best, traditional reasons for making a romance--to exemplify and promote national and spiritual principles, to use narrative to transmute ideas into group sentiment. In the West we're familiar with Hero's motives as Verdian themes from the transitional works I Vespri siciliani (1855), Simon Boccanegra (1857), Un Ballo in maschera (1859), and La Forza del destino (1862): the necessity of sacrifice on the part of one of the antagonists in order to end a vendetta and the primary importance of national unity. Unfortunately, Hero lacks that combination of mastery and discovery that Verdi shows in these operas.

The fantastic combat scenes in Hero, accomplished with wires and CGI, are impressive but in a relatively impersonal way. Yimou seems to be working in a borrowed style. Indeed, this movie bears no resemblance to the much more formally static works that made him famous. As a result the movie doesn't have the crispness that an action master like Akira Kurosawa brought to his breakthrough works. And though it does sweep along that's due in large part to the fact that the script recounts the same events in several versions within a short enough span of time so you can appreciate the differences. A lot of the most pictorial effects--the protagonist's face moving in slow motion through individual raindrops, antgonists running across the surface of a lake seen from below, or action laid out against geological panoramas--make the movie look like a sequence of (admittedly sleek) TV commercials. Yimou's work here is absorbing and fleet, and all the actors score, especially Maggie Cheung who maintains movie-star allure in a range of styles as the protagonist's story changes, but I would be more careful than most critics have been not to oversell it.

A Dirty Shame

A Dirty Shame, the latest movie by John Waters, brings the interplay of irony and romance full circle. It stars Tracey Ullman as a drab, prudish, picklepussed Baltimore housewife who suffers a concussion which turns her into a raging, exhibitionistic nympho. This isn't just a physiological condition. She's the final apostle of a mechanic named Ray Ray, played by Jackass host Johnny Knoxville, who believes that number 12 will be the One to lead the world to an overwhelming sex act never before performed.

It's all a put-on, of course, and Waters can beat Ferrell and his team any day at purposely bad. The challenge for Ferrell is to appear incompetent in a way that registers as if it required effort--the difference between Anchorman and Elf. Waters, the most consistently entertaining of permanent amateurs, has never bothered to develop any conventional skills. The difficulty for him is finding actors with the right mixture of bravado and desperation, which came naturally to Divine, the obese cross-dresser Waters met in high school who starred in his first, way-underground cheapies. (There's nothing else in movies like the scene in Female Trouble (1975) in which Divine out of drag rapes Divine in drag.)