‘Crouching Tiger’ tears into success Director Ang Lee’s martial arts masterpiece leaves audiences star-struck

In theaters

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. 119 minutes. PG-13. (Mandarin with English subtitles). Directed by Ang Lee. Written by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung.

Ang Lee’s masterwork, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Foreign Film, is the most exciting, exhilarating movie to hit theaters in years.

It’s everything you’ve heard it is and more, an amazing film infused with Eastern myths and Western pop that could only come from Lee, a man born and raised in Taiwan, yet educated in the United States.

This remarkable film, more than any other movie by Lee (“Sense and Sensibility,” “Eat Drink Man Woman,” “The Ice Storm”), is the best utilization of his unique perspective, a movie that seamlessly presents one artistic triumph after another.

It gleefully draws from the masters of the Chinese action genre – especially director King Hu, whose influence is seen everywhere in “Tiger,” right down to the casting (Cheng Pei Pei, who plays Jade Fox in “Tiger,” starred in Hu’s 1965 film, “Come Drink with Me”) – yet it nevertheless lives, breathes and soars because of the mischievous way Lee reinvents a genre long overdue for a face-lift.

Without giving too much of its plot away, the film follows Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), a martial arts expert retiring his sword, the infamous Green Destiny, even though he’s about to go in search of the person who murdered his master.

With the woman (Michelle Yeoh) he’s loved for years at his side, Bai is about to leave when the Green Destiny is stolen, his arch nemesis, Jade Fox (Pei Pei), storms back into his life, and an aristocrat’s daughter (Zhang Zi-yi) proves she’s hardly the demure petal some perceive her to be.

Marked by its wit, its heart and its mesmerizing performances – Yeoh and Zi-yi, in particular, are brilliant – “Tiger” truly takes off to become a cultural phenomenon in its fight sequences.

Choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, surpassing his landmark work in “The Matrix,” creates a precise, thrilling ballet of whirling arms, kicking feet and tumbling bodies that’s unrelenting in its intensity and creativity.

Couple those moves with the mournful sounds of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello – not to mention with Lee’s decision to send his cast sailing across rooftops, tripping across water, fighting within the limbs of a bamboo forest or flying straight through the air as if they were starring in a remake of “Peter Pan” – and you have a good idea of this film’s ability to stun its audiences with the unexpected.

In the four years I’ve been reviewing films for this paper, I’ve never seen an audience as captivated by a film as they were here. When the lights came up, people didn’t dash out as they usually do. Instead, they remained rooted to their seats and transfixed to a black screen. It’s as if they couldn’t believe what they had just seen.

I couldn’t either. It’s rare that one sees the face of cinema changed so grandly by a director working at the top of his form, but that’s just what Lee has done here. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is his masterpiece. A masterpiece. Don’t miss your chance to see it in theaters.

Grade: A+

DOWN TO EARTH. 87 minutes. PG-13. Directed by Chris and Paul Weitz. Written by Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, Ali LeRoi and Louis CK.

As remakes of remakes of remakes go, the new Chris Rock film, “Down to Earth,” feels, well, relentlessly remade.

What began as a 1937 play by Harry Segall called “Heaven Can Wait,” became, in 1941, Alexander Hall’s excellent movie, “Here Comes Mr. Jordan.” Both followed a prizefighter who dies prematurely only to come back to Earth in somebody else’s body.

In 1978, Elaine May, Buck Henry and Warren Beatty, recognizing a good story, made the commercially unsuccessful yet Academy Award-nominated “Heaven Can Wait,” which featured Beatty not as a prizefighter, but as a pro football player. The film wasn’t as good as Hall’s “Mr. Jordan,” but it certainly wasn’t the unfunny atrocity directors Chris and Paul Weitz have created in “Down to Earth.”

In “Earth,” Chris Rock stars as Lance Barton, a bad stand-up comedian who gets booed off the Apollo stage only to get mowed down by a speeding car. Dead before his time, Lance convinces Heaven’s Mr. Keyes (Eugene Levy) and Mr. King (Chazz Palmintieri) to send him back to Earth. They agree, but with a condition: He’s forced to become Charles Wellington, an elderly rich white man recently poisoned by his philandering wife (Jennifer Coolidge).

What ensues is a comedy that stakes much of its laughs on its racial divide. But why cast Rock, one of our smarter comedians, as an unfunny comic? That decision, coupled with the dull script and the total lack of chemistry between Rock and Regina King, Lance’s love interest, turns “Earth” into a surprisingly flat experience.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6.