There’s an astonishing level of swordsmanship and general badass-ery in the small cluster of lavish, Chinese-produced martial-arts epics from a few years back. These films—most notably Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Lotus, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—were modern versions of wuxia, a 2,000-year-old literary genre that places chivalrous heroes in a series of high-body-count situations. Yu Shu and Jen, from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, may not represent the absolute pinnacle of personal-combat talent in these movies, but their clash—a wise and stoic woman warrior facing off against a preternaturally gifted spoiled brat—is a dizzying display of clanking steel and physics-defying acrobatics, heightened by a brittle tension between two women who really don’t like each other.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCHw0Ovqf4]