I thought the movie was really well done, the cinematography and music and choreography mixed in together very well. The wire sequences were cool looking in my opinion, totally brought alive moves such as "Yun-Tee-Zong" (clouds as ladders) and "bee-hoo-gong" (wall crawlers kungfu) from them old school pulp-and-neoclassic kungfu novels. Stuff most literate Chinese teenage boys read about are now finally put on celluloids, thank you Ang Lee and Master Yuen.

But unfortunately, the Chinese teenage boys now have to put up with awfully Westernized dialogues that cah only be found in Hollywood action movies. The whole pseudo-Taoist philosophies injected in the dialogues have poisoned some scenes. For example early in the movie when Chow YunFat talked about his meditation and that he was "led into this state where time and space have disappeared," and "was surrounded only by a light..." Hey man are you abducted by an UFO? This is stuff you find in that New Age/Self Help bookshelf in Barnes and Nobles--they have no place in a wuxia movie.

Another monologue he delivers late in the movie about being a hungry ghost for 49 days and all was also awfully cliched (for Chinese people at least.)
PLUS the entire theme about "being true to yourself, do what you want to do regardless of the society...etc." is VERY VERY Disney.

Even though I don't know who wrote those lines, I'm blaming James Schamus for it anyways, those damn gwailos trying to poison kickass HK movies.
Yeah and such shallow deeds done solely for the purpose of reaching a wider target audience is what separates Crouching Tiger from a great film to an entertaining movie. I'm willing to bet you anything that Ang Lee's "boyhood fantasy" did NOT include a New Age Yuppie lecture.

Good luck on the Academy Award though, if that suckass Gladiator wins anything that night I'm gonna cry.