I've been looking for a really cool theme song for years. Ying, as he conquers kingdoms and puts populations to the slaughter, has three goals in life: to earn the name of emperor, to get his daughter married off, and to find a really cool theme song. His son suggests that this is not quite enough. At one point, when assailed along the road by an assassin, he orders everyone within one square mile killed. It's actually set in China 200 years before the birth of Christ and tells the story of China's first emperor, Ying Zheng, who loved his daughter, his music and the land he unified while cheerily murdering millions. It's so different, in fact, it could easily be set on the planet Dune a billion years from now. I kid you not, and I mean not to diminish the film a whit, because it's majestic, fabulous, strange, hypnotic and utterly fascinating. "The Emperor's Shadow," which today begins a 10-day run at the American Film Institute, tells a story so Chinese it needs to be expressed in English terms just to get the gist: Think of it as "Genghis Khan, the Musical."
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