FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Chad Shiira Yu Hong(Hao Lei) is no different than the average American youth. Although the first-year college student may take a passing interest in her country's political climate, the super-charged ambiance of the bustling Beijing University campus never makes a strong enough impression to usurp the personal fireworks she started with a boy named Zhao Wei(Guo Ziading). While her classmates talk about politics in smoke-filled cafes and bars, she and Zhao Wei are having hot sex in his dorm room. Yu Hong is apolitical. Dancing to bad American music gave Yu Hong and other young people like her the impression that they didn't have to fight for the right to bop along to Toni Basil. The girl from the small provincial town can open her legs all she wants, but it still doesn't make China an open country.Campus life is a sheltered life of consciousness raising and extra-curricular activities. In "Yihe yuan", the leeway that the Chinese government allows their young people to speak their minds is mistaken for freedom. Because the students smoke, drink, f***, and dance like Americans, they forget that this intellectual and spatial enclave was the site of a purge that resulted in a lot of over-qualified laborers who dotted the countryside. In one pointed scene, to illustrate how young people like Yu Hong and Zhao Wei took their deliverance from collectivism for granted, the two lovers pedal for the lead in a playful bicycle race, and as they alternate being in the front position, a passing poster of Mao Tse Tsung reminds the viewer that life in Red China was a utilitarian one. Yu Hong and Zhao Wei don't live in a vacuum. The image of this dictator is a foreshadowing of things to come. To go racing in the streets that once flowed with blood, and will soon flow again, is an innocent but flagrant act of defiance. There can't be a battle of the sexes until the battle is won against the government. After their love breaks down, Yu Hong writes in her diary that she taught Dong Dong, a roommate, how to masturbate. As an afterthought, she reports on the first rumblings of the students' protest at Tianamen Square that infamously ended in police gunfire. Yu Hong makes love, not war, and the same goes for Zhao Wei, as well. When the first shots are fired into the student congregation, Zhao Wei hardly notices the pandemonium that surrounds him. All he cares about is locating Yu Hong before she returns home to Yumen.Yu Hong and Zhao Wei aren't heroic. Their participation in history was pure happenstance. It's not fair to paint them as anti-heroes, but they are, despite their tender age. "Yihe yuan" is not a film about revolutionaries, but still the lovers make a political statement with their bodies. "Yihe yuan" ends with a post-script that informs us on the current whereabouts of Yu Hong and Zhao Wei as if they were real people. This simulacrum of reality gives us the impression that we've just witnessed a documentary about their otherwise fictive lives. By doing this, their f***** seems real enough to be thought of as a weapon to fight back against the government, with love, instead of bullets.

blearned-1 I thought this film was a fascinating portrait of Chinese youth and culture, as they struggle through some astoundingly turbulent times. Coming into maturity while defining love, commitment, and one's self is a challenging part of any youth's life, but all the more so as part of a society that is struggling through the same challenges itself. I found interesting analogies of the Chinese village in the character of Yu Huong, and the big city in Zhou Wei. Somewhere around college age, we all attempt to define what is important to us and explore what we can do, can be, and want. Some of that experience is sorting through our history - family, village, cultural - and deciding what we want to carry forward and embrace, and what to rebel against and discard, and I believe that this film paints a lovely, if gritty, portrayal of modern China doing just that. In their dorm rooms, in the bars and restaurants, in their homes, in their hearts. On the one hand, I would have, aesthetically, enjoyed a more sumptuous, smooth production; but that is not modern China. China (what admittedly little of it I've seen) is gritty, sweaty, crowded, noisy, straining, and that's what I see in this film.

DICK STEEL Continuing my weekend of R21 movies, given that almost every screen in Singapore is showing Spider-Man 3 at the moment, and gives a clear indication on how the other blockbusters in the next 2 months will be treated as well. The Passion was a disappointment, and Summer Palace, somehow didn't live up to its hype, probably drawing curious audiences by the banning of its director Lou Ye from making films in the Mainland for the next 5 years, because he had failed to obtain official permission before screening Summer Palace overseas.In any case, the same old marketing gimmick was to hype that this as the most erotic movie from China, and naturally drew audiences in like bees to honey. I've long classified broadly that movies of the romance genre can usually be grouped into the romantic comedies which Hollywood does well enough, and the romantic tragedies which try to bring out those tears. I've forgotten one more group, so add this to the broad classification now - those that want to titillate. Summer Palace attempts to explore relationships from its leads against the historical backdrop of change in China, but falls flat and seemed to prefer to focus on humping.And even that it degenerates itself into soft porn territory, but at least soft porns are being honest about it. The story is neither a tragedy, or comedy, just plain boring drama infused with plenty of sex, which becomes meaningless, and mechanical after a while with repeated actions that drills down to lack of skills in bed. Both the action and the characters lack the emotional core that grabs the attention of the audience and engage some cerebral on why they are doing what they're doing.Yu Hong (Lei Hao) is a village girl staying near the border of China and North Korea, and qualified for Beijing University in the late 80s. Leaving behind her shopkeeper father and a postal service boyfriend who deflowered her in the middle of a road late one night, she goes to the big city, but inside is quite unhappy about it. You know, she's one of those girls with huge emotional baggage problems that nobody, including herself, understands why.Friendship comes in the form of fellow hostel mate Li Ti (Ling Hu), who introduces her to Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong) at one of those jam and hop sessions, and thereafter they become sex partners trying to heat up the screen. It becomes love found, love lost, making love, love lost, love found, you get the idea. We have confused characters who do not know what to do with each other, and to make things worse, they're promiscuous too, making everything quite frivolous in their quest to satisfy their lust for sex. Even the direction and story became schizophrenic, and with the lack of skill, breezes through events like the Tiananmen Incident, and the fall of Communism with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev's resignation, Yeltsin's ascension to power, and the likes, with just archived images, and subtitles indicating the event and the year. It's cheap, lazy film-making. Before you know it, it's down to the last hour where the characters have grown up, and apart in different countries.There's a general feeling of lost, and if that's the filmmakers' intent, they have succeeded. Perhaps the best part is the reunion, where I thought is the only time when it's realistic with the feeling of helplessness and being tongue tied when meeting up with a loved one after donkey years - things are never the same again, and could never be the same anymore, and do you wish to hold onto the past, or move on to your own future?Despite the pretentious plot and characters, the movie does feature an excellent eclectic soundtrack, and there thankfully helped keep everyone awake. Otherwise it's as hokey as the inscription on the tombstone - unless it's a mega tombstone, I don't see how those words could have been inscribed on it without running out of space.

mgdu it's hard to write about this film, because it leaves you with the feeling that there is little point communicating within any species that could produce it. everybody sure looks uglier coming out of the theatre than going in. mean-spirited bombast like this--where the only suspense is whether the nasty world the film creates will turn out to be more self-important or more self-pitying--debases and deadens the audience. to cover for the fact that nothing is happening (in the causal sense, that Mr Jones doesn't get), the director subjects us to such cheap tricks as incessant cutting and multiple soundtracks (including an extended fingernail-on-blackboard "seven little girls in the backseat" as background for 'live' music). noise piled on noise, aurally, visually, causally. to condemn all this as sound and fury signifying nothing would be to elevate it; contrasted with sitting through this film, nothing would be paradise. i've never seen any of the mechanical blue movies of the repressed 1950s, but i'm sure that none of them present sex that is any more boring and over-miked than you get here, or with characters who are less interesting. and all this in the service of a base worldview: the tenor of the film is that the student participants in China's 1980s' democracy movement shattered at Tien An Min square were uncorked hysterics, heads-in-the-clouds, minds-in-the-muck lost goats. too bad, because the benfits and costs of repressive societies vs democratization are a compelling topic, but saints preserve us from the heavy-handedness and cheap tricks that make Summer Palace so excruciating to sit through.