SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Pluskylang Great Film overall

BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

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.

Vishwas Verma Nominated for Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 2005, Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times is a moody exploration of love, freedom and youth. The movie unfolds in three separate stories which take place in three different time zones over a century in Taiwan, with the main roles in each story played by same two actors – Qi Shu and Chen Chang.In the first story – A Time for Love – set in 1966, Chen meets May in a bar while playing pool. They stay in touch when he joins the army, but when he comes back May doesn't work in the same bar anymore. So he seeks her to different places. In the second – A Time for Freedom – set in 1911, Mr. Chang is frequent visitor to a brothel where he keeps interacting with a singer. When he frees one of the other girls by providing financial help, the singer asks if he would help her too. The last story – A Time for Youth – set in 2005, shows a relationship of girl with a photographer and a bisexual singer.This is one movie where actually "nothing happens". There are long shots without any dialogue at all, camera just pondering on characters when they do trite stuff, where everything depends on whether you will get sucked into the day to day lives of these people. But even then when you find yourself hooked to the screen, and admire each shot for its perfection and at the same time you connect with the characters all of them being from radically different eras.The music plays a huge part in the movie and sets the gloomy mood of the movie throughout – especially in the second and third stories. In fact, in the second story, there is no spoken dialogue at all. Though you can see people speaking, all you hear is a long musical piece in the background, and you get to see what is spoken written on the screen like in a silent movie. The first story is played on the background of two soulful songs – Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by The Platters and Rain and Tears by Aphrodite's Child. I became an instant fan of these two songs. I would love to go back to watch this movie again just to listen to these songs with great visuals and atmosphere of love and longing.Qi Shu gives electrifying performances as May in the first story, the singer in the second, and as the girl torn between the loves of his boyfriend and a girl. Chen Chang is also brilliant – particularly in the first and last story. The best part of the movie is the direction, where Hou keeps you riveted for nearly two hours without much of any story. Overall, this is one of the best movies I have seen in recent which I would love to watch again and again.http://vishwas8317.blogspot.in/2012/12/threetimes.html

dcannon It's so amusing to read the adoring, slavishly reverent attitudes of viewers who, I can only surmise, can not bring themselves to poo-poo an art film that so many critics have championed. This film is a disaster. There is no narrative to speak of in any of the three stories. The characters act as if embalmed. Scenes unfold at a glacial pace and sequences are repeated ad nauseam, e.g., the pool playing in the first story. The second segment should be laughed off the screen. How pretentious to watch the characters lips moving and then be shown in titles what they just said. This is film-making at the college sophomore level. And the third part is just one giant cliché about alienated youth. Just imagine!!! They have sex, they sing about being different, and they look at the Internet and find kinky Web sites. Shocking!! Don't believe the hype on this one. There is NOTHING there.

anonyimdb1 You need patience to sink yourself into Hou's rhythm. But it is not to say patience alone would enable you to understand him. You need to think, use retrospection, and savor. His film is not constructed like our modern day commercial productions that employ the conceptions so successfully implanted in your brain by the omnipresent pop culture throughout your life that when the buttons are pushed you are instantly and readily joyed, angered, saddened, or cheered.Hou's film is not built on that.The expression is not visually over-charged, nor verbally flowered, nor did he use any clichés, be it western or eastern. The screen speaks beyond itself.It could be said that most western (by "western" I mean culturally European or American in contrast with the "eastern" by which I mean the Chinese or Japanese culture) movies have their meanings put as explicitly as possible, with one of the criteria of success being that the film should say everything that could be said and with nothing left. The audience would only appreciate the things presented and ignore the ideas inexplicit. With quite an opposite of this western technique, Hou expresses himself mostly in an implicit way. The movie itself is not the ultimate product but only the more superficial side of a deeper meaning. It is like painting. In order to describe the wind, a swinging willow has to be drawn. Because the wind is invisible and cannot be captured. It is the same with the technique that works implicitly which Hou uses - he is trying to capture the culture of the society as a whole and the various individual views on love in each of the three historical phases where three love stories took place. He was trying to capture the unspeakable panoramas of the societies with the stories that were each unique to their respective historical context.Hou pieces the three stories together to mark the transition of the Taiwan history and to compare the societies and their impact on individuals. The three couples in each era were all played by Chang Chen and Shu Ki. Thus, the three stories could be seen as three hypotheses of how their love would evolve under the respective influence of each particular historical setting. The lovers are the same, but the times change. Then you could see his evaluations on each era, how he reminisces the halcyon days of the 60s, how he respects and yet condemns the protestant-like days of early 20th century, and how he doubts the present globalization and the emergence of the hybrid culture between the western (chiefly American) and the Chinese.This is simply a masterpiece. I give it a 9 only because I've seen better ones from him and his fellow Taiwanese director Edward Yang. For those of you who enjoy this film, I recommend Hou's A City of Sadness and Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. The latter, in my opinion, is the best Chinese movie ever, and arguably the best movie ever. It used the "implicit technique" to the consummation.

Roland E. Zwick Like so many foreign and independent films these days, Hsiao-hsien Hou's "Three Times" is less concerned with telling a story than with observing the rituals of everyday life. The movie is so-titled because it uses the same set of actors to tell three different tales of love spanning nearly a century of Chinese history.The first segment, "A Time for Love", set in 1966, is a sweet and tender tale of an arm's-length romance between a pool hall hostess and the soldier who pursues her. The second, "A Time for Youth," in which a singer yearns for a life outside the brothel in which she works, takes place in 1911 and borrows its style from silent films, using title cards rather than voices to convey the dialogue. The final part, "A Time for Freedom," is a contemporary tale of a bisexual woman caught between her male and female lovers.All three episodes are more mood pieces than narratives, with emotions and meanings hinted at rather than externalized and dramatized. This is fine up to a point, but eventually, as a trilogy, "Three Times" becomes a case of diminishing returns the longer it goes on. The first section is a work of tremendous charm and beauty, the second considerably less so, and the third is so inscrutable in content and desultory in tone that the viewer winds up virtually pulling his hair out in frustration and boredom by the time it's over. There are some distinct parallels between the first and second story, and I'm sure that one could come up with some grand thematic scheme connecting the three works, but, frankly, none of it really holds together all that well, apart from the use of letters (or, in the case of the third installment, text messages) as a key plot device in each section.Qi Shu and Chen Chang have charisma and rapport as the two time-hopping lovers, but even they are not enough to keep "Three Times" from being much less than the sum of its parts.