Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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.

yasaka This is the worst Chinese movie ever made and I am so shameful of Lou Ye. I personal experienced the Tian'an'men Square incidence and pretty much understood what that student generation looked like. What depicted in this movie is totally a fake! I chatted with my other peers who watched this movie and they all expressed the same feeling as mine. Disgusting! They are all so angry! This movie was intentionally made for westerners. If you believe what you saw, then you were cheated. Such storyline has nothing to do with Tian'an'men Square incidence, has nothing to do with the associated university. It's a pure crap! If you like this movie, before making your own comment, try to contact your Chinese friends who had been through the transformations in late 80s and early 90s, they will tell you what the real life is. DO not be fooled by this movie. It is absolutely misleading.

Chris Having watched the movie myself and reading some of the comments/reviews with regards to the movie prompted me to post something in fairness to the movie.I feel that the movie was meant to let audience have a feeling that the leads in the movies are lost. If we were to think of the backdrop of the movie, set in the late 80's, Tiananmen incident, the chant for democracy, all this would have let you understand that the China then was not a China that many could understand.The China up till the 80s was probably such a controlled and suppressed place to live in, and when these suppressed feelings and emotions were suddenly set free, it was like an explosion. The literature and external factors began influencing the way the people viewed and did things. This could explain the "mindless" love making scenes as the desires to love and to have sex were probably something that was not openly displayed or demonstrated. Freedom is what everyone wants, but the maturity to handle the consequence of the actions brought about by freedom might not be something that everyone can handle.The movie also explores on people who dare not love. All because they fear losing it. I personally felt the characterization was done quite well, and was aptly shown by the character Yu Hong. Love is not something that can be explained logically or defined in any one way. The insight to the characters views and actions in this movie shows that clearly.Summer Palace is a movie worth watching, but it might not be a movie that is for everyone. Keep an open mind and try and understand the time and country this movie is set in, you'd probably appreciate the movie much better that way.

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.