Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Jay Harris There already have been more than a few films about China & the peoples straggles in the 1930's & in WW 2. There also have been a few about a dedicated person helping children escaping from wars horrors. So what makes this film so much better.First, this was made in China in actual locations. The scenery is breathtaking.It is based on a real person Charles Hogg a journalist in his 20's,who reluctantly became head of a school of orphans,who with the help of a young nurse leads these young children 700 miles across China to a safer area.There was a similar film many years ago with Ingrid Bergman, Inn of the Sixth Happinness; which in itself was an excellent movie.Jonathan Rhyss-Meyer who is under 30 is Hogg & fits the role perfectly. Radha Mitchell is the Aunstralian nurse ,she has a difficult role to play, she does have personal problems.She too, fits here role perfectly.Ynn Fat Chow (AKA Chow Yun Fat)is a soldier & Hogg's friend. This fine actor has yet to give a bad performance. Michelle Yeoh also has a major role & is greatIn fact all the acting & all the production values are first rate.This film is based on fact,I cannot & will not say how accurate it is. I only know I felt watching it, I saw a wonderful well made film.As one would expect there are some clichés, Very few if any films escape from having themIt was excellently directed by Roger Spottiswoode. It did have a theatrical run in the USA, playing in small handful of theatres.WHY OH WHY do they do this is beyond me. Granted there are few exciting action packed scenes, this is NOT that type of film.. Ratings; **** (out of 4) 98 points (out of 100) IMDb 10 (out of 10)

isabelle1955 There is a good film struggling to get out of the heroic story of George Hogg. Unfortunately this isn't it. My son saw the words 'sweeping historical drama' on the DVD sleeve and headed for the door. "It's the kiss of death for a film," he said, "The word sweeping.....". Out of the mouths of babes......I'm not sure what it is about these international productions, financed by several countries, but they never quite seem to work, and they especially don't seem to work when the product is some kind of bio-pic. This seems to be a type of production much loved by the Australian film industry and as far as I can see, The Children of Huang Shi was made with money from Germany, China and Australia. Certainly this is a good story, and when the movie gets away from the badly lit set and into the countryside it's photogenic and pretty to watch, yet somehow it's all a bit dull. I strongly suspect that the need to keep several nations happy, leads to a smoothing out of script disagreements which leaves a rather anodyne finished product.The story, which is basically true - if tweaked a fair amount - concerns George Hogg, a young, English, Oxford graduate, who arrived in China in the years leading up to WW2 to work as a stringer for the Associated Press, and landed himself in the middle of the Japanese occupation. He managed to get into Nanjing where, after witnessing appalling atrocities, he was captured by the Japanese, narrowly avoided a beheading and after being injured, traveled up country to Huang Shi to recuperate. There he found himself in charge of an orphanage for boys. The boys had been abandoned by adults and were living a Lord of the Flies type existence. Most had witnessed terrible scenes themselves with family killed in front of them, bombings, massacres and near starvation. Initially unwilling, Hogg was persuaded by a Red Cross nurse (Lee Pearson) to stay and assist them. He built the orphanage into a strong community based on his pacifist principles, but finding that they were stuck between the advancing Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces – who wanted to recruit his charges as soldiers – he took his boys on a long trek over the mountains to China's remote and harsh interior where they would be safe. It's an interesting story, but the dialog is often leaden – even by the standards of the 1930s – and sometimes sounds as if it was written by a committee, none of whose members had English as a first language. It's very hard to get away with lines like "My mother had Ghandi to tea." Given the natural drama of the true story, I'm not certain why it's quite so disappointing, but one reason has to be the casting. Jonathan Rhys Meyers just doesn't have the gravitas to pull off the role of Hogg. (I know it's not his fault, but he reminds me too much of Rik Mayall in The Young Ones, a British TV comedy series from the 1980s.) I never believed in his Hogg, never felt he was a strong enough, or tough enough character to carry off the things that Hogg did. Rhys Meyers doesn't have the charisma to carry the movie, but Hogg is the central character and if he is not convincing, none of the rest can work either. I actually liked Rhys Meyers in Match Point a few years back, but this is too much of a stretch for him, he is wildly miscast here. He looks petulant and sulky and never fully rises to the occasion. Also rather miscast is Radha Mitchell as the American Nurse Pearson. And this is where I'm puzzled. Brief investigation of the actual facts reveals that the nurse who aided Hogg was a New Zealander not American. I assume her nationality has been changed to make the movie appeal to an American audience? So why cast an Australian in the role who is little known here in the USA? Mitchell was very effective in Finding Neverland where Johnny Depp carried the movie, but her performance here is monotone. There is no real heat generated between Hogg and Pearson, despite the attempt to inject a love story. It felt false and an appeasement to the audience.Also surprisingly bad is Yun-Fat Chow as the communist leader. David Wenham puts in a brief appearance but is killed off early. I assume he's there to appeal to the Australian audience, but he's around for far too short a time to be effective. However Michelle Yeoh is stand out as Mrs Wang, a local trader who assists Hogg, and I actually thought the kids all pretty good and rather appealing, despite other IMDb reviewers thinking otherwise. They tackle their parts with honesty. It felt as if the casting had been done to appeal broadly to all the nationalities who put up the money, but if the actors don't fit the parts, that cannot work. The whole production has a stilted feel. It's not actively bad, but it's nowhere near as good as the story demands. I'd like to see it re-made with a really strong actor as Hogg, and a more nuanced interpretation of Pearson, and, if the love story must be in there, then some genuine passion between the two leads. Disappointing.

smatson123 Who was George Hogg, really? Do an Internet search and you'll see that his name is variously interpreted as a "footballer," a midshipman on the Titantic, and various unknowns in genealogy charts. But Nie Quangpei, a Chinese orphan whose life Hogg saved, had this to say: "They say there isn't a perfect man in this world, but Hogg was." Nie,now a middleaged tradesman in the PRC, seems to have had more insight into the forging of character than the writers and director (Australian Roger Spottiswoode) of the film. "He changed," says Nie of Hogg's transformation from a raw university graduate to a father figure to 60 boys under extraordinary circumstances. "He became a different man."While the facts are not widely public except to Sinophiles, they are impressive on their face. An English blueblood and Oxford grad, the handsome Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers)tried his hand at journalism in wealthy, up-and-coming Shanghai and could have led the good life for the duration of WWII. Instead he connected with a like-minded benefactor, Rewi Alli, to determine what could be done with orphans and the homeless. After mastering Mandarin he became the headmaster of Shuangshi-pu school, mostly for orphans, in a northwestern province. He made a success of teaching and administering there until fear of the oncoming Japanese invasion convinced him to leave. Managing to cross some 600-700 miles in the dead of winter with children and books on carts, he re-established them in a converted monastery--all with little help and few resources. Though keenly aware of the irony of staying in China while his own country was under threat, Hogg came to terms with who he was and was deeply loved by his charges in the process. Today a statue in his honor stands in his final resting place in Shanan, Gansu.Spottiswoode, though, prefers to go for the blood, sex, and supposedly, the glory. Briefly seen as a journalist at parties in Shanghai, his Hogg finds a way to make it to Nanking to get the perfect story on the Japanese invasion, but while there nearly suffers a beheading when the invaders discover him. (In reality, the Japanese had their hands full with just dispatching locals with guns--the efficient killing method of choice--for the most part ignoring Westerners.) Just in the nick of time, Hogg is saved by a counter-revolutionary (a suave, goatee-bedecked Chow Yun Fat) and a beautiful American nurse, Lee (Australian Radha Mitchell), whose presence in circumstances of extreme personal peril is never entirely explained. But no matter: she is portrayed as the one who convinces Hogg to take shelter in an orphanage, to learn Chinese and otherwise take a breather. As she comes and goes to the orphanage, her existence means a film opportunity for romance, as though Hogg's real-life challenge of adapting to near-starvation conditions and nurturing traumatized children could have been inspiration enough for anyone. A hint of a love triangle also surfaces in the person of a beautiful, exquisitely dressed local merchant of opiates (Michelle Seoh) who will go to any lengths to serve Hogg's cause.History, as documentarian Ken Burns has proved, can be compelling in its own right. It can both stranger than fiction and more powerful, as we see the choices others have made that we do or don't choose to emulate. A decent tribute to Hogg's life would have demanded that his unheralded acts stand in stark relief to the pointless cruelties of war around him. That didn't happen in this movie. His legacy to the weak and unfortunate lives on, most recently in a book published this January in Beijing (Ocean Devil, by James MacManus). And final testimonies at the end of "Children of Huang Shi" from boys saved by Hogg--boys who are now in late middle age--do something to capture the essence of respectful biography but still, not nearly enough. The movie was exquisitely filmed in Chinese and Australian locales at a 40 million budget and unfortunately has grossed only 691,000 as of late July. If history and film could align a little more closely, I like to think that both the audience and box office would have profited.

Seamus2829 After I exited the theater that screened 'The Children Of Huang Shi', I was on a cloud. This is easily one of the best films of 2008 (so far the other is Mongol). The plot concerns a foreign correspondent from Australia in China covering the Chinese/Japanese war in 1937, who gets in over his head by venturing out of the safety zone of Bejing, into the thick of the war, and gets involved helping an orphanage of Chinese war orphans. A woman doctor also gets tossed in for good measure in the proceedings. This is a finely acted drama that is a bit rough to watch at times, but is well worth the effort. You could do a lot worse than 'The Children Of Huang Shi' (does 'You Don't Mess With The Zohan' mean anything?)