UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Red-125 The Taiwanese movie Zui hao de shi guang was shown in the United States with the title Three Times (2005). The film was co-written and directed by Hsiao-Hsien Hou.A more accurate title for this movie would be "Three Episodes." The movie is really three separate 40-minute films, linked only by the fact that the same actors play the leads in all three episodes. Both actors are famous in Taiwan--Qi Shu is a major female lead actor, and Chen Chang is equally well known. (Both have starred in dozens of films.)The first story is charming in a quiet way. It's set in 1966. Qi Shu plays a hostess at a pool hall. From the context of the film, these young women were there in a more or less decorative way. They weren't prostitutes. A young man is about to be drafted into the army, and he clearly is in love with the hostess. When he returns on leave, she's gone, and he searches for her from small town pool hall to small town pool hall, always one step behind.The second film basically follows in the steps of Flowers of Shanghai (1998), another film by Hsiao-Hsien Hou, which I've seen and reviewed. Both movies are set in very elegant houses of prostitution. Although this episode is set in the 20th Century, about 30 years after Flowers of Shanghai, apparently very little had changed. The girls were sold by their parents into virtual slavery, and were trained as courtesans from an early age. They could buy their way out of the houses, but it was expensive. In fact, the hero is considered extremely generous because he pays part of the fee that enables one of the prostitutes to leave the brothel and become a concubine to a wealthy man. Both Flowers of Shanghai and this episode were filmed entirely indoors. The house is its own universe, with its own rules. Everyone plays by those rules, and it's never clear who will win or lose.The third story is contemporary--set in modern Taipai. Qui Shu is a performer--never quite clear to me what she does--who is in a committed lesbian relationship. However, she begins an affair with a photographer. The movie is loud and depressing. I couldn't find any reason to care about any of the characters. It was hard to decide which was worse--the motorcycle rides through Taipai (portrayed as the ugliest city in the world) or the incredibly loud rock music at the clubs.The first episode is worth seeing, the second is fascinating, and the third is worth avoiding. My advice is that if you see the film in a theater, leave after the second episode. If you watch it on DVD stop after the second episode. Or, at least, watch the last episode first, so that's not the one you'll remember when the movie is over.We saw the film at the Dryden Theatre at Eastman House in Rochester, NY. Bravo to the Dryden for showing a Hsiao-Hsien Hou retrospective. It was wonderful to see the film at the Dryden, but it will work well on DVD.

Armand or, only mirror. a couple. different periods. definition of relationship, frame of ordinary experiences, love, need, search of other like way to define yourself. a trip. a discovery. a form of fragile wise, joy and images. gentle, cruel, bitter, almost chaotic. a man. a woman. and something else. three pictures. first - in sepia, sign of happiness. the second - ash picture. the last - storm of reality. and the feeling after its end. a kind of jewel. or, only, a meeting. like evening on beach. in summer, in winter, in spring. must see it ! not exactly for delicate - precise art of team. but for a feeling who describes it only as experience. nothing more.

Chad Shiira Not known for big emotional payoffs, this internationally-acclaimed, but audience polarizing filmmaker, better known for modulation than sensation, in "A Time for Love", the first of three stories from "Zui hao de shi guang", atypically gives the people what they want: a reason to cry, and an occasion to nod in recognition. This cerebral, often clinical Taiwanese director, has made the unthinkable...a crowd-pleaser; it's the closest he'll ever get to mainstream filmmaker. "A Time for Love" contains a scene every bit as iconic as the moment Lloyd Dobler(John Cusack) holds his boom-box towards Diana Court's window, as Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" dovetails with the night air like a prayer, in Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything". The genesis of the momentous instant when two hands, isolated from their star-crossed owners, find each other and clasp together like nervous magnets, begins in earnest, in a billiards room, where the same man and woman will meet three times across different generations. This is the second time; the year is 1966. At a train station, a man and woman share an umbrella; they're too late to catch a train, but right on time for love. It's raining.In "Lexus and Butters", an episode of Season 6 of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park", Cartman and the gang visit the local Hooters where Butters falls under the spell of a Hooters waitress. Failing to understand that Lexus entertains men for a living, he pursuses her, confusing the girl's professional flirting with love. Butter's plight is Chen's plight as well, in "Zui hao de shi guang", a soldier, who writes a letter to the pool girl, describing his time with her as a happy experience. In the scene, we see the aftermath of his mistake; we see the slight curl in the girl's lip before she folds the letter away. The girl leaves. May(Qi Shu) is her replacement. During a long, drawn-out scene, Chen(Chen Chang) and the pool girl shoot a game, in which the long take allows the viewer to see how chemistry works, how mutual ground can unfold into elevation. They're largely silent, but it's a comfortable silence, interjected with Chen's apprehensive incursions about this sinuous girl holding a stick. It looks like a date, but the spontaneity of actualization is dashed by a feminine arm that appears suddenly in frame under Chen, cigarette in mouth, lining up his shot, to lay down an ashtray. It's May's job to smile. He pays her. But in an earlier scene, May found the letter he wrote to the other pool girl, setting up the possibility that she takes pleasure in entertaining the soldier. She's no Lexus; he's no Butters.Like the late Johnny Cash, Chen has "been everywhere" too, man; instead of "Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Toronto...," Chen has been to Gangshen, Jiayi, Shuishang, Xinying...," looking for May. The town names may be Chinese, but the music in "A Time for Love" is conspicuously American, when it matters. The filmmaker uses The Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and Aphrodite Child's "Rain and Tears" to convey romance, seemingly, in a way that western audiences can understand. When Cheng finds May in a Huwei pool hall, the girl reacts with such obvious delight, the audience can now differentiate May's professional smile from her genuine one. Unusual for this filmmaker, the following scene at a noodle cafe, is brief, succinct, and to-the-point: May looks at Cheng, waiting for the soldier to make the next move. The two American songs have the effect of explaining the American length of the scene, even though it carries the filmmaker's trademark of a fixed camera and no dialogue. And that next move; it's not an overture for intimacy, or even a kiss, it's the simple desire to hold a girl's hand. While "A Time for Freedom"(for people who liked "Hai Shang Hua") and "A Time for Youth(for people who could tolerate "Qian xi man po") have its strong points, "A Time for Love" is an unqualified success.

mhar Three Times tells three unconnected love stories in Taiwan in 1966, 1911, and 2005, with the lovers played each time by Chang Chen and the gorgeous Shu Qi.1966 is a charming, exquisitely-realized romance. On brief days of leave from military service, Chang insouciantly woos Shu over a game of pool, and then pursues her in small- town pool halls across Taiwan. 1911 is silent, with inter-titles for formalized dialogue. Chang is a wealthy young reformer meeting Shu as a courtesan in her room in a large Japanese house, between excursions with the great scholar and politician Liang Qichao. In 2005, Shu has a jilted girlfriend as well as photographer Chang, and sings in dark underground clubs in Taipei. Shu is damaged physically and emotionally, and self-consciously alienated from meaning in her life.Three Times is unmistakably Hou, with long static takes and minimal dialogue. It is beautifully shot with framed compositions which return like motifs through each section, and he makes the most of his photogenic actors.In 1911, Chang writes to Shu to tell her he is leaving for Shanghai and he may never return, his reforming ideals falling before the courtesan who he is unwilling to save. In that moment, Three Times becomes national allegory, and Shu Qi is Taiwan herself, abandoned by China and its hypocrisies. Hou is writing her history as a continuous narrative across the Japanese colonial period, the KMT era and the present. As an allegory, Three Times becomes Hou's personal and critical view of Taiwan. After being left to her fate, she returns steeped in nostalgia in the 1960s with freshness, charm, and captivating beauty. But by 2005, she is fractured, cynical, materialistic, and tragically lost in her modernity.Three Times' elegiac presentation of the 1960s, when Taiwan was an authoritarian state under martial law, makes it very particular critique and sure to irk those who would write that period differently. But as Taiwan struggles through its current crisis of confidence, Hou's film is a timely and harsh commentary, and its wholly ambiguous and uneasy ending suits the moment.