Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Desertman84 Summer Palace is a politically charged drama from director Lou Ye.The movie features Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong.The screenplay by Lou Ye, Feng Mei and Ma Yingli tells the story of Chinese political upheaval through the eyes of protagonist Yu Hong, who moves from her rural community to embrace life in Beijing. Spanning nearly 20 years, the film elucidates the mindset of the Chinese revolutionary youth during the 1980's and into the new millennium through its narration by Hong, who reads diary excerpts to set scenes.Yu Hong is a beautiful 17-year-old girl who is soon to leave the small border town where she was born and raised to attend college at Beijing University. Shortly before Yu Hong leaves for school, she gives her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Xiao, and pledges to remain faithful to him. At Beijing University, Yu Hong makes friends with Li Ti,another girl dealing with a long-distance relationship, and meets Zhou Wei, a handsome student who soon steals her heart. Yu Hong leaves her relationship with Xiao behind to commit herself to Zhou Wei, and she's swept up by her feelings for him as they embrace the new social and economic freedoms which are being felt on campus. The empowerment felt by the students in Beijing comes to a head during a series of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; the protests have tragic consequences, and the excitement of new possibilities gives way to a feeling of defeat. Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are separated and the heavy hand of the state is brought to bear on the rebellious students.The movie suffers from excessive length and inconsistent pacing.Also,one who does not speak the movie's language needs full concentration to follow what's happening in the plot and to get the message that it is trying to impart.But nevertheless,it manages to be a brilliant and excellent film encapsulates an important moment in Chinese history and will especially enlighten viewers to the nuances of people struggling for freedom.Aside from that,we get to see the coming-of-age and maturation of Hong as she gets exposed to the her world and the changes she undergoes in response to it.

Richard Green The only value in this over-hyped movie is in seeing how much China changes as a modern society, from the beginning of the story ( 1987 ), to the end ( 2001 ). The country is truly racing forward in that sense.The troubled, narcissistic heroine has moments on screen which are really rather touching: but she cannot seem to connect with anyone she meets at the university in Beijing. She is an emotional recluse. What is so galling is that we never, ever, get to have any clues about why she is so alienated from everything in her life. She has been plucked from a village near the border with North Korea and admitted to the very metropolitan Beijing University. She makes friends, so she is not all alone in that giant place.The only comparison which might resonate with western viewers is to think of a bright young thing from a small town in Montana who finds herself enrolled at the University of Chicago. It's a grand opportunity for her to learn and to excel, and all the leading lady can seem to do is feel depressed about her emotions, and then to "hook up" with an absolute Cad and Bounder. Naturally he charms her and they get into a steamy physical affair which goes absolutely no where.The leading man is a good actor but he is playing a fellow who is an out and out shark in sexual terms and not even very handsome.Near the end of this dreadful film, a woman who was friends with the leading lady -- and who has had her own fling with the "hero" -- drops herself off of a tall building in Berlin for no explainable reason at all !! Worse yet, many parts of the film are shot in dark hallways and with poor resolution, it felt like the director was having some kind of a mental black-out. This film cost five bucks to rent on DVD and that was precisely five bucks too many. Skip it, please, if you value your time and your own money.

Celluloid_Image I received a promotional pass to see this film and went without knowing any of surrounding hype, "controversy" or baggage it supposedly brings with it. I have generally like most Chinese films, especially those by Zhang Yamou, so I thought I'd give it a viewing. *Warning* Many Spoilers Follow * OK, this must be made clear at the outset. If you like dim lit naked bodies and lots of sex with a Chinese twist, this movie may be worth your price of admission. But if you would like to get a bit more out of a film, be prepared to endure painfully long minutes (hours) of wordless, earnest look scenes for a few brief gems of poetic insight and genuinely interesting philosophical questions.It starts off in an interesting way with a young girl living in a small town who has just learned she has is accepted to the prestigious Beijing University. Bright lights, big city, here she comes! Cool, high-fives all around from the neighbors and a funny scene where she watches her "boyfriend" get drunk to cover his sadness at her leaving. Long, no, make that very very long interludes with absolutely no dialog follow, but on the up side the actors do convey quite a bit of emotion with their facial expressions. The girl and her friend end up in some out of the way place and suddenly she decides they should "do it" before she takes off for the big city ...cut to long scene of furious (and apparently inexperienced) humping in the dirt ....just the first of many such scenes. Fade to Beijing where the girl is now a freshman student and her friends tease her because she doesn't have a boyfriend. That soon ends when her girlfriend's fiancée just back from Germany brings a friend along. Speed through a couple of scenes of cute dancing, long walks, and earnest serious stares with absolutely no dialog .... then cut to some more furious humping. Many more incredibly long, one-take scenes follow, often with serious intended voice overs and some poetic prose, but very little action .... until, well you guessed it, more double-backed beast time. Are you starting to see the pattern here? This film drags on for nearly two and one-half hours, covers a time period of approximately 14 years from 1987 to 2001, and does so with perhaps the least amount of dialog between characters that I can remember. There are plenty of voice-over thoughts, dreams and fears expressed, just like we were reading a novel. But don't worry, if you doze off there will always be yet another steamy, rabbits-going-at-it sex scene to wake you up.Five out of ten, and I'm being kind.

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.