capone666 The Joy Luck ClubThe upside to playing games with your parents is they give you longer to pay your debts before breaking your legs.Mind you, the mothers in this drama aren't the kind to offer their children such leniencies.June (Ming-Na Wen) takes up her deceased mother's position at a weekly mah-jong game where she finds herself privy to the heartbreaking back-stories of each of the elderly players (Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, Lisa Lu). As the group plays the tile-based game, the other daughters of the players deal with their own anxieties as a result of their stern upbringings in America. Offering a disquieting glimpse at the lengths that these women had to endure to give their offspring a better life, this 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan's bestseller flawlessly captures the intensity, turmoil and tenderness of this moving mother/daughter tale. Moreover, old people reminiscing during game play allows for some epic cheating. Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

OllieSuave-007 I read Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club in high school and on my leisure time, and became one of my favorites. It is a combination of fantastic stories about four young Chinese women learning the walks of life from their mothers, whose life stories of love, hate, sacrifices, honor and war are retold in the novel and powerfully depicted in this movie, which are acted out through a series of flashbacks from the daughters' present day lives to their mothers' past in feudal China.Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom and Rosalind Chao play the four daughters and each gave a powerful and realistic performance in their respective roles. The same goes with their on-screen mothers, played wonderfully by Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen and Lisa Lu. Their mother-daughter and friend-friend chemistry together were inspiring and a joy to watch and experience.This movie made me appreciate my Chinese heritage as it delves upon another's struggles and perseverance through the culture's past, present and future, and explore how one can cement his/her relationship with one's child or parent and learn from each other to better their lives. The scene where Kieu Chieh's character Suyuan flees China from the Japanese occupation, pushing a cart with her newborn twin daughters and a handful of her belongings in it was such a strong scene that it put tears to my eyes. The cart collapsing with her daughters and belongings spilling out furthered the emotion. Then, the following part where Suyuan had to make the difficult decision to leave her daughters behind, knowing she couldn't care for them, and putting some jewelry and a black & white picture of herself with the baby bundle finally sent me crying my eyes out (I have never had this much years in any of the movies I've seen).Kudos to Amy Tan for writing such a powerful novel and kudos to Director Wayne Wang for directing such a beautiful movie and cast. I enjoyed every minute of it and I highly recommend it to anyone.Grade A

jzappa The story comes after a death and a reunion that bring the past back in all of its undiluted passion, and shows how the present, too, is made, how children who think they are worlds apart are inextricably influenced by the lives of their parents. Wayne Wang's touching film, based on Amy Tan's novel, is about four women, who were born in China and later came to America, and their daughters. Among these eight women mingle countless friends and relatives, to the mise-en-scene's maximum scenery capacity, in peripheral branches of life. Actually, those scenes are the biggest weaknesses of the film, as their interjecting party jest is so transparently scripted that we want only the bottom line of the scenes. But what is about to be dissolved are the beginnings of the women, the stories of how they were born and grew up in a time and culture so far apart from the one in which they live now.The club of the title is a circle of elderly Chinese ladies who meet weekly to play mah jong, and trade stories of their families and grandchildren. All have made ruinous paths from pre- revolutionary China to the privileged homes in San Francisco where they meet. But those old days are not frequently talked about, and often the entire reality of them is not revealed.In a framework of flashbacks, the secrets and stories of all four of the "aunties" are unraveled. We see that the China of the 1930s and 1940s, before the Revolution, was an inconceivably dissimilar world than it is today. Women were not considered too much. Those with resilient spirits and wills were regarded even less than the impressionable, submissive ones. Life was worthless, no more than in wartime. A mother's ability to love her children was doubted. In plenty of instances, all-consuming dilemmas from those hard days still find their echoes in succeeding generations: The potent reality of Amy Tan's story is the lack of understanding between cultures that make the capability of the mothers to identify with their westernized daughters rely on things that have never been clearly vocalized.How, in one instance, could the narrator's mother have told of deserting her first-born twin girls by the roadside? Her mother, ill and emaciated, was certain she should die, and believed her girls would have a better likelihood of living if they were not compromised by the "bad luck" of a deceased mother. Other stories are just as, if not more, agonizing to Americanized ears. There is the auntie who becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy man, and when she gives birth to the son he wished for so much, the child is taken from her by the second wife.In America, the mothers find it difficult to get their minds around the paths their daughters are taking. Some marry whites, who have deplorable etiquette. They move out of the old neighborhood into houses that seem too cutting-edge and frigid. One daughter gives up on ever pleasing her mother, who carps on everything she does.This movie was produced by Oliver Stone, who himself at one time was an astute and scrappy filmmaker who turned out films with cross-cultural themes like this one, such as his Vietnam trilogy, and Joy Luck's director Wang leaves us longing for the rawness of those films, but he captures Tan's story and keeps it pure within his medium. Her story is as respects Chinese and Chinese-American characters, but their stories are all-inclusive. Anyone, everyone, can relate to how the expectations of one generation can become both the obstructions and the awakenings of the next.

BC I'd read many books by Chinese, and Asian-American authors before, but though some of them touched something in me, I didn't really understand a lot of what they said. I knew I needed a better understanding of the cultural differences, but boy! what a gap!!!I've lived in Taiwan now for 5 years, and still have a lot to learn about the "inner fires and mysteries" that push and nudge these people to their choices. Choices I make, too but from a somewhat different outlook. So I caught the Joy Luck Club on the Starmovies channel... and laughed and sobbed, and felt so full I could burst and desolate, and loved, and neglected. All at once. Wow! What a ride! And for Pete's sake, I'm a 40-year old guy! (And no, I'm happily married!)I don't care that some posters are heartless enough to pare people down to "cliches" (ugly word, that.. yuck) in order to be able to make sense of the movie. It's their tough luck that they are missing out on the richness of life - a life that is portrayed so very well and so deeply by the smallest actions of the actors, and their words! A feather to you Amy Tan and Ronald Bass for some of the most stunning lines written for the screen!Go get the movie, folks.