snowscu While the book is fascinating. The movie is so weird. I am quite disappointed about the start of the movie, which was so abrupt. The scenes about China, so weird and not true at all.

clanciai To watch this film after having seen the Greta Garbo version of 1934 is a challenge indeed. They are both excellent but at the same time each other's contraries. This version is truer to Somerset Maugham, while the Garbo version is so much more efficient and dramatic. Naomi Watts and Edward Norton are bleak and almost insipid in their performances in comparison with the passions of Garbo, Herbert Marshall and George Brent. The 1934 film is also much more interesting in its rendering of the Chinese reality of those days. Compare for instance the couple's visit to the Chinese opera. In 1934 it's a phantasmagoria of festivities, while here it's just one actress miaowing.On the other hand, this version is so much more beautiful. The Chinese landscape is intoxicating in its beauty, and Alexander Desplat's music, always enchanting, casts a soft spell of sweetness over the film in a sad mood of inevitability. Edward Norton's role is a difficult one, it is never sympathetic, and Naomi Watts does not cut a very sympathetic figure either, while Greta Garbo still shines the more after 80 years. The tempo is slow, you are bound to yawn at times and maybe even fall asleep to the soft dullness, while the 1934 film keeps you wide awake all through indeed. On the other hand, this film does not abandon Somerset Maugham but walks the line all the way.

pancakesincandyland The title pulled me into this movie. I'd hoped that the intriguing cover would keep up in the movie, and it totally did! A great movie while you're in need of something with passion, and kindness in the midst of tragedy. I didn't give it a 10 because of the ending. When she sees Charlie again I wanted her to punch him right in the street. I wish the main couple could have had the cheesy long happy life ending and somehow he would find out the baby is his. Oh well! A very good movie. I hope you enjoy the creativity of the camera angles and well written lines in this movie as much as I did. Beautifully made, I will definitely be watching it again.

magnuslhad A young doctor and his wife, unhappily married in 1920s Shanghai, travel to inland China to help tackle a cholera outbreak. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts are outstanding in this period drama that perfectly captures the quiet desperation of women suffocated by social mores. Britain is fast approaching its end of empire phase. Women will soon have suffrage, and China is the sleeping bear beginning to rouse. The script deftly weaves in nods to these momentous social changes, but only as background to a tense marital drama crushing in the unhappiness it brings for its inhabitants. The doctor husband seems to have murderous and/or suicidal intent in dragging his wife to a cholera-infested region. There seems no way back for this couple after initial infidelity, but incredibly they fashion a reconciliation in an unlikely setting. There is top calibre support from Toby Jones and Diana Rigg as the foot soldiers of imperialism. Wonderful production design and cinematography, this is period cinema and literary canon adaptation at its best.