clobban Even though Tian yu (Xiu-Xiu) is a deeply moving film, one could sit back complacently thinking that something like this could never happen in America. Yet, Million Dollar Baby shows us that it can. Two excellent films. Of course, the movies are very different in many ways, but I was intrigued by some key parallels. In both, the male lead is an older man who develops a special, non sexual love for the female lead. Both men, for quite different reasons blame themselves for the situations the women eventually find themselves in, and both help in the ultimate solution, at the cost of their own lives. But they are not to blame: in each case society has trapped the women into intolerable situations from which there is ultimately only one escape. The nurse who gloats that "she'll never do that again" after Maggie tries to pull out her life support is no less despicable than the nurses who deride Xiu-Xiu for what she has become, or the men who take advantage of her. We may view the system that forgot Xiu-Xiu as malignant, but it is no less so than the "benign" system that dehumanizes Maggie. Xiu-Xiu is the sort of film one expects to see in human rights film festivals… and what about Million Dollar Baby?

md7-1 This movie has a really nice pace of editing among the many beautiful images presented by Joan Chen. You should take note that the pace isn't very fast and the story presents it self very linear. Without making clichés. For me it wasn't disturbing, I even embraced it.I watched this movie because the band Xiu Xiu recommended it. And I knew that this wasn't going to be happy-happy-joy-joy-experience.But the movie really grabbed me after wards, knowing that this isn't likely for many movies I regard this movie as a masterpiece. Strong Cinematography, good acting, moving story, nice soundtrack (not only the music), fine pace of editing.Be good to your self and step in to this experience.

soblessed I just saw this video last night.I mostly enjoyed it. The two main characters are wonderful to watch. The scenery was beautiful. Most of it was very touching,but I would have been happier with less explicit sex scenes. This film definitly held my interest,even though you must read the subtitles. It is a very sad story on two levels.Because of the beautiful young girl's situation and because of her wonderful, but much older castrated mentor's love for her. After seeing "The Shower" and now this film, I am developing an appreciation and interest for Chinese films. For those who don't mind reading subtitles in a good foreign film, I don't think this will dissapoint many.

tedg Spoilers herein.Joan Chen is a lovely woman who went to the Chinese outback to learn how ordinary people think visually. So she makes a film about a lovely girl sent to the Chinese outback to learn how ordinary people think agriculturally.The girl ends up feeling she has to prostitute herself to find her way back home. And so with Ms Chen, and as with the girl, we the viewer get some superficial pleasure.This is a simple film, and one can see that it was made by someone with an actor's sensibility. The story is extremely economical, so much so that the camera is anchored to the actors. Every shot is an actor's shot: either to place the actor in a scene or to show the actor acting. The one exception is a rather heavihanded cloud metaphor. This works because the project has such low ambition, but it has the effect of abstracting the story so much we just don't care.A more experienced filmmaker might work at defining the situation, setting up some complex dynamics in the world and then placing some characters within those dynamics. That way we watch them in a context that we understand. Bertolucci did that with `The Last Emperor' in which Ms Chen worked as one of those actors responding to their environment. Here, she has it the other way around. We still get the wilderness, the political idealism and associated petty tyrants. But they are the the other way around, what our heroine sees. We, through our surrogate the camera eye, never see the bigger picture.In a sense, this is a `Taxi Driver' bet, a first film where we get things through one character's mind. It worked for Scorsese because he was fearless in putting us on the edge. This project was clearly designed that way, like `taxi' with the edge being in the sexual exploitation of a young girl. But Ms Chen backs away when the chips are down. Some more visual pain, more explicit images, more of a linkage of loneliness to the environment (for example in the Bertolucci `Sheltering Sky').So what we end up with is a small film where everything seems competent but nothing works quite right. She followed this up with the very similarly conceived `Autumn in NY.' Prostitution in the name of getting home. Sad.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.