Word: lucked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seem from another world, these harbingers of a new Chinese-American cinema. With their glimpses of swirling silks, their rapid clatter of languages, their arranged marriages, fatal renunciations, invocations of ghosts and ancestors, aphorisms straight out of a fortune cookie from one of the better Chinese restaurants, The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet look beautifully alien. But this is all a trick, to entice you with a vision of novelty. The Western viewer shortly, delightedly, discovers tales of universal savor and significance. Only the garnish is regional...
Like the Amy Tan novel, Wayne Wang's film of The Joy Luck Club shuttles between imperial China and today's San Francisco. Four immigrant ladies, who meet for mah-jongg and call themselves the Joy Luck Club, have four American- born girls, now in their 30s. While the daughters follow the quiet ambition fed them at birth -- to be unostentatiously extraordinary -- the mothers fret and fuss. You're not a good enough pianist; you're too proud about your gift for playing chess. "I'd rather get rectal cancer" than have you marry that Caucasian. And look...
...answer is in their pasts in China, flashbacks that give The Joy Luck Club its epic radiance. The domestic dilemmas in the American scenes are minute compared with the enthralling tragedies laid out amid period splendor: brutal husbands, wicked stepmothers, subjugation and betrayal, lives ruined, babies sacrificed -- and, on the young women's part, a wondrous ferocity of will. The large ensemble (mothers and daughters at two or three ages) is evidence of Hollywood's untapped wealth of Chinese-American actresses. One warning: the typhoon of emotions makes this an eight-handkerchief movie. Bring four for the mothers, four...
More conventionally than The Joy Luck Club, The Wedding Banquet plays with images of the Eastern character. "Fifth Avenue is too expensive," Mrs. Gao complains after a shopping tour. "And when we find something suitable, it's made in Taiwan." But as the movie ripens from Green Card situation comedy into mellow drama, it finds human wrinkles in its stock figures. There's no gay baiting or Taipei typecasting. The old folks possess hidden reserves of sagacity; the young folks can bend to meet them before saying a last, wistful goodbye...
...armed man. They can also be about chasing the dragon tail of filial responsibility -- isn't that a form of everyday heroism? The Mexican hit Like Water for Chocolate proved that American audiences can respond to stories about love and marriage, food and family. The Joy Luck Club and The Wedding Banquet display this same wisdom: that we never stop being our parents' children, and they never stop being ours...