Audience Member
A rather faithful adaptation of the original novel, with minimum amount of plot changes (which is understandable). I like the slowness of the scenes, and how in a plain way the story unfolds. But of course given its mere 2-hour length, lots of details have to be trimmed. å´å©è² is just so good and powerful in portraying the main character. On the other hand, é»æ's Mandarin sounds a bit weird and is distracting at times. The film is a little too compressed and it is difficult for the audience to realize that the whole movie actually spans 14 years, and hence appreciate the magnitude of the suffering endured by most of the characters. I wish the make-up artist had at least made the characters look older when they appear at the end of the movie. Overall, it's still a great movie. But the book is still 200% better! 8/10.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/02/23
Full Review
Audience Member
http://vieplivee.blogspot.com/2008/08/18-spring.html
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Maybe Ann Hui wanted a true adaptation but that was just a flop. The details weren't true, and it lost on hold of the theme: fate and love. Let alone the truthfulness of adaptations, the film itself is not well presented as well. A bit disappointed...
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/15/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Ann Hui is a good director, but she doesn't seem to master adaptation very well, let alone Eileen Chang's works, probably the most difficult to present in visuals. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is the best ever. Eighteen Springs comes nothing close. Anita didn't fit the role very well, pardon me, but she gave her best that again outshone the others.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Seriously miscast and poor direction. Not even a decent adaptation It's even worse than Love in a Fallen City!
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
[img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/movie/coverv/83/220183.jpg[/img]When ex-Buddhist monk turned exotic dancer Biggie (Andy Lau) begins to have premonitions of future events--including murders--he attracts the attention of the beautiful police officer Yee (Cecilia Cheung). Yee quickly falls in love with the sweet, muscular Biggie, and he feels secure in their developing relationship--until he begins to have visions of Yee's imminent murder!
[font=Tahoma][size=3]Andy Lau dons a full body muscle suit and plays an ex-monk who works illegally as a strip dancer, and has psychic visions. First the film starts out looking like its going to be some kind of action hero thriller than turns into a silly romantic comedy then into some drama with a mystical, karmic buddist message. I just thought the film was sloppy and went on for too long. I couldn't get into the everchanging story or charactors.[/size][/font]
[img]http://www.chinesecinemas.org/images/eighteen.jpg[/img] [b]Eighteen Springs- [/b][color=black]based on an Eileen Chang novel, a story of romance and fate set in the Shanghai of the 1930s. Manjing (Wu Chien-lien), a young woman from a once-well-off family, works in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shujun (Leon Lai), the son of wealthy Nanjing merchants. Despite Shujun's reservations about Manjing's family (her sister, Manlu works as a nightclub "hostess"), they manage, in stages, to fall in love. The expected progress through engagement to marriage is interrupted, first by Manjing's ambivalence about taking this step, then by Shujun's rejection of her family, and finally by that family's baroquely conceived abuse and enslavement of Shujun. After a long period of seperation, Shujun and Manjing meet, but realize that their happiness remains only in memory, in a nostalgic re-imagining of opportunities missed, understandings never arrived at.[/color]
[font=Book Antiqua][size=3]Sad, but well told romance story. I was surprised how much I liked it.[/size][/font]
[img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/movie/coverv/96/219996.jpg[/img]In this sequel to NAKED KILLER, Anya and Maggie Q star as Charlene and Katt, the two newest recruits of Madame M, an assassin who kidnaps girls off the streets and trains them to become killers. The two quickly become Madame M's top students and, as a reward, are assigned to kill a prominent but CIA protected dignitary.
[font=Franklin Gothic Medium][size=3]While this film shows plenty of skin & some good fighting sequences, I was put off by some aspects of the film. The group rape scene for instance was shot in an overly exploitive manner, even one of the actresses admitted to feeling degraded while acting in that scene in the dvd extras. Perhaps the film makers thought that having the lead bad guy running this concentration camp style school for forming female killing machines be a woman who orders the rape would make it seem less misogynistic, but it just made it even more disturbing.[/size][/font]
[font=Franklin Gothic Medium][size=3][/size][/font]
[img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/movie/coverv/35/245835.jpg[/img][font=Comic Sans MS]Starring the lovely and daring Michelle Yeoh, best known for her acclaimed work in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, the film SILVER HAWK is a Kung Fu take on THE MATRIX. Directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Jingle Ma, the movie tells the story of Lulu, a beautiful millionaire who uses her inheritance to reinvent herself as a caped crimefighter. A master of martial arts, Lulu uses her talents to rid her beloved city of the violence and crime that plagues it. Set sometime in the future, SILVER HAWK is a sexy fantasy packed with kung fu kicks.[/font]
[font=Trebuchet MS][size=3][b]This is the first movie I've seen that had an Asian woman play a super hero. Aged 40-something no less. Michelle Yeoh is great with all the action sequences, unfortunately watching her is one of the few good things about the film. I found the story line a bit hard to follow at times, the dialog and other charactors often silly. It's great to see a charactor like this tho, and hopefully they'll be more like it. [/b][/size][/font]
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
Full Review
Read all reviews
>
