#A chinese ghost story 1997 movie#
Part of the reason is that the Chinese government stalled its premiere for nearly a year because of lingering anger over Disney's 1997 release of Kundun, Martin Scorsese's Dalai Lama movie that dealt with China's occupation of Tibet. While the original 1998 Mulan was a critical and commercial hit, garnering a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination and grossing more than $300 million worldwide ($475 million today), it faltered at the Chinese box office. But then disaster strikes the city they now call home, and they must find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.Įven before the outbreak of the virus, Mulan - the first Disney-branded film with an all-Asian cast and the first to be rated PG-13 (for battle scenes) - would have marked one of the studio's riskiest live-action films to date.
Their search for identity-as individuals and as a family-threatens to tear them apart. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong takes up with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. While she copes with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memory and imagination. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.īut with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam.
Moving, important, and strikingly relevant to our times, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship from one of our most celebrated authors. Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. But he is soon placed on a Chinese government blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn, and it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian's career begins to flourish in the United States. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government's threat to his artistic integrity. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan's secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter's tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. Animation is reasonably fluid, colorings are vivid, and backgrounds have a fragility that recalls Chinese landscapes, though in an accessible, unscholarly way.At the end of a U.S. Top film names Anita Yuen, Charlie Young and Jordan Chan are among those supplying the voices in the Cantonese print, though it's Ning's cute dog that steals the show on a comic level. Other parallels include Tsui's fascination with turn-of-the-century mechanical artifacts, here shown in the inventive Reincarnation Train, and his delight in mixing periods (cell phones are one notable example). The irony is that the action sequences are clearer and easier to follow, with none of the over-fast cutting of his regular pics. The plot is stuffed with hosts of wild, buccaneering characters and a ceaseless flow of action that parallels many of Tsui's fantasies like Zu – Warriors of the Magic Mountain. En route, he meets the beautiful Shine, a follower of Madame Trunk, and the pair try to board the Reincarnation Train to get Shine reborn.
#A chinese ghost story 1997 series#
Main character here is a young debt collector, Ning, who is ditched by his girlfriend, Siu-lan, and sets off with his dog, Solid Gold, on a series of adventures. Storyline bears no relation to the famous Chinese Ghost Story trilogy of martial arts fantasies produced by Tsui from 1987-91, though the universe in which the characters move is the same mixture of mortals, supergods and pesky sprits. Result is infused with many of Tsui's own filmic trademarks, some touches of typically Cantonese humor and a childlike, naive style that Japanese anime simply don't possess. A Chinese Ghost Story is a considerable accomplishment, the result of four years' work by Tsui Hark's Hong Kong-based Film Workshop.