Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

jeremy-giroux I really loved this movie. Many people didn't and I really understand why : it's a very slow movie. Everything takes time, everything is long and you don't really see where the director really wants to go. He follows this girl. She appears to us at the beginning at the film, walking in a very long corridor, in a slow motion and on pop music. As this girl is impersonated by Shu Qi, she is absolutely beautiful. This girl smokes, she seems a little bit sad and you don't really know what is her story. The voice of a girl tells you about the relationships this girl had in the past and this voice says that, when she speaks, it's in 2010 (ten years later after when the action takes place). You never really understand why this voice says that. You never really understand what this girl wants and what is her past (although you have some informations during the film), you just see her live and it's absolutely fascinating and hypnotic. It's hard to say but you see how much Hou Hsia Hsien is fascinated by beauty, time and modern life. His fascination for time is also present in "Three Times". In this movie, everything is normal, nothing is spectacular and incredible (about the plot, the sets or whatever) but everything is poetic, mysterious and hypnotic. It's the kind of feeling you have when you see someone and you don't know why, but this person fascinates you. It's the same kind of feeling. It's fascinating as when you see someone's life and just let this person free to do what she wants, you just look at this person. It's a very good movie although fascination is something very personal.

Zargo 'Millennium Mambo' is a surreal, enigmatic film exploring the developments in the life of Vicky. Vicky is young woman who struggles to end her miserable relationship with her abusive boyfriend Hao-Hao, who she's lived with since her teenage years.I'm left wondering whether there are hidden meanings to this film that are above my head, or whether there is actually all that much substance there in the beginning.It all managed to be fairly entrancing however, thanks to the magnetic performance of Shu Qi, who proved she is much more then just an extraordinarily beautiful face and figure.She effortlessly keeps the viewer's attention during endlessly long takes where not a lot appears to be happening.

Dhomochevsky Amongst the few people who saw it i'm surprised to be the one who liked "millennium mambo" the most. You will too if you keep to looking for beautiful music, sets and colors. Some will instantly fall in love with the main actress, too. Unfortunately, the story is a bit too plain too convince. And the lack from dialogues doesn't really help as well. It's true that "all the talk about girls and drugs in asian clubs" doesn't necessarily need some but... I've never been a real fan of highly "brained" movies, and that's why i liked it. Not everyone will. Now you're warned. The choice i was talking about in the summary is wether you want to get experienced in contemporary "fantasied" hong kong cinema, or not. My advice would be to watch it on a boring and/or quiet saturday night, with 2 or 3 friends, just to realize how it's cool to feel at home.

alsolikelife Hou's latest film, I saw as part of Village Voice's Best Undistributed Films of 2001 series, feels like a mixing and modulation of his last three: a young woman's abortive but contemplative contemporary existence (GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN), a moment-by-moment addiction to thrill-seeking (GOODBYE SOUTH GOODBYE) and a love affair entombed in drugs (FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI) all figure into Hou's attempt to lyricize the moment we are living in -- NOW. The result is a film that seems immensely fascinated in each moment it is capturing -- luminescent bodies dancing in an underground rave; a man inhaling and exhaling smoke from a makeshift bong; the absolute wonder of one's facial imprint in an immaculately white snowbank -- until those moments lead to other moments of inescapable banality or dread. Hou enhances this addiciton-to-the-moment with a voice-over that takes place in 2010, giving away plot points before they happen on-screen; since narrative convention no longer matters, the result is an even more intense experience of the moment tied in with an odd sensation of retrospection (no one messes around with the concept of history more than Hou). The give-and-take of this kind of project is that not everything will succeed on a dramatic level, but the experience of this film (and I do mean *experience*) is too exquisite to be denied. There are no less than half a dozen moments in this film, easily the most sumptuously photographed of the year, whose sheer beauty in harmonizing time and image are timeless treasures: objects and settings seem to take on a life of their own, before they are inevitably swept under the ever-moving carpet of time.