ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

cmc2392 The story is classic in San Francisco of Asian women with own daughters. This Is Us show had nailed the past or chronological times same as Joy Luck Club's chronologies times.

tylersc-19626 CULTURE First of all, the movie portrays the mother's very differently than the book, this is not inherently bad; however, in the movie the mothers don't act Chinese. Half of the book was about cultural differences of China and the US and how the Chinese mothers dealt with their daughters adopting western culture. In the movie, this is not present at all. The mothers act like any American mother would so that the audience would be able to relate to the characters. But I'm doing this, they have missed half the point of the entire book. This would be fine if it chose to focus on another aspect of the story. But it doesn't. The movie just goes through the motions of each story in a non- creative way. PACING And what might that be? Well, all the stories are shown through flashbacks. The present day is a going away party for the character June to see her long lost sisters. Boy oh boy does that tank the pacing. Everytime the movie flashes back to another story, you can almost hear the screeching of tires as the pacing grinds to a complete stop. This is because the people making the movie didn't know how to properly convert a book into a film. Which brings me to my next point: the voice over. THE VOICE OVER The movie is over reliant on voice over to explain the story to the audience. This happens a lot on book to film adaptations, either because the writers aren't talented enough to adapt an almost entirely expositional form of entertainment into a visual form, or they are just too lazy. Not 10 minutes goes by in his movie without some voice coming in over top of the action to explain everything that is going on to the audience. It is incredibly easy to tell that this movie was based off of a book because of this, and it is very distracting. Speaking of distracting: THE SCORE Lordy. This score made me want to rip my ears out. Soooo overdramatic. It was absolutely ridiculous. Anytime there was a heartfelt or intense moment, the overbearing score immediately ruined it. You don't need loud, sappy music, to convey emotion. It's cheap and it's annoying. Good writing, good acting (the acting in this movie is competent btw), and good cinematography should convey emotion. All of which this movie doesn't have. But the awful overbearing score makes it 2X worse, especially with the ending. CLICHÉ The movie ends with close up camera shot that slowly pans up and out into the landscape where there is a massive amount of people bustling about while the loud overdramatic music plays in the background. So original. Never before done in a film.But hey, at least there was some okay acting (Not the actor who played Harold though he was atrocious)

Michael Neumann Amy Tan's bestselling novel has been adapted for the big screen into a respectable but artless melodrama, tracing in a colorful anthology of flashbacks during a family reunion in San Francisco the often-tragic lives of four Chinese women and their adult daughters. The cultural differences separating each of the quartet of traditional Chinese elders from their modern American children give each episode a special poignancy, but while criss-crossing two hemispheres and three generations the film is forced to lean too heavily (out of necessity) on the crutch of constant voice-over narration, presumably quoted straight out of the book.It looks and sounds at times too much like a well-produced television drama (full screen VHS and DVD versions were 'formatted to fit your TV screen', to no real noticeable effect). In fact the film might have worked better had it actually been expanded into a mini-series. Each of the separate relationships deserves a full movie by itself, and cramming so many memorable biographies (by so many different narrators) into a single two-hour movie only dilutes the emotional impact of each story.

BC I'd read many books by Chinese, and Asian-American authors before, but though some of them touched something in me, I didn't really understand a lot of what they said. I knew I needed a better understanding of the cultural differences, but boy! what a gap!!!I've lived in Taiwan now for 5 years, and still have a lot to learn about the "inner fires and mysteries" that push and nudge these people to their choices. Choices I make, too but from a somewhat different outlook. So I caught the Joy Luck Club on the Starmovies channel... and laughed and sobbed, and felt so full I could burst and desolate, and loved, and neglected. All at once. Wow! What a ride! And for Pete's sake, I'm a 40-year old guy! (And no, I'm happily married!)I don't care that some posters are heartless enough to pare people down to "cliches" (ugly word, that.. yuck) in order to be able to make sense of the movie. It's their tough luck that they are missing out on the richness of life - a life that is portrayed so very well and so deeply by the smallest actions of the actors, and their words! A feather to you Amy Tan and Ronald Bass for some of the most stunning lines written for the screen!Go get the movie, folks.