Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

lh-cooper-1 I was part of a tour grip visiting China a year ago last May. Part of the itinerary was the Yangtze river cruise. Had I seen this film prior to my trip, I doubt I would have been able to handle the cruise. It's one thing to know intellectually about how many people are being displaced by the project. It's altogether different - and gut wrenching - to witness the impact on one family.Because I was so intensely affected by the film, it's impossible for me to avoid some spoilers.Although it starts out slowly, this is a really powerful film that had me in tears by the end. The juxtaposition of the travelers and crew in an overly elegant setting against the farmer and his family and their humble home on the river was a perfect balance. The score is well suited to the different settings, especially near the end, as the family's home and land sink slowly but inexorably under the waters of the Yangtze. You're left imagining what the young girl from the family will be able to do with her life beyond sending her savings from the cruise ship home to enable her parents and family to eat. And this magnificent project, still underway, will produce a grand total of 2 to 3% of the country's energy needs at the expense of millions of displaced Chinese who are in the way of "progress."

Ron Chow I finally watched this film during its third run at a local art-house cinema, having missed it on two previous occasions. I enjoyed the film, but at the same time felt it could have been done better. The knitting could have been tighter.Ten years ago I took a boat trip up the Yangtze, starting from ChongQing. No, I was not on a 5-star cruiser depicted in this film. My boat was much more modest, and smaller. At night I could hear rats racing across the ceiling. But it was, nevertheless, an enjoyable trip. The water level was much lower at that time, so the cliff faces were higher and more impressive. What I once saw is now mostly submerged, as was chronicled in this film. Taking this trip 'Up the Yangtze' again on the big screen sure brought back fond memories.Overall I find the focus on the demise of a poor family affected by the rising water level, and the activities surrounding large cruise ships catering to well-off visitors from around the world to be a good and relevant backdrop to this informative documentary. The acting and interviews were well conducted, with unforced ease and human sentiment. At the end, you draw your own conclusion who to sympathize with, whether you want to point fingers at the establishment, or just resign to the fact that progress toward modernization, in any country, comes with a price.As the end credits rolled on the screen, a band played 'To traverse a big sea you need a good navigator', a song composed and forced into the ears of every Chinese national during the Culteral Revolution - in praise of Mao, the 'Navigator'. It was a great propaganda song but the band, using inappropriate instruments, made a mess of it and it sounded like white noise. I don't know why the director did not chose the far more superior 'choir' version, which would have been more becoming to close out a good documentary. This is just one example of how some fine-tuning and refinements could have brought this film one step closer to being a masterpiece.

Chris Knipp Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang's National Film Board of Canada-sponsored documentary about the displacement of the Yangtze river and the population surrounding it by the Three Gorges Dam in China creates a vivid picture of people and transitions. But it's got a tough act to follow in the films of Jia Zhang-ke, whose recent 'Still Life' goes over similar ground in a style that feels at once more sweeping and more intimate.Chang mainly alternates between a big "luxury cruise" boat that takes North Americans and Europeans to see the river landscape before flooding changes everything, and a poor family living in an improvised riverside shack that's shabby but is in a place where there is land they can cultivate for food. In the course of the film, the family is moved up to temporary housing where they have to buy food and water and their sixteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to continue beyond middle school, struggles and makes her way up from dishwasher to dining room help on the boat. Meanwhile Chang also follows another new boat worker called "Jerry" (Chen Bu Yu) who washes out after his trial period despite being handsome and a good singer. He is accused by his supervisor of being over-confident, egotistical, and careless of others, which some Chinese think is a common byproduct of one-child families.'Up the Yangtze' is skillfully edited by Hannele Halm to underline social contrasts . It moves seamlessly back and forth between "Cindy" (as the subsistence farmer's daughter, Shui Yu, is called for her boat job) and her family's shack. We see "Jerry" boasting, drinking and swearing at a Karaoke bar before beginning his boat job. He interacts smoothly with a couple of young European men while bartending on the boat, and performs a Chinese song for an assembled audience of the tourists on board. The workers' supervisor, "Campbell" (Ping He) gives them lots of instructions. Symbolically, Chang's extensive coverage of life on the cruise boat among the young workers and their supervisors, who teach them how to tell tourists what they want to hear and not bring up controversial subjects, is a vision of China's desire to make nice with the western world on its upward path to being one of the leading nations. At the same time, this cruise boat story seems somehow peripheral to general Chinese life. Jia's 'Still Life,' with its haunting fiction of several different lives disrupted by the Three Gorges project, gives a more vivid sense of the turmoil and unpredictability of contemporary China and more specific detail about the shifting interface between people and the dam's ongoing displacements. The cruise boat story in 'Up the Yangtze' has its richer counterpoint in Jia's previous film, 'The World,' and he presented a portrait of several decades of contemporary Chinese history in his second feature film, the 2000 'Platform.' In 'Unknown Pleasures' (2002), Jia dramatized the marginal lives of semi-educated young people (like Cindy) who are caught in the swirl of transformation of the rural into the urban in China's vast economic cauldron.But Chang seems to have had excellent access to each of the worlds he chooses to focus on, and particularly to the sense of humiliation and grief some people feel in the course of things. This includes Cindy, before she leaves home; a shopkeeper who was brutally relocated; and Jerry when he begins to realize that his coworkers don't like him because he's not a team player. Chang was able to film Cindy's parents explaining why they can't send her on to further schooling, and their humble visit to the boat after she's been working there a while. Jerry seems to have characteristics that would serve him well in a western setting or a school. But though he comes from a richer family than Cindy, such opportunities are unreachable even at nineteen, and when he's banished from the river boat job, one wonders if he may end up like the young lost souls in Jia's 'Unknown Pleasures,' who face jail or worse.In 'Still Life' it's clear that people at all levels are being churned around in China, and since English is Chang's first language, it's quite possible "Up the Yangtze" is meant to evoke the words "up the river." It seems that the only value that survives is the intense desire to work and no one can really see the big picture, even though they may supervise the construction of big bridges or buildings. The recent earthquake in China is a new demonstration that planning and construction are often faulty. Since Chang's film is a documentary, you may wonder why nobody is asked whether there wouldn't have been an alternative to the giant dam with its disruption of a vast eco-system and displacement of two million people and counting. But nobody does, and Chang's access doesn't mean he could talk to policy-makers, or even mid-level bureaucrats. Like many documentarians, he has worked very well with the material that came his way. He also refers to his own family stories and trips to the area of the river--this isn't his first. The film has a strong but not obtrusive soundtrack by Olivier Alary; the cinematography of Wang Shi Qing is often striking. Jia's 'Still Life' remains a hard act to follow.Shown at Sundance, Seattle, San Francisco and other festivals, currently (June 2008) in US release in 6 theaters.

wanderingstar "Up the Yangtze" is a documentary which is at its heart, about a poor Chinese family and the impact the Three Gorges Dam project is having on their lives. In a broader sense it is about a rapidly changing China and the huge disparity in rich & poor that exists there.The Three Gorges Dam is a colossal hydroelectric project. The hydro plant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, "wonder of the world", generates 2,300 MW of electricity. The Three Gorges project will be 26,000 MW, a dam two km wide, and when complete will displace 2 million people and empty about 9 large cities.One such displaced family is featured in the film. The daughter of the family goes to work on a cruise ship on the Yangtze which caters to rich Westerners. The story is told from the point of view of the daughter, and various people we meet along the trip.The film made me laugh, and cry a couple of times too. (Which was embarrassing because I watched it on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver) If you want to get a little window on what is going on in China right now, the corruption of officials, the disparity between rich and poor, the treatment of peasants by the government, beyond the newspaper headlines, then this film is for you.