LONG LIFE, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2003 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
With ten magic mirrors, a strand of her mother's hair and some of her mother's saliva, 12-year-old Mindy (Valerie Tian) is out to change her family's fortune. With these ingredients, Mindy is convinced that she can make just the right magical concoction to win the lottery. Mindy also tries to increase the size of her two-person family by using a love potion to find a husband for her mother, played by Sandra Oh.
LONG LIFE, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY, which alternates between a slight comedy and a sappy drama, is set in a cold and dreary Vancouver. The weather is a perfect metaphor for the movie itself, which contains few laughs and not much drama. Its whimsical music tells us how it wants us to feel, but the story leaves us cold and disengaged. Although it is filled with quirky little setups, like the mother's night job as a telephone "Oriental psychic," the story is never able to develop characters that are defined well enough to make us care about them.
"All we need is a purpose," Yeu Wong (Colin Foo) tells her husband, Shuck (Chang Tseng), during an inconsequential scene. The same could be said of the movie.
LONG LIFE, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY runs 1:30. The film is in Mandarin with English subtitles and in English. It is not rated but would be G and would be acceptable for all ages.
The film will open the San Jose portion of the San Francisco Asian Film Festival on Friday, March 14, 2003 at the Camera 3.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email? Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 34198 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 846341 X-RT-TitleID: 10002291 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 2/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews