TWO GREAT SHEEP A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
TWO GREAT SHEEP (HAO DA YI DUI YANG) is a simple story, simply told. It is set in a remote area of China, where rust-colored rock and dirt cover the landscape with little grass and no trees to block the blowing wind. Bingquiang Li's cinematography displays the stunning vistas with painterly beauty.
This touching tale concerns an assignment given to Deshan (Yunkun Sun), an old farmer living on the outskirts of a remote village. The Deputy Governor for the region gives Deshan the important task of caring for two imported sheep. Worth literally twenty-five times the local variety, these sheep are expected to be given special care -- including keeping them out of the sun and wind, right! -- and a special diet. All Deshan gets for this thankless job is grief, but he pours his heart and soul into caring for the prized animals. The sheep sleep next to Deshan and his wife, and their nightly baaaaaing is treated with the same lovely care and prompt attention that the nightly cries of human infants would command.
Not a particularly eventful story, typical of the episodes is the one in which Deshan's wife decides the sheep must be constipated, causing the need for exotic new food to be found. If you like a film in which peaceful silence in punctuated by the natural sounds of wind blowing down from the mountains, you'll be in a cinematic state of bliss while watching TWO GREAT SHEEP.
TWO GREAT SHEEP runs 1:40. The film is in Mandarin with English subtitles
The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival (www.Cinequest.org), which runs March 2-13, 2005.
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: 39510 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1368074 X-RT-TitleID: 10005034 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 2.5/4
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