This week, we watched a lot of Chinese Movies. Red Cliff, Painted Skin, Shanghai Dreams, Peacocks…. There are heaps of them still waiting, like Suzhou River, Stolen Life and Spring Begins….We reckon this is like catching up with what we have missed in the past many years.

To be honest, we’ve watched too many Hollywood’s film products. I guess we watch more than 150 new movies every year and most of them are from US. We are getting to a point where we started to lose the interests in knowing American history, a particular person or a certain social class or even fiction scenes. Why do we have to follow America to see what’s happening in their life? Why do we have to chase them around to get entertained or amused?

Anyway, I found some Chinese movies, especially with the good quality ones, really tell you the stories well. I particularly like those happened between 60s-80s. For example, Shanghai Dreams (“Qing Hong” directed by Wang Xiaoshuai) is a good one. Comparing to Peacock, this one has a better touch. I actually like Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle better, which tells about a story happened in Beijing Hutong and how the people at my age had lived their lives in 90s.

However, I still think Zhang Yimou’s “To Live” is the top one among all these types of Chinese movies, though I like none of the rest of his movies that he directed in the past 20 years. Frankly I can hardly believe that he actually did “To Live”.

You know what? The only problem that I have with good Chinese movies is that I haven’t seen a real happy story yet. Sad story can easily make a deep impression on its audience, but the happy ones? It’s just too hard to get remembered.