The World
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Movie Reviews of The World
Movie Review: Surprisingly good
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm shocked by some of the reviews here, but not necessarily surprised - The average filmgoer/dvdwatcher has the attention span of a small child on crack & the intellectual curiosity of those small dustbunnies that collect under old furniture. Still, I expect more from you people.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film - & yes, I wasn't actually expecting to. In fact I bought it more than a month ago & kept making up excuses not to watch it. Imagine my surprise when I found myself intrigued by some of the relationships in the film. Tao's boyfriend who mysteriously returns at the beginning of the film then disappears for the duration. Or her strange relationship with the Russian woman Anna. Even more interesting was the relationship between Niu & Xiaowei - why did they end up getting married considering Niu's jealous behavior (he set himself on fire for godssake)? Who knows, but these details make for a supremely fascinating character study IMHO. Like real life, this film demonstrates that our relationships can be extremely complex & often unpredictable. We make friends with the most unlikely people in the bizarrest of situations - maybe we're lonely or just sense something of ourselves in them. We get involved with people we know will hurt us (over & over again). We often feel like we can't fully understand the person we're with & their motives...
Of course, The World's relationship angle is also used in a much broader sense: the employees of Beijing's amusement park & their relationship with China & in turn, China's relationship to the rest of the world. It seems to me that as China becomes more capitalistic this movie will gain in popularity with people who wish to understand these people better. Like most of us, they don't quite know where they fit in the world & although they work in a park that offers a scaled-down glimpse of the world outside Beijing, most of them will never get to see that world first hand.
Movie Review: Intriguing film
Summary: 4 Stars
The World is aptly named; it's set in Beijing's World Park--a real theme park in China's capital, complete with miniature versions of landmark buildings and monuments from all over the world including, in this film, the often-mentioned Eiffel Tower, as well as the pyramids of Egypt, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Moscow's Red Square, the Taj Mahal, and so on.
The director, Zhang Ke Jia, focuses on a number of younger people (in their 20s) who work at World Park, interleaving their lives with each other to ultimately present a vision of 21st century urban China. This has a markedly different feel and tone from his earlier Unknown Pleasures, set in a rural provincial area, and from my point of view, is all the better for that change of setting.
The underlying thematic feel of the film is the inevitability of ephemeral relationships given not so much the availability of current technologies like the cell phone, but more so the reliance on them and, maybe most importantly, the enormous degree to which people's psychologies have been changed by these technologies. In fact, this short-lived nature of relationships, indicates Zhang, is inextricably enmeshed in the existence of World Park itself. People want to see and hear the world, all of the world, as quickly as possible, and World Park gives them that opportunity, even if in a fake kind of way--just like cell phones give people the opportunity to connect to anyone anywhere at any time, just as the Internet itself does.
But it's this instant "connectability" that also fosters relationships that cannot last. Tao, the female lead and a dancer at the World Park, has a strong emotional connection with her boyfriend Taisheng, a security guard in the same place. But he cannot commit; he cheats on her; she finds out. Meanwhile, another relationship is characterized by a boyfriend who always wants to know where his girlfriend has been, always asking her the same question--as if desperately trying to reverse this instant "everywhere at once" psychology that current technologies--and World Park itself--perpetuates.
This is a truly intriguing film, because it probes more deeply than a lot of other films have managed to do the nature of how globalization has effected a paradigm shift in how we think about our relationships with others, how we see ourselves--or maybe don't see ourselves too well at all--in the context of the world, and how we cope with those around us who have, just like us, changed--likely in the same way we have.
Highly recommended. A real find and worthy of the high praise it's received from a number of critics.
Movie Review: The New Capitalism
Summary: 4 Stars
Chinese from the provinces live in the new capitalist world of Beijing. It is not so much represented by economic growth as by symbolic and material change, specially the use of cellular phones. Society is still in a transformation phase, when women start to act as legal prostitutes using sex to advance and men start to steal, die, kill, or pay accordingly. Not showing how was life in the provinces makes difficult to compare with the actual situation of the protagonists, but the antagonism is nevertheless expertly crafted by opposing the fantasy world of a theme park with the real life of its workers. The most important theme in this film is the relationship people have with money once the process of capitalist social differentiation is put in motion. Some of them prefer to sacrifice comfort for old values (as love or family) and others go with the current, because they don't have options or because they want to live a better material life. Beijing seems an oppressive place to live, a monster that transforms its citizens in an anonymous mass of workers, like a futurist dystopia (and is not communism the responsible here!) The mix of personal poverty with superficial opulence for tourists seems lethal for the construction of a positive life-story (a narrative): the options seem to consist in escaping abroad or being subservient to somebody more powerful (in general, women to rich men). Governmental policy seems to be the only barrier between dozens of millions of migrants and the developed world. The creation of this longing for the outside world comes together with the development of Chinese capitalism, and the theme park is only the symptom of the phenomenon, giving our heroes a little respite from the life of the metropolis in construction. Beautifully filmed in DV, "The World" is a statement against the way in which some societal changes are made by unseen people that forgets how they affect to the big (in this case, the really big) part of the population.Movie Review: Correct location of the film is Shenzhen, not Beijing.
Summary: 4 Stars
This review is a correction that may help search engines.
The location of the movie is "Window of the World" park, in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is next to Hong Kong. Window of the World is just one of several OCT recreation complexes in Shenzhen, including two other amusement parks: "Happy Valley" and the Chinese Folk Village/Splendid China.
The location is not Beijing, as listed in other reviews. Saying Window of the World is in Beijing is sort of like saying Cedar Point park (in Ohio) is in New Orleans.
Movie Review: Ensemble Drama in Beijing Theme Park: Realistic Slice of Life, Plus Very Very Pessimistic Outlook of Life
Summary: 3 Stars
Newset film from Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia ('Platform' 'Unknown Pleasures') is, some say, most accessible one in his works. True, but the touch of the long film is still bleak and detached, going on and on with almost non-existent story about the workers in the eponymous theme park. Critics would admire the feel and perhaps appreciate its anti-globalization attitudes in it, but many viewers like me would find the film awfully pretentious and tedious. My impression happens to be the latter one (hence my lower rating). But of course, you might find the film and its realistic content differently.
Anyway, I have never been to the place myself, but in the suburb of rapidly modernized city of Beijing, there really exists a theme park World Park, where you can see lots of miniature landmarks of the world such as The Eiffel Tower, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, or The Taj Mahal. The catch phase of the place is `Visit the World without leaving Beijing.'
In this small world lives Tao, young girl and dancer working in the theme park. She has a boy friend, the park's guard Taisheng, but `The World' introduces us to many other characters, all somehow trapped in this small-scale artificial `world.' With the film's ensemble fashion that strongly reminds us of Robert Altman, `The World' shows us the background of each character. One is from Russia, but most of them are from rural parts of the mainland China, and as Tao recollects, they all came to the big city with dreams.
But in the bleak world of Zhang Ke Jia, dream means something that these characters never get, and as many viewers would notice, their lives keep going around the same course like the small monorail car that runs languidly around the theme park. Many things (mostly unhappy ones) happen to the people surrounding Tao, but the director often insists on the emotionally detached tone, making some of us wishing for twist and surprises. But in `The World,' for better or for worse, you don't see them, and you don't even see what you call character development because the story is already told before the film begins.
Excuse me for my vague commentary about the story, but there is no way of summarizing it just like the case of `Short Cuts.' And `Short Cuts' is not my favorite film, which would explain my rather negative review. I just don't like long films (`The World' runs 140 minutes) and I don't like pessimistic films (as you expect from Zhang Ke Jia). I gave a try to this one, but couldn't bring myself to give it a second one.
The film's realistic touch is definitely helped by digital camera and the actors' good acting, and the camera always captures the slice of ordinary life of the ordinary people, letting us see the inside of their hearts. Still, these days I'm getting tired of the attitudes of any director who is always looking for the negative aspects in the things surrounding us. And the film's very ending, of which meaning is still unclear to me, but of which shockingly cold touch is clearly intentional, is only the film's mystification of its theme, which is obvious from the beginning. The problem is, do we really need 140 minutes to know that? Or it is worth?