To Live
|
Our Price: $109.09 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $15.57 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of To Live
Movie Review: To Live, Huozhe - The Chinese Gone With The Wind
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw this film at the Curzon Cinema in London's West End in 1994. A soon as the first frame appeared I knew I was watching a Classic.
This Film has to be one of the all time greats. One reviewer called it "The Chinese Gone With The Wind" and I agree to a point.
The central performances in this film are masterful. Li Gong and You Ge are incredible. They age before your eyes with hardly any make-up. It is all relayed in performance. Watch the amazing body movement of Li Gong in the last reel as she convinces us she is an aged woman. Remarkable!!!
The emotions in this film are strong and it is hard now to be moved by them. I particularly love the scene when they both unravel the soaking wet letter. This scene is played with such truthfulness that at points you feel you are watching a slice of real life and not a big budget Chinese movie.
Yimou Zhang is one of the best Directors alive today if not the best. He consistently produces brilliant films his latest being the exception.
Please read my Review of Curse of the Golden Flower
Movie Review: An outstanding Chinese movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Of all the Chinese movies I have seen, 'To Live' has impressed me most. It is the story of a Chinese family, during revolutionary social changes. The chaos and cruelties during the so-called 'Cultural Revolution', can only be imagined by people who haven't lived then and there, including former residents of Communist Eastern European countries like myself.
Recently,I've been thinking of a scene in the movie. The main character is a gambling addict and he's been losing more and more money with each visit to the gambling house.
One night, after they close down the business, the owners look at the book and one of them says: "Just a few more times, and we'll own his house", which in the end they do.
Does this remind anyone of our own failings and of the present economic relationship between the US and China? Will they end up owning us? The way we run our own economy, we might very well deserve it, just like the character in the movie did.
Movie Review: epic and intimate
Summary: 5 Stars
I watch "To Live" at least once a year, and definitely near my birthday, because it is about the sublime beauty of simple persistence in harshest times. It is in the top five of my favorite movies. Everyone else has said what's important, but I will add that the theme music is haunting and exquisite. Once I read that the most tenacious life forms, like bristle cone shrubs, are ones that can die back, allowing the core to live on in most harsh conditions. The emotional theme of the film is about reconciling to loss, on both large and small scales, and how letting go of the past is like dying back. What a film. What I would give to meet Zhang Yimou, whose other films, including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, and Red Sorghum, are marked by the same careful attention to the significance of the intimate encased in epic themes. One last thing, share this film with your friends. Many of mine appreciated it.Movie Review: Spellbinding...a Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
If To Live's title, as Roger Ebertt says, "conceals a universe," then watching this engrossing, exhilirating and extravagant film surely reveals one. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival, this epic film from China's most renowned director, Zhand Yimou (Oscar nominee for Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern), unveils a world worthy of "a Chinese Gone With the Wind" (The New York Observer)! Set against four decades of Chinese political turmoil, To Live follows the lives of one couple, Fugui and Jiazhen (Ge You and Gong Li), as they struggle to survive their own changing station within the upheaval. As the years go by, bringing bizarre twists, tragic losses...and profound hope, Fugui and his family persevere, striving to reach a calm within the storm so they can do the one thingthe one thing they've always wanted: To Live.Movie Review: Horrors of communism unveiled
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a fabulous movie and a testimony to the ability of Chinese film makers to tell the story. Hollywood could never put something like this together. It takes the main characters from the time they're newly married and wealthy to the poverty in sunset of their lives. They live quite the lives as they experience the horrors communism wreaks all about them. They go from disaster to disaster, losing everything they have but slowly realizing that they have only each other and that their family is the most precious thing they have. It's a bit disheartening to see that when they lose family members there is no hope or light at the end of the tunnel that they could look forward to. The heartbreak that communist ideology caused by taking away this hope is perhaps its greatest crime. Another required movie.