FOREIGN MOON
Director: Zeming Zhang.
Starring: Da Ming Chen, Vicky Chen, Harrison Liu, David Tse.
I should have paid attention to the signs. Unfortunately, I can only
tell what the signs mean in hindsight.
I was a bit early to catch the bus to the movies so I decided to stop
at the bookstore to collect the books I had ordered. Of course, they
couldn't find one of them and it took forever and it looked
like I was going to miss the movie. However, they managed to find it,
and I got to the bus stop with a few seconds to spare. Straight away
a bus came: it was going to be close but I should make it. Two stops
from the cinema, I kid you not, around fifty elderly people got on the
bus. Thankfully they were a group so they didn't all try to pay
individually but it still took forever. (I overheard their
conversations; they were going three stops!) I get to my stop five
minutes after the starting time of the movie. Usually this isn't a
problem except I was going to an independent movie house that doesn't
show a lot of ads. In spite of all that, I got there and it hadn't
started yet. Ninety minutes later and I was wishing one hundred people
had got on the bus and slowed it down that much more.
People have been giving this movie rave reviews. If this were in
English, it would be being universally panned. I felt as if I were
watching a year of Days of Our Lives, compressed in to ninety
minutes. This was soap opera at its worst. The only things that made
this movie seem better than that were the fact that it was in Chinese,
and hence a bit of work to get through, and the interesting
juxtapositioning of strangers in a strange land, where we had Chinese
people trying to make it in London.
It's hard to review the acting in a foreign language movie because I'm
reviewing how they behaved relative to the translation. Also, I'm
being distracted by having to read, so it's possible to miss some
subtle nuances of the performances. Having said that, there were
moments in Foreign Moon where the acting was cringingly awful.
Early on, as Lan Lan (Ms. Vicky Chen) discovers what her sponsor is
really like, we
realise that she is fuming mad. I could tell that she was fuming mad
by the expression on her face: it was the I'm-fuming-mad expression.
This kind of woodenness was repeated throughout the movie.
Also, what was the attraction? I never understood what she saw in
this guy, other than the fact that he didn't try to rape her. Now I
know that I'm inclined to go on about sexism in the movies and the
limited roles available to women, but I would think that men would be
starting to get a bit frustrated by the way they are stereotyped: in
this case, the muscle-bound jock. I guess as long as
middle aged, boring men get to have sex with beautiful twenty year
olds, I won't hear men complaining.
It's not the worst movie I've seen all year (have I told you about Breakdown?)
but that's probably just because I'm being swayed by the foreign language
movie syndrome: it's artsy so it must be good. Foreign Moon
isn't.
Rating: CP
© Nikki Lesley 1997