Soaking It In: The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club (1993) by Wayne Wang: 139 minutes, 7.2 IMDB, 89% fresh tomatoes

Great film!

My notes:

• 0:07:50 Playing Antonín Dvořák's "Humoresque". Makes me think of Slappy Squirrel.
• 0:09:15 Song: I Enjoy Being a Girl, which is from The Flower Drum Song, so I guess it's kind of Chinese-American.
• 0:32:55 I like the way that, while she was doling out the punishments, Lindo Jong struck a blow against the matchmaker as well. Fight the power!
• 0:56:00 Ying-Ying St. Clair's whole married-a-cruel-man sequence is so powerful, it makes me really regret the time we just spent watching Daughters of the Dust. Actress France Nuyen put more power in this scene than director Julie Dash put into that entire film.
• 1:05:50 "Seven and a half." Ha! So she is good at math.
• 1:14:39 The power continues. Oh, I like the whole St. Clair family.
• 1:31:00 Andrew McCarthy is playing a pretty complicated character, here. He's turning in an excellent performance.
• 1:49:25 Too overwhelmed by a great movie to blog.

The cousinnephew summary:

• Great director. Good script. Good actors.
• Main thing is the way the story was told. The time.
• Going through each story from her mother's friends. Going through the mother's life, then the daughter's life, through each family.
• It wasn't, "Look at how many film elements we can do with the camera angles." If you create the right past and present time sequence, it turns out this good.
• (Asked which of the film's techniques he'd emulate and which he'd avoid:) I just have to say that I'm impressed with the way they created an entire set for China in the 1940s. They recreated it entirely for certain parts of the movie. They went through that much trouble to let you feel the mother's experience.
• To emulate: Don't get lazy.
• Also, the make-up.