Mostly Harmless

I wanted to like this film, but to keep my attention for three hours I need more than standard melodrama. Yi Yi is cute and sad by turn, it's well-acted, and yet there's nothing there. This is fluff, pure and simple, like a weeks' worth of 1970's The Young and the Restless. Why the accolades? Zhang Yimou* (pre-Hero/House of Flying Daggers, that is) could pack more punch into a single scene than Yi Yi generates at epic length.

Skip this one--there's plenty of much shorter pap available, like that show about Flava Flav on MTV. To make matters worse, the DVD transfer is wretched.

*Speaking of Yimou, a long-awaited widescreen DVD transfer of one of his masterworks is finally coming:



Let's hope The Story of QiuJiu is soon to follow!