One of the best films i have seen

Crappy film

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

"Millenium Mambo" (Qianxi manbo) is a film about alienation, the pursuit of happiness and techno music. In a world that is too fast a young girl searches for an identity, in clubs, big cities and in the chaotic beats of techno music. The dialogue in the movie is there only where it's necessary which made it at least for me easier to identify with the main character. Vicky's relationships and her life seems to be shallow but it's not much different than anyone else's life and that's what makes this film so great. Qi Shu has done a remarkable job as Vicky and I'm really looking forward to see Hsiao-hsien Hou's next film.

I'm sick and tired of reading complaints from people that this film (as well as most of Hou Hsiao-hsien's others) are too boring, impersonal, detached, plotless, etc. Generally speaking, people don't just casually walk into one of Hou's films; chances are, if you go and see one, you already know basically what to expect -- which is, more or less, the polar opposite of Hollywood-style filmmaking. That said, Hou's films are among the most artful, innovative, breathtaking, and purely cinematic (in the absolute best sense of the word) made today, and Millennium Mambo is certainly no exception. In fact, I would even rank it as one of Hou's five best films (along with Flowers of Shanghai, Goodbye South, Goodbye, The Puppetmaster, and A Time to Live and a Time to Die).The film is exquisitely photographed by Mark Li Ping-bin, whose camera here is even more hypnotically mobile than usual, and -- perhaps to an even greater extent than in any of Hou's previous features -- takes on an ambiguously voyeuristic role. There are scenes in Millennium Mambo that are among the most haunting and beautiful in, not only Hou's cinema, but in all modern world cinema. The opening voice-over sequence (that calls to mind the best voice-over work from the films of Wong Kar-wai and Terrence Malick), the scene where Vicky lies in bed with the window reflection of the untuned television sumperimposing the passing trains behind her, and the scene set amidst the snowdrifts are probably the finest examples, but there are countless others, as well. Shu Qi is positively luminous in the film's central role. Her performance is, at times, even reminiscent of those by Anna Karina, Liv Ullman, and Monica Vitti for Godard, Bergman, and Antonioni, respectively. The supporting performers (especially Jack Kao) are also superb.As you can probably guess, I love Hou Hsiao-hsien and Millennium Mambo. I will be the first to concede, however, that his films are decidedly not for all tastes. They are usually very deliberately-paced, sometimes require knowledge of Asian (almost always Taiwanese) history (which means - god forbid - research for most viewers), and never feel in the slightest like Hollywood product. Now you've been warned. If this doesn't sound appealing or entertaining to you, then go watch Pearl Harbor. But if it does, I highly recommend that you check out Millennium Mambo (as well, as Hou's other films - all of which are genuinely worthwhile).My rating: 10/10

A grey-blue tunnel, neon lights, a surrealistic music and a girl "slowly" running through... That's the great, fashionable, beginning of Millennium Mambo. This start gives the film the right imprinting: everything you will see and hear from now on, will be equally beautiful and magic. But...But there are no characters and it is very hard to be interested on the stories of Vicky and her silent, unemployed, boyfriend. everything is so, so boring. Why?Now-a-days Chinese film-makers can be the best. The best in cinematography, in composing good scores, in acting, in art direction, but sometimes they miss the story. Like in Millennium Mambo.

Hou's latest film, I saw as part of Village Voice's Best Undistributed Films of 2001 series, feels like a mixing and modulation of his last three: a young woman's abortive but contemplative contemporary existence (GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN), a moment-by-moment addiction to thrill-seeking (GOODBYE SOUTH GOODBYE) and a love affair entombed in drugs (FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI) all figure into Hou's attempt to lyricize the moment we are living in -- NOW. The result is a film that seems immensely fascinated in each moment it is capturing -- luminescent bodies dancing in an underground rave; a man inhaling and exhaling smoke from a makeshift bong; the absolute wonder of one's facial imprint in an immaculately white snowbank -- until those moments lead to other moments of inescapable banality or dread. Hou enhances this addiciton-to-the-moment with a voice-over that takes place in 2010, giving away plot points before they happen on-screen; since narrative convention no longer matters, the result is an even more intense experience of the moment tied in with an odd sensation of retrospection (no one messes around with the concept of history more than Hou). The give-and-take of this kind of project is that not everything will succeed on a dramatic level, but the experience of this film (and I do mean *experience*) is too exquisite to be denied. There are no less than half a dozen moments in this film, easily the most sumptuously photographed of the year, whose sheer beauty in harmonizing time and image are timeless treasures: objects and settings seem to take on a life of their own, before they are inevitably swept under the ever-moving carpet of time.