Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Amy Tan's bestselling novel has been adapted for the big screen into a respectable but artless melodrama, tracing in a colorful anthology of flashbacks during a family reunion in San Francisco the often-tragic lives of four Chinese women and their adult daughters. The cultural differences separating each of the quartet of traditional Chinese elders from their modern American children give each episode a special poignancy, but while criss-crossing two hemispheres and three generations the film is forced to lean too heavily (out of necessity) on the crutch of constant voice-over narration, presumably quoted straight out of the book.It looks and sounds at times too much like a well-produced television drama (full screen VHS and DVD versions were 'formatted to fit your TV screen', to no real noticeable effect). In fact the film might have worked better had it actually been expanded into a mini-series. Each of the separate relationships deserves a full movie by itself, and cramming so many memorable biographies (by so many different narrators) into a single two-hour movie only dilutes the emotional impact of each story.

All this mystification expressed over why this flick wasn't considered for an Oscar is, in itself, a bit mystifying. While it wouldn't have been the first time Hollywood recognized what is essentially a tawdry melodrama in that fashion, let's not confuse a bloated, ineptly manipulative movie with great art.It LOOKS great, though. Very high production values with great costumes and beautiful period sets. And the cinematography is gorgeous. All at the service of... ? A convoluted story, put in the hands of people that seem to have no idea how to tell it. Some good actors involved, though, gamely trying to make something of execrable material.

The story comes after a death and a reunion that bring the past back in all of its undiluted passion, and shows how the present, too, is made, how children who think they are worlds apart are inextricably influenced by the lives of their parents. Wayne Wang's touching film, based on Amy Tan's novel, is about four women, who were born in China and later came to America, and their daughters. Among these eight women mingle countless friends and relatives, to the mise-en-scene's maximum scenery capacity, in peripheral branches of life. Actually, those scenes are the biggest weaknesses of the film, as their interjecting party jest is so transparently scripted that we want only the bottom line of the scenes. But what is about to be dissolved are the beginnings of the women, the stories of how they were born and grew up in a time and culture so far apart from the one in which they live now.The club of the title is a circle of elderly Chinese ladies who meet weekly to play mah jong, and trade stories of their families and grandchildren. All have made ruinous paths from pre- revolutionary China to the privileged homes in San Francisco where they meet. But those old days are not frequently talked about, and often the entire reality of them is not revealed.In a framework of flashbacks, the secrets and stories of all four of the "aunties" are unraveled. We see that the China of the 1930s and 1940s, before the Revolution, was an inconceivably dissimilar world than it is today. Women were not considered too much. Those with resilient spirits and wills were regarded even less than the impressionable, submissive ones. Life was worthless, no more than in wartime. A mother's ability to love her children was doubted. In plenty of instances, all-consuming dilemmas from those hard days still find their echoes in succeeding generations: The potent reality of Amy Tan's story is the lack of understanding between cultures that make the capability of the mothers to identify with their westernized daughters rely on things that have never been clearly vocalized.How, in one instance, could the narrator's mother have told of deserting her first-born twin girls by the roadside? Her mother, ill and emaciated, was certain she should die, and believed her girls would have a better likelihood of living if they were not compromised by the "bad luck" of a deceased mother. Other stories are just as, if not more, agonizing to Americanized ears. There is the auntie who becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy man, and when she gives birth to the son he wished for so much, the child is taken from her by the second wife.In America, the mothers find it difficult to get their minds around the paths their daughters are taking. Some marry whites, who have deplorable etiquette. They move out of the old neighborhood into houses that seem too cutting-edge and frigid. One daughter gives up on ever pleasing her mother, who carps on everything she does.This movie was produced by Oliver Stone, who himself at one time was an astute and scrappy filmmaker who turned out films with cross-cultural themes like this one, such as his Vietnam trilogy, and Joy Luck's director Wang leaves us longing for the rawness of those films, but he captures Tan's story and keeps it pure within his medium. Her story is as respects Chinese and Chinese-American characters, but their stories are all-inclusive. Anyone, everyone, can relate to how the expectations of one generation can become both the obstructions and the awakenings of the next.

On my first viewing, this film got a "fair" rating because there were not enough memorable roles and the story was confusing to me. I lost track of which person was telling their particular story at the moment. (There are eight stories woven into this two hour, 19 minute movie). I think it would be confusing to most one-time viewers to get confused here if you don't know the stories or the actors. It also got a little soap-opera-ish, too, but then again, this film was based on a best-selling book that was ready primarily by women.On the second viewing, almost two years later, I liked it a lot more and upgraded my "star" rating considerably. It's still a "chick flick" and a feminist one. The young women are that way, the Americanized women, while their mothers, those all born in China, are quite. The older ladies are a bit too strict and their daughters are a bit too liberal. That included general morals and language - a big difference between the two generations and cultures. The feminist angle I didn't like was that in almost every relationship the man is painted as the bad guy (the abuser, the non-loving type, etc.) That kind of story bias was too much.The more memorable of the stories turned out to be the ones with the older women, such as the one who left her two babies at the base of a tree, or the one who had to marry a young boy.For me, the best part of the film was the cinematography. There were some beautiful scenes and great colors: bright oranges, yellows, reds and browns. Some of the young women were beautiful, too. The lady narrating in the beginning, "June" (Melanie Chang as a nine-year- old and then Ming-Na as an adult) was very appealing and had a great voice. Her story is the one that begins and ends the film. That ending, by the way, is almost guaranteed to bring a few tears.Overall, a wonderful visual movie and a great venue for Chinese-American actresses, all of whom I found fascinating to watch.