People are voting emotionally.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

"Three Times" is not just your average movie, and it definitely is not the type of movie that will broadly appeal to just anyone in the audience.The movie is roughly two hours long and is divided into three segments, each telling a different love story in a different place, time and environment. But they are set around the same two leads - Shu Qi and Chen Chang.The first segment is titled "A time for love" and it is set in 1966 taking place in a pool hall where a military enlisted man falls in love with a woman working there. This is my personal favorite of the three segments.The second segment is titled "A time for freedom" and it is set in 1911. This segment is the strangest and perhaps the most artful of the three, as it is shot mostly without audible dialog. There is a piano playing constantly, and whatever dialogue is there is shown as written text on the screen, like in the old silent movies. The story in this is about a courtesan who falls in love with a political activist. This was the toughest to get through, as it was amazingly slow paced and nothing much happened.The third and final segment is titled "A time for youth" and it is set in 2005. The story in this segment is about a bisexual singer who is in a relationship with two people, a man and a woman, but things are not all well. This last segment was fairly blend, in my opinion.I enjoy Asian movies a lot and had to check out this movie as Shu Qi was in it, and also was intrigued as the movie had received fairly well reviews and ratings. Having seen it now, I will say that the movie is entertaining, but it is hardly the type of movie that you will put into the DVD player a second time, as it just doesn't have that much entertainment value to support more than a single watching.The people in the movie did good jobs with their given roles, and that goes for all three segments, and the director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, does actually have quite a knack for capturing raw emotions and good imagery on film.

THREE TIMES (Zui hao de shi guang) is so frank a film that the viewer may get lost looking for the hidden meanings in this century traversal of lovers' interactions in China. Not one for simple linear film-making, director Hsiao-hsien Hou instead opts for mood and suggestion and leaves the paucity of dialog to make room for emotional involvement and response. Three periods - 1966 A Time for Love, 1911 A Time for Freedom, and 2005 A Time for Youth - are depicted with the same main characters, Qi Shu and Chen Chang, who prove to be exceptionally sensitive to the concept from the director: with each new tale these fine actors mold new characters and questions and yet allow us to see a line of similarity in the couples as the director has suggested.The film wisely opens with the most successful of the three 'Times' - 1966 A Time for Love - - tracing the emergence of timid passion between a lad headed for the military and a young girl who works in a pool hall. They communicate by letters after their first brief introductory encounter and circumstances interfere with the progress of their relationship in 1966 Taiwan. The middle section 1911 A Time for Freedom is gorgeous visually and conceptually the director has elected to use the cinematic form of the period (silent movie) to tell his story about the freeing of a young girl from the grip of a brothel madam and surveys the political tensions between Japan and China as the quietly lighted story of love and yearning unfolds. The film ends with 2005 A Time for Youth and here our lovers are caught up in the pollution of smog, cellphones, emails, nightclubs, and infidelities for same sex affairs that speak loudly about the tenor of the times.Hsiao-hsien Hou's films are an acquired taste and many will find the choppy editing, the fragmentary scenes that are not always well focused for the story line, and the over-long length (130 minutes) too much to endure. But the ideas are fresh and the characters and vignettes are memorable, and most of the major critics in the media have lavished praise on this film. It is an interesting work but for this viewer there are enough flaws to keep it grounded. Grady Harp

Like so many foreign and independent films these days, Hsiao-hsien Hou's "Three Times" is less concerned with telling a story than with observing the rituals of everyday life. The movie is so-titled because it uses the same set of actors to tell three different tales of love spanning nearly a century of Chinese history.The first segment, "A Time for Love", set in 1966, is a sweet and tender tale of an arm's-length romance between a pool hall hostess and the soldier who pursues her. The second, "A Time for Youth," in which a singer yearns for a life outside the brothel in which she works, takes place in 1911 and borrows its style from silent films, using title cards rather than voices to convey the dialogue. The final part, "A Time for Freedom," is a contemporary tale of a bisexual woman caught between her male and female lovers.All three episodes are more mood pieces than narratives, with emotions and meanings hinted at rather than externalized and dramatized. This is fine up to a point, but eventually, as a trilogy, "Three Times" becomes a case of diminishing returns the longer it goes on. The first section is a work of tremendous charm and beauty, the second considerably less so, and the third is so inscrutable in content and desultory in tone that the viewer winds up virtually pulling his hair out in frustration and boredom by the time it's over. There are some distinct parallels between the first and second story, and I'm sure that one could come up with some grand thematic scheme connecting the three works, but, frankly, none of it really holds together all that well, apart from the use of letters (or, in the case of the third installment, text messages) as a key plot device in each section.Qi Shu and Chen Chang have charisma and rapport as the two time-hopping lovers, but even they are not enough to keep "Three Times" from being much less than the sum of its parts.

This was my first Hou Hsiao-hsien picture, and I feel like I've been missing out on quite a lot, seeing as he's been doing this for about a quarter century. Not that I'm experiencing the kind of panic and regret that I might if I'd only just discovered Godard or Jarmusch. Three Times is simply the kind of movie I gravitate to, and I'm hoping it points the way to a trove of similar pleasures, even if it isn't quite a masterpiece on its own.As I'm sure others around here have written, Three Times is literally about three different times, as in eras: 1911, 1966, and 2005, and each of the forty-minute featurettes in this triptych is defined by a separate thematic quality: the 1960s, naturally, by love; the end of Dynastic rule by freedom; and contemporary China by youth. All of them, however, involve love on some level, or, at the very least, sex. Each chapter centers on a man and a woman (played by Chang Chen and Shu Qi in each case) caught up in some variation of romantic or erotic involvement that reflects the three themes.What I love about Hou's approach is that each of these forty-minute pieces tells no more "story" than an average Hollywood film would chew up and spit out in its first four or five minutes. In "A Time for Love" (the 1960s chapter) little more "happens" than a young soldier returning from military leave to find that the girl he's been writing to has moved to another town, so he tracks her down and they spend a few hours together. The other stories cover similarly scant territory while Hou allows his camera and the nearly constant presence of popular music to evoke the tempo and space of his characters' lives. Hou and his writer Chu T'ien-wen find worlds of behavior to explore and time worth spending in scenes that most writers would consider the merely necessary business of establishing a premise and getting their characters into position.If the movie doesn't exactly reach ecstatic heights, it isn't for lack of Hou's ability to fulfill his own purpose, but merely because his purpose contains almost no emotional arc, either for his characters or for his audience, and it isn't loaded up with the kind of ornate, spiritual metaphor that similarly deliberate films by, say, Bergman and Tarkovsky are. Hou doesn't seem interested (at least here) in either God or people, per se, but rather our cognitive relationship to the passage of time and the subtle but profound effect of small decisions on the course of our own histories.