建党伟业，Beginning of the Great Revival：Too many stars, too little history



now why isn't Wang Li Hong on the cover?! *outraged*

 Beginning of the Great Revival is a movie by Sanping Han/Jianxing Huang celebrating the 90th anniversary of the great revival of the communist party in China, and it came out June 11, 2011 in Hangzhou, China. In order to fully understand and review this film, we must try to let go the conceptions most of us hold on the idea of communism and just look at the film as objectively as we can.

It sucked.

I mean, I actually am not against the 'propanganda' purposes of this film -- I think one should judge a film from a clean slate -- just the lense of whether the director did a good job on portraying the emotions that he/she wanted to portray.

Many pro-communism Chinese people hate the movie too:

“一个极为严肃，令人动容，影响几乎百年历史发展轨迹的题材，居然能被演绎成明星化、娱乐化，、时尚化的流行影剧..."
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Roughly translated as: "Such a serious, moving history that have for a hundred years affected China's progress and people, was actually downplayed to a star-oriented, entertainment-oriented, pop (culture)-oriented blockbuster film..."

：“导演黄建新完全是电影剪辑的小学生，此片故事之庞大，人物线索之多，完全就是一部五十集电视剧的容量，将一部五十集的电视剧压缩成一百三十分钟，可见其人物、故事被挖得有多空。”

【多维新闻】本文网址：http://blog.dwnews.com/post-140396.html

Roughly translated as: "Director Jianxing Huang is totally like a simple student; the history this movie talks about is enormous, and should be covered through a 50 series TV series. This movie shrinks that to a 130 minute fastfoward; you can imagine how empty the content has been shrunken to."

Every three minutes, a star appears, and everyone points and gasps. All Chinese stars have been squeezed into this film, including Liuye as Chairman Mao (who acted horribly), Aloys as Enlai Zhou, pop-singer-that-I-don't-know Han Geng as Xiaoping Deng, and pop-singer-and-my-only-pop-idol-in-this-world Leehom Wang as Jialun Luo (he appeared for a total of 2 minutes as the rebel student...T.T). In total there are more than 20 internationally renowned actors. This overflow of famous actors of course downplays the depth of historical understanding people can learn from the film, and after a while, the constant 'oh my gosh its fill-in-the-blank from blah-blah-movie!' gets old. It was after that where I started asking, "why am I watching this?" At the end, I felt like there was no 收获 -- anything that I got out of the film that inspired me or even informed me about the history.

All in all, I officially on this blog give this Chinese film 2 out of 5 stars. The 2 stars are for the great performances of some of the actors during some of the 130 minutes (aka not a lot of boredom). Despite the huge paragraphs of criticism above, this movie was somewhat ok (not great failure).

I do encourage my followers to watch it though; it is not worth missing out on, especially for non-Chinese followers. It is a great way to understand basics of Chinese history.

Thanks for reading, make some comments, and give me suggestions @ wanghui138138@gmail.com!

This Thursday, we'll be having a post on an exciting Japanese manga classic from the Glibi Collections. G'nite!