求刮痧英文影评

求刮痧英文影评
求刮痧英文影评

求刮痧英文影评
一些找到的评论,看一下吧.
THE TREATMENT (GUA SHA)
by Rich Cline
A Chinese film shot completely on location in St. Louis, this is an off-beat hybrid that never quite works, even though it has a worthy and intriguing central premise. A young, successful Chinese immigrant couple (Tony Leung Ka Fai and Jiang Wenli) give their 5-year-old son (Dennis Zhu) a painless, ancient Chinese treatment called gua sha, which leaves marks on the boy's back. This alerts the authorities, who take the child away and charge the parents with abuse and neglect. Numerous court hearings ensue, followed by lots of overwrought melodrama, which will probably please Eastern audiences much more than Western ones. The acting is uneven (the Asian cast is superb; most of the Americans are, frankly, awful), as are the production values (very slick camera work sits at odds with a cheesy musical score). First-time director Zheng Xiaolong will probably find success back home with this cautionary tale of life in the Promised Land. But few Americans or Europeans will take its TV movie-of-the-week sensibilities very seriously.
Review by Rich Cline
Gua Sha had its world premiere at the St Louis International Film Festival
A compelling tale of culture clash in middle America, Gua Sha centres on a young Chinese couple (Leung and Jiang) who immigrate to St Louis with their bright young son (Zhu), who they're raising to be a proper American. Then a doctor treating the boy for a minor bump notices strange scarring on his back, social services step in to protect the child and a legal battle ensues, dragging the parents through the courts to prove them as abusive and neglectful, which of course they're not. The marks are from an ancient (and painless) Chinese medical treatment called gua sha.
OK, so it's not much more than a made-for-TV premise, and the filmmaking is pretty tame in many respects, tracing the obvious melodramatic storyline from the family's delirious happiness through the most bleak darkness imaginable. First-time director Zheng has an excellent technical crew behind him, but the performances are extremely uneven (the Asian cast is superb; most Yanks seem like they're from a local amateur theatre group). And finally, the cheesy musical score combines with overwrought plot points to alienate Western viewers, leaving us quite intrigued by the themes and story possibilities, but disappointed by the film itself.
East Asian medicine, 9 July 2004
Author: arya-5 (arya@guasha.com) from New York, NY
Gua Sha, known as kerik in Indonesia, Cao Gio in Vietnam (see Harvey Keitel's The Three Seasons) and khoud lam in Laos is a legitimate and effective therapy. In Asia it is usually done with a coin, Chinese soup spoon, slice of water buffalo horn, or even a slice of ginger. A simple cap with a rounded edge is quite good to use and available in most homes in the West. It was not commonly done with wood, but if smooth and the right edge it could be. There is a teaching text in English called Gua Sha. A Traditional Technique for Modern Practice, and a teaching video: Gua Sha: Step-by-Step, by Arya Nielsen.If an acupuncturist is trained in Classical Chinese medicine, they will do this technique in their practice for pain, and for acute or chronic illness.
2009年的评论
Gua Sha - The Treatment (2001)
EmailWritten by pppatty on Jan-29-09 3:32am
From: pppatty.blogspot.com
Life is full of surprises. I religiously scour the German television schedules (which I receive by satellite) for oddities, particularly on the German/French arts channel Arte. I have found most of my silent collection there; for example, last week they showed a 2007 restoration of Intolerance (1916) and their selection of unusual cinema is matchless. The only problem with them (and all of the other German channels) is their propensity for overdubbing rather than relying on subtitles.
I noticed the above Taiwanese film in the afternoon schedules and didn't bother to check it out; I just noted that it was starring Tony Leung and I assumed it would be something pretty special. Well for a start it wasn't the Tony Leung of the recent Wong Kar Wai and Ang Lee films but the actor of the same name who starred in "The Lover" (1992), who is also a fine actor but not the one I was expecting. The next surprise is that this was a modern-day drama, set and filmed in St. Louis, Missouri and written primarily in English, which led to the very pleasant surprise that the movie was not dubbed but used German subtitles for the dialogue which switched between English and Mandarin (and I was able to cope with these for the brief non-English dialogue).
But enough about the background: the final surprise was how involving the story was. Leung plays a prize-winning computer game designer, who, together with his equally intelligent wife and US-born 6-year son, is trying to assimilate into the American life style and the American dream. He has brought over his non-English-speaking father from the mainland and hopes to obtain a green card for him. When the child falls at home and is taken to hospital for stitches, the doctors note the extreme bruising on his back and conclude that he has been abused; and the do-gooder social workers immediately remove the cosseted child from his home and very loving parents. All attempts to explain that the bruising is the result of an ancient Chinese health treatment known as Gua Sha -- and in fact administered by the grandfather -- do not impress the ignorant court and they deem the child permanently at risk. The Child Services lawyer takes pleasure in presenting the father as a violent man -- based on the kind of games he designs -- and provokes him into losing his temper in court which hardly helps his case. I don't want to go on to explain how this situation develops and how it resolves itself, even if the film does not appear to be on DVD at present, as the possible spoilers are many. I will just mention that the penultimate scenes involve Leung in a Santa Claus suit climbing up the drainpipe to the family's ninth floor apartment with a toy monkey in his arm -- real heart in your throat action. I could do with a lot more surprises like this one.
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Directed by: Zheng Xiaolong
Cast: Tony Leung Ka-fai, Zhu Xu, Jiang Wenli, Dennis Zhu
Rating: NR
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Review Summary
Hong Kong indie film icon Tony Leung stars in this Chinese production about cultural misunderstanding and intolerance. Datong (Leung) is a patrician of a St. Louis Chinese-American family and a designer of violent video games. When Datong's father (Zhu Xu) visits from China, he performs some traditional Chinese medicine on his young grandson. Though painless, the treatment leaves bright red marks on the skin, which are interpreted by the kid's teacher as welts. Soon the Child Welfare Agency is accusing the family of child abuse and transfers the kid to a foster home. This film was screened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide