input: It may be the remake of 1987 Autumn's Tale after eleven years, as the director Mabel Cheung claimed. Mabel employs rock music as the medium in this movie to express her personal attitude to life, in which love, desire and the consequential frustration play significantly crucial roles. Rock music may not be the best vehicle to convey the profound sentiment, and yet it is not too inappropriate to utilize it as the life of underground rock musicians is bitterly more intense than an ordinary one. The director focuses on the depiction of subtle affection and ultimate vanity of life rather than mere rock music. The love between father and son, lovers, and friends is delicately and touchingly delivered through the fine performance. Mabel does not attempt to beautify rock musicians as artists at all, instead, she tries to reproduce a true life on screen, making huge efforts of years' working on this project and gathering information in Beijing underground pubs.

Daniel has given probably the best performance in all his movies made so far. His innate dispiritedness and reticence fit the blue mood of the film perfectly.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: Infamous pre-code film, really the one film that caused people to insist on the Hayes Code being strictly enforced. Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young girl whose liquor-selling father has no problem pimping her out to customers. When he dies in an accident, she's released out into the world with the knowledge that her nubile body can get her whatever she wants. She goes to New York and proceeds to climb the corporate ladder, one bed at a time. Although obviously there's no actual sex shown, the film is quite sleazy. Unfortunately, after the initial shock value fades (around the time Stanwyck screws a rail car inspector so she can travel for free), the film becomes a tad repetitive and dull. Stanwyck herself is the only thing that keeps the film worth sitting through. As always, she's fantastic.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: They should have called this movie: "Adopted Mouse Brother That is Slightly Inspired by Someone's Vague Recollection of Stuart Little Who Just Kind of Skimmed the Book a Little, But Mostly Just Remembered the Cover" If it wasn't so misleading I'd give it a better review.

But seriously people, do your kids a favor and have them read the book. They might actually learn something instead of having their mind numbed by what we all know as Hollywood film.

The book Stuart little isn't about a mouse, it's about a person who happens to be very small and mouse-like. He's born to his parents, not adopted. The book is about his life and his eventual departure from home and the journey he embarks on. There is a cat named Snowball who thinks he's food and wants to eat him, but Snowball can't talk.

In the movie they screw all of that up. I think the only things that they kept from the book were the boat race and the names.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: I saw Chan Is Missing when it first came out, about four years after moving from San Francisco to New York. Maybe it was the perspective of a few years away, but this movie seemed to capture the essence of the city and its people better than anything else I'd ever seen (still does). It concentrates on one particular community - the Chinese - but that's fine, because so much of the city's soul is refracted through the settings, the faces, and the maybe above all the voices of the characters.

This isn't the tourists' San Francisco. The settings are humble and everyday: a taxi cab, the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, Richmond District row houses, little Chinatown apartments and small-business offices, the piers, a Philippine elder center. This is what the city looks and feels like day to day to the people who live there - even now, in the era of Silicon Gulch urban redevelopment. Unlike, say, Dirty Harry (in its own way an excellent San Francisco movie as well), everything is filmed at street level: We come to understand the characters' points of view from the perspective their surroundings give them, not from some fancy vertiginous shooting.

Wang apparently filmed in B&W because he didn't have the money to do otherwise, yet one of the strongest visual elements of the movie is the natural light he achieves. The often harsh, pervasive quality of the sunlight is one of my closest associations with San Francisco: It seems to expose everything, bringing the buildings, the hills, the other landmarks down in scale and, in a funny way, making the people you pass on the streets seem more individual and potentially closer to you than they might in another place. Wang's photography perfectly conveys this, and even helps the story along at points.

Wang captures the speech and conversational style of Chinese and other San Franciscans better than anyone ever has, I think. If there's such thing as a true San Francisco "accent," it's what you hear from the balding taxi medallion broker (I think) who appears talking on the phone in one scene (listen to the way he calls the person on the other end "ya dingaling!").

The story is poignant and, despite a few very small missteps, makes its points beautifully about the longings that pull at the hearts of people living in old immigrant communities - including the justified political and ethnic resentments, and little ironic amusements, that help to fuel them. All this is communicated delicately - perhaps why some respondents here think the film meanders. It doesn't - suffice it to say that the two cab drivers' quest for Chan becomes a quest for something more personal.

Chan Is Missing finishes up with a Chinatown travelogue sequence backed by a goofy novelty song from the 1930s (I guess) about San Francisco and all its crazy diversity. An American caricature, yes, but somehow not entirely off the mark either.

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pos/neg ans:
negative