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Critics Consensus: Doesn't reach the heights of Zhang Yimou's best, but this is still a heartwarming tale of love and forgiveness from the acclaimed Chinese director.
Critic Consensus: Doesn't reach the heights of Zhang Yimou's best, but this is still a heartwarming tale of love and forgiveness from the acclaimed Chinese director.
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All Critics (76) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (61) | Rotten (15) | DVD (2)
The themes are universal (if a touch corny), the rugged Chinese scenery is stupendous, and the performances are touching.
What remains most vividly after Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, however, is not its story but its world--the immersion in that world of a foreigner, not a polo-shirted Yank but a stiff-necked Japanese. And it is all overseen by a Chinese director.
It sounds like a slight plot, and it is, but it is rich in detail that makes up for the simplicity of the story.
It's a masterful little film, and, thanks to Zhang's seasoned hands, it's subtly heartfelt but never manipulative.
A father takes a spiritual journey from Japan to China to help mend a decades-long rift between himself and his dying son. The lessons learned en route are as profound as they are simple.
Relatively speaking, minor Yimou, yet it retains that extraordinary cinematic sensibility and superbly observed humanity that characterizes all his work.
A profound example of unashamed feeling expanding across cultural barriers
This may be one man's story but the themes are epic.
The director fails to overcome a script that ignores the backstory of the characters, and that agonizingly details minor subplots.
The story may be sentimental, but Yimou layers it by adding cultural clash to the generational ones.
From real-life opera singer Jianin to travel agent Lin Qiu and youngster Zhenbo Yang, the cast is the genuine article...
...gorgeously photographed and, like Babel, a subtly organized commentary on the ways people strive to communicate.
Just to start off, let's call this the little Asian film that thinks it can. Certainly it does, and it almost succeeds (and does succeed on some levels), and it's awful pretty looking along the way, but it lacks a certain something. In this it reminds me of another recent Asian film: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring - both had a lot of potential and some good acting, and some potent (if almost overbearing, at times) imagery, but lacked the execution to get the film where it needed to be, it just sort of flounders somewhere in the middle. Granted, to be fair, I liked Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles a lot better - it had far more redeeming factors; for example, the wonderful performance of Ken Takakura really anchors the film and gives you a reason to keep on. As well, the film picks up significantly once the plot of Yang Yang and his father comes into play. If more time had spent on that it would have strengthened the main plot of Takata and his dying son. Anyway, this is a good film, it's definitely worth watching, but it definitely wasn't all that it could have been due to some sloppy storytelling.
Super Reviewer
I'm still trying to figure out, WHY. Why what you ask, why I continue to watch this bloody movie, I mean theres no blood in the movie, just an expression, Guy wandering around trying to do good for his dying son, but tends to piss people off
Mushy-Mushy.
[font=Century Gothic]In "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles", Takata(Ken Takakura) has been estranged from his son, Ken-ichi, for the past ten years and is living in a remote fishing village. When he gets a call from his daughter-in-law, Rie(Shinobu Terajima), that his son is in the hospital, Takata ventures to Tokyo to see him but he refuses to see his father. Not entirely deterred, Rie gives Takata a tape of some footage that his son shot for a documentary on Chinese mask opera but could not get a key performance because the singer was ill. When Ken-ichi is diagnosed as having terminal liver cancer, Takata resolves to go back to the same Chinese village to videotape the performance his son missed. But this is complicated by the singer being in jail for three years for assault...[/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]Directed by Zhang Yimou, "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" is a beautiful, emotionally powerful movie with genuine emotions that carefully demolishes the notion of stoic masculinity. The message of the movie is to not keep one's head in the sand. It is about how a person affects the world by simply being a part of it. In short, this is the kind of movie that Steven Spielberg bungles with alarming regularity. [/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]And there is a political subtext if you are looking for it...[/font]
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