Mandarin Chinese - moving on

# 19 orangutan - Thanks for that. I had printed out the Breen O'Reilly list # 14 link (above) and searched the library catalogue (all branches) by the film names. The info. on the computer said To Live was in Cantonese (which may be what's on the video jacket - but, hey, perhaps some idiot made a guess), so I'll go to the branch that has it, borrow it, and find out for myself. I'll come back to you on it - and I'll be jolly pleased if it IS Mandarin!

No worries, a quick check on amazon.de also stated that it's in Mandarin.

Watched Shanghai Dreams (Mandarin) today. It is set in the 1980s and is about families who moved from Shanghai to work in factories in the west of China (the "third front") in the 1960s and 1970s. Although when it started I thought it might not be up to much, it turned out to be a very good film. I won't say more or I'll spoil it for those who haven't yet seen it.

Maybe we should start a new thread on Chinese film reviews, but since we're on the subject, I'll pitch in with a couple of my favourites :-) :
Lost in Beijing - loved this one. Set in present-day Beijing, a countryside immigrant falls pregnant after getting raped (?) by her boss. How everyone deals with the the situation (including their spouses) just seems, with my limited experience of travelling in China, very Chinese to me. Impossible to imagine the same film being made in the West.
Blue Gate Crossing - Set in Taiwan, a girl acts as a go-between between her friend and the boy she likes, but the boy, inevitably falls for her instead. Lot's of teenage angst for sure, but I thought it was a really charming, understated film nonetheless.

By the way, Amazon is a good place to look at reviews for some of the lesser known films (if you didn't know already). If you're ever in Thailand, yu can usually pick up Chinese films from the shops inthe big mega-malls for under 100 baht. Most of the time, they'll have the original Mandarin soundtrack, a dubbed Thai one, and English and Thai subtitles too (plus occasionally Chinese ones as well). Very handy if you're crazy enough to be learning Mandarin and Thai at the same time...

One final thing, if the box says "Chinese" under language, it's always been Mandarin Chinese in my experience. Cantonese tracks are always listed as "Cantonese", Mandarin as "Chinese", or more simply "Mandarin".

Good idea to make this a Chinese movie thread. To that end here are some possible search words so this will be picked up ...

Chinese films
Chinese movies
Chinese cinema
Mandarin films
Recommended Mandarin Chinese films.

Now off to do a search to see if that works!!!

Yep - a search on Chinese films in Mandarin put this thread first.

The movie that got me started on foreign films as a teenager was Raise the Red Lantern. I loved that movie and would spend a good hour before it started tuning my crappy portable TV to pick up the station signal as it wasn't on a station that everyone could get clearly (SBS for the Aussies).