The Blue Kite
Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang
Year Released: 1993
Rating: 1.5
Downtrodden account of the Communist Revolution in China as told from the perspective of a young boy growing up in the struggle. The moral of the story is made perfectly clear from the beginning - "Communism is evil!" - leaving the rest to press the viewer's face into the misery and backstabbing. Critical reception seems primarily based on the obvious difficulties Tian had to make the film and the nobility of cinema standing up to a powerful government, glazing over the fact that the film skips forward in time without making it especially clear it's doing so, that the blue kite-as-central metaphor is quite banal and that the movie is essentially one very long, whining complaint that offers little illumination for anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of China. I have yet to see a film by Tian that doesn't reflect a kind of arrogance on his part, this one being no exception.
