The Joy Luck Club

Wonderful and heart-breaking. Suffering and agony magically transformed right before my eyes. I have never shed so many tears ever. Such a beautiful cast of souls.

The Joy Luck Club* beautifully weaves stories of Chinese-American mothers and daughters, exploring culture, identity, and generational bonds. Poignant and heartfelt, it captures the complexities of family and tradition with grace. A touching, thoughtful film that resonates deeply about heritage and the ties that shape us.

I'd read the book a few years ago and was stunned by how well-written it was. The imagery, the story-telling, the connections, and just the beauty of the prose made it so enjoyable. So when I saw the film I had to give it a try. To my delight, many of the exact words from the book made it into the film. If you are looking for a movie with a clear sense of direction, this might not be the film for you. It is a film about love, loss, and the relational disconnect between mothers and daughters. 4 Chinese women come to America hoping to create a better life for their children, only to find that their 4 daughters have become more American than Chinese. The daughters have different lifestyles, different goals, different struggles that the mothers struggle to understand, yet all parties involved genuinely long for a deep, meaningful relationship. And in the end, they find that connection in their own ways, discovering that their differing circumstances have more in common than meets the eye. It was so wholesome to watch.

Great movie, very moving!

When I first went to see this in 1993 , I didn't know what to expect. The author, Amy Tan, books were the talk of the media. I sat down & went on this wonderful, tender, hardship & joyful journey through the the lives of of 4 Chinese women and their daughters (movie relates to all people's life). It was stunning! I smiled, I cried, I was in awe and I felt a kinship with these women & their daughters. With one daughter, I felt she was telling my life story. Every actress & actor are marvelous artists along with the director Wayne Wang (his sensitivity, honesty, vision is mind-blowing). This is in my top 10 movies of all-time . . .highly recommend!!! It was delivered on time and was in Perfect shape.

These immigrant women have set the highest of standards for their overachieving daughters in hopes of a better life for them. The contrast in the physical appearance of the two generations is substantial. These mothers of Chinese and Vietnamese descent look weathered and lassitude from a life of hard labor in peasantry. The daughters, on the other hand, are fresh and respited, refined and polished from a more sinecure, salubrious lifestyle. Amy Tan's novel begins in 1949, in San Francisco, to which this 1993 film is based on. The impetus of immigrating to the U.S. to acquire the "American dream" is no longer true today. China's standard-of-living has vastly improved over the intervening decades as evident by their ever burgeoning middle class. Those dreams can now be realized in their homeland. Several specific examples will give a sense of what this movie is about. In one instance, the absurdity, farcicality of equality issues that are pushed to the extreme in a marriage are examined with much hilarity (the contentedness of that purring, furry pet cat being canoodled in a scene was more than a little ironic). In another instance, the excruciating pain of rejection a mother feels from her husband is quite intensely portrayed. And, in a third instance, when one of the mothers becomes aware of her adult daughter's saturnine and morose ambience or weltschmerz for not meeting perceived expectations, the mother, with much concern and compassion, reassured her daughter that she loved her for who she was, not for what success she may or may not have accomplished. Generally, the movie is about the daughter's exasperations and frustrations of not being able to meet and fulfill lofty expectations. The subsequent feeling of inadequacy engenders a backlash of rebellion and recalcitrance depicted in comical, facetious ways. The author, Amy Tan, writes in a format that Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) would suggest and with great felicity. Her writing is terse and succinct, no unnecessary wordiness, no grandiloquence and, in my opinion, effective and interesting. (Could she be considered the Jane Austen of our time)? This movie is very urbane, cosmopolitan, and such a powerhouse of substantive, emotional depth and that is why I like it so much.

Great movie. Brand new video

Excellent movie even when I first saw it.