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Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works

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Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works reviews
60
N/A User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 10 critic reviews
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Comedy  |  Documentary  |  Foreign

Written by: Yan-Ting Yuen

Directed by: Yan-Ting Yuen

Release Date:
Theatrical: March 29, 2006
DVD: April 10, 2007

Running Time: 90 minutes, Color

Origin: Netherlands

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

This documentary examines the rise and fall of the revolutionary model opera, or Yang Ban Xi, in China.

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

80

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Enthralling documentary.

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75

San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson

A proper labor of love profiling many of the principles involved in the making of the films, peppered with a generous helping of wonderful clips.

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70

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.

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63

New York Post V.A. Musetto

Entertaining and informative, but it suffers from distracting voice-overs of what are supposed to be Madame Mao's thoughts. Too bad.

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63

TV Guide Ken Fox

Yuen would have been better off exposing more of that reality and celebrating less of the joyful silliness of the model works, let alone staging pointless hip-hop-inflected dance numbers set to Yang Ban Xi musical themes.

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60

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.

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60

The Hollywood Reporter Richard James Havis

Will intrigue art house audiences unfamiliar with modern Chinese history. But sinophiles and followers of Chinese cinema will be shocked by the lack of historical detail and context.

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60

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

Overall, the film lacks cohesion and a true point of view. Further muddling the film's meaning is a voice-over attributed to Jiang Qing, which we learn at the end is fictionalized.

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50

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Despite the fascinating topic, director Yan-ting Yuen offers relatively little history or criticism of the works themselves, squandering screen time on such gimmicks as mock voice-over and scenes of young people performing hard-rock and hip-hop versions of vintage songs. It's enough to make you pine for the good old days when irony was illegal.

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50

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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