Smile

My friend is visiting Shanghai and giving lectures to pharmacists in one of the hospitals. Her partner wrote me how shocked they were to learn that in China, an ostensibly Communist-governed country, the health care system is privately operated. And yet, to view this picture, you would never guess that the whole health system was not hunky-dory and just bursting to help deformed children. You could call this omission naive, or you could call it misleading---even dishonest. Smile is an advertisement for a regime that holds millions of dissenters in a gulag of slave factories and conducts a huge number of public executions per year. Furthermore, the perpetrators of the Tianenmen Square massacre have never been brought to justice, which goes fundamentally against human rights and human nature. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see Shanghai looking so comely, and Mika's super figure is waved around in almost every shot. The picture is a courageous attempt to sell Volunteering Overseas and for that it deserves brownie points, but can charity ever be divorced from politics? What price in oppression is this picture paying for its sanitised portrait of Communist China?

Two redeeming qualities of this film were the cinemaphotography and a storyline that was hard to resist. However, the script, the direction, and some scenes, were just awful. I kept asking myself why such a good cast would have produced such a bad movie. My only conclusion was that these actors must believe in the charity which underlies the plot of the movie, but knew the movie was filled with flaws.

This film could have been so much better, and reached a larger audience accordingly. What makes me think this is that with all of the problems of the film, some scenes being painfully bad to watch, I still wanted to see how the obvious conclusion would resolve itself.

I watched this movie on DVD with my boyfriend and I had pretty low expectations. After seeing it I would say that as message movies go, this one is not bad. Mika Boorem is good and believable....it's a shame her career hasn't gone anywhere since this. I thought the locations were really interesting and intense. Sometimes I felt like it was a little heavy-handed and its earnestness kind of got in the way of what could have been a better story if it wasn't quite so predictable.

It does make you contemplate just how fortunate we are to grow up in a place where if you're born with cleft palate or something like that, it gets fixed and you can go about your life. I think the "Operation Smile" people are doing some very good work, and this movie is part of that effort and should be respected in a way that's different than the way you would think about simple "fun" movies.

SMILE is one of those Op-Ed moments on CNN that can be told with poignant dignity in 10 - 15 minutes and make a significant impact. The trouble with SMILE, the motion picture, is that it stretches this idea into 107 padded minutes, incorporating far more sitcom TV dialog about wealthy families with strident children looking for ways to escape uninspiring parental role models with teenage sex life and outside causes. It takes so long for this movie to get going that it loses the viewer.

The strong elements lie in the concept of the parallel of two girls born on the same day, one to the wealthy Malibu family with everything but concord, an the other left as an unwanted deserted orphan because of a facial deformity, salvaged by a caring worker who raises her as his own. The stories run parallel through the teen years when the Western girl seeks meaning to life by joining a humanitarian medical group whose efforts are directed toward offering the Eastern girl a chance at a normal appearance. The comparison of the lives of the two girls and their disparate families is tender and meaningful and that alone is worth the effort to tell this tale.

The actors are very good for the most part - Sean Astin in his most mature role to date, Mika Boorem as the Western girl and Yi Ding as the Eastern girl, and Beau Bridges and Luoyong Wang as the apposing fathers, Linda Hamilton as a rather tiresome mother, and some good young actors in supporting parts. The cinematography in China is very lovely but there is little tie in with the California counterpart. Jeffrey Kramer directs with less hold on pacing than on commitment to a worthwhile tale begging for brevity. Grady Harp

This movie isn't about the character makeover that Katie has or the facial makeover that Lindsay has. I kept on wondering why they would call the movie Smile ! I had my answer. "Smile" is about the ability to genuinely smile, to smile for something that doesn't go through you, to smile with mushy emotions inside, to smile with tears in your eyes, to smile at the happiness of someone besides yourself ! Its what you would do while you watched "Smile". They have also probably chosen the perfect tag-line for this movie. Watch the movie and you will find out why !

I give this movie all its rating because of Lindsay and her dad and everything that revolves around them. Very very touching to watch a father sacrifice everything for the love of an adopted child. Cinematography too was excellent. The scenic countryside holding hands with the pleasant music score adds to the feel good touch of brilliantly done scenes such as the father and child dancing etc.

The initial chunk of the movie is a lil overdone potpourri of characters. Character development was essential, but it spills over into more of a striking contrasting difference between the lives of two girls born on the same day. It puts forth a wrong perspective which could well and truly stand in line with the archaic stereotype of lives in developing countries. They could also have gone easy on the last set of photo stills to don the movie screen. It tends to give a lil bit of the "true story" thing away !

Given its pros and cons, I would certainly recommend this movie even if its a date movie !