Red Corner

I thought this was wonderful - and can't for the life of me understand the criticisms.

Some seem to be attacking the movie on the basis that it is too hard on China - REALLY?

Ask any North Korean refugee who's been captured in China -

Ask any member of the harmless Falun Gong religious sect -

Ask anyone connected by family ties with those identified as having participated in the Tianenmen Square protests (the protests were actually in quite a number of cities - but television covered just the tens of thousands assembled in Beijing).

No, it's not an "art house" kind of movie - don't expect the slow pace and strange story of something like Farewell My Concubine.

Instead, it's a wonderful Hitchcock-type story transplanted to Communist China - and voila - a wonderful movie that should have been remembered at Oscar time!

It's far better than, say, Hitchcock's Torn Curtain or Topaz - both set in repressive Communist regimes. It's more like a combination of The Wrong Man and North by Northwest - but sexier than either.

Our Welsh friend from beautiful Aberystwyth, Philip Davies, has it about right in his review printed beneath mine.

This is beautifully shot, with wonderful acting in a riveting Hitchcock type movie. Richard Gere is excellent - the politics and scenes of a changing China are fascinating.

I strongly recommend this one.

This is very exciting, suspenseful, romantic - and its depiction of China rings true.

Rambling drama about a US salesman arrested for a murder he did not commit, Red Corner has actual footage of Beijing convincingly mixed with the main shooting which gives the impression that the movie was actually made in China - and presumably with the approval of the Chinese authorities. Unfortunately, this is not really true, and the main Chinese lead - Ling Bai, whose name means 'white light' or 'white spirit' - was at Tiananmen in 1989 and emigrated to the US shortly thereafter. I've met students who lived in China at the time who absolutely refuse to discuss the situation back home; that Ling Bai does is testimony to her 'white spirit', and she really does steal the show from Gere here, in a kind of reverse Casablanca 'hill of beans' role. Whether the depiction of conditions in the Chinese judicial system is accurate or not, the movie does succeed in making the viewer understand that there are two views to almost anything, and that in China, as anywhere, power corrupts. Stacking the deck against consular officials is a nice touch, for these people are truly the cowards and turncoats the movie makes them out to be. The plot swerves from the inexplicable to the Orwellian to a love story (which does, it is true, sort of come out of nowhere), but the final scene on the tarmac does much to salvage that. Maybe Gere wanted to make the Chinese look bad, but they certainly don't need his help. Based on an incident that happened not in China but in Italy, Red Corner is viewable without ever coming close to being a great film. Its one claim to greatness is Ling Bai - she's absolutely fabulous.

Essentially what we are shown here is not the classical American court drama. When our 'Mr. Deeds' goes to town, the town is Beijing, and his case becomes a show-trial in the cockpit of a new Chinese revolution that is taking place between the old-guard Maoists and the modernisers.

Richard Gere's American is an alienated, rootless 'Rick' caught in the cultural cross-fire between two power blocs. It is his enforced engagement with the reality of another world-view and the struggle of an intelligent Chinese woman to redeem the revolutionary excesses of her culture that lead directly to the Casablanca-esque ending, where love is sublimated beyond the personal to an ideal understanding and identification - 'You have a family here' - with the historical plight of a people.

This explains Richard Gere's unusually selfless performance, where he has had the taste and intelligence to let the women, particularly his Chinese defence lawyer, dominate every situation and every scene. Indeed, this feminist tendency in the film is also reflected in the consistently hostile view taken of the militaristic structure of Chinese state power as so much authoritarian posturing. As symbol of a new China the young woman lawyer is most effective: The ancient Greeks also saw the spirit of unbiased law as female, and Shakespeare's Portia is another such paradigm. And the actress portraying her illuminates the screen with her passionate intellectual intensity.

There is an effective parallelism to the revolutionary acts which destroyed the young lawyer's father during the time of the Cultural Revolution, leaving her with crippling and unresolved guilt, and the barrel of a gun in the hands of the murdered girl's father which alone can resolve the historical tensions at work in the courtroom, and reverse all the political lies in a new revolutionary act, additionally realising the great potential of a young China, by freeing that stirring Chinese conscience from its historical contradictions.

So this is an intelligent political thriller, although those of a more Costas-Gavrian or Godardian intellectual purity do seem to resent seeing a crisis of the Left viewed even from a very disengaged American viewpoint, disliking the humanist American strain of populist appeal in a political context, and resenting the smooth professionalism of the presentation as a mere circus. Even stranger are the objectors to Gere's Buddhism, who seemingly take fright at the intrusion of other perspectives into their own blinkered focus! In any case, Buddhism seems clearly not to be an issue to the scriptwriter.

This film in no way presents itself as the last word on its subject - but it is an intelligent and engaging movie, which, far from slandering the Chinese in the manner some vintage Korean-War tub-thumper about the 'Yellow Peril', goes out of its way not to identify the Chinese people with their masters. Curiously, this is exactly what the film's detractors do!

There is a sly reference to the Boxer Rebellion that began China's long road to modernisation, in the person of the trusty who was sent to beat up or even kill the American, but who comes to see that the real foreign devils in this instance are the corrupted Chinese officials who have sold out to the worst foreign traits of cynicism and greed by doing back-door deals with an unscrupulous Western communications company, and who finally confesses his error with true selfless revolutionary earnestness.

The fact that this Boxer Rebellion is played out in the blockbuster film equivalent of Madison Square Gardens, and is mightily entertaining throughout, has led many critics to assume that all they have been presented with is a superficial entertainment unworthy of such a serious subject. Actually, the film is fully engaged with the tragedy and passion of the Chinese people as they try to work out their destiny, and the proof of this is that, to any unbiased observer, the film leaves one with a new respect for the Chinese people, caught up in the complexities of their own history, and struggling for a better life. There is nothing patronising; there is emphatically no United States Cavalry riding to the rescue.

And I should have thought the contempt shown throughout towards official American diplomacy and state policy would have appealed to the most anti-American leftist. But are the critics just taking fashionable left jabs at their own right-wing bogies? - and I do mean Humphrey! Let us leave these obsessives to their futile shadow-boxing, forever engaged with an opponent entirely constructed from the straw which evidently bulks out their own brain-pans.

I came across this movie on Hulu last night by accident, after failing to stream two other movies, and am overall glad I decided to "settle" for it. It definitely could have been better in several ways, but the historical/legal aspect of it, set in transitional 90's Communist China is actually pretty outstanding and memorable. As one other user commented, the Chinese acting is perfectly convincing and even frightening in how realistic it is, but unfortunately Richard Gere's character is a little too...I don't know, idiotic? for my liking. Still, I wouldn't say he single-handedly ruined the movie.

Reading the production notes and trivia on here is interesting to me because it shows how the producers really did capture the reality of what goes on in Red China. I visited all over China and Lhasa, Tibet, right after the olympics and can vouch that the same legal situation still exists there today. In Beijing, we drove by a large, concrete and windowless court-building with the CCP emblem (seen many times in the film, and omnipresent in China in general) and when asked what the building was, my tour guide just responded plainly, "That's where you go to die."

For a foreigner, yeah, it might take a murder or espionage charge to keep you imprisoned indefinitely over there, but for Chinese citizens, many crimes are still punishable by execution without a fair trial, just as the film accurately portrays.

So, if you're into Chinese history or culture, then this is definitely worth watching, even more than once. If not, then don't watch it.

For about a dozen years, it was hard to find too many films Richard Gere made which weren't interesting and well-made. This was no exception. Once again, he "delivers the goods" and is involved in an interesting story.

Gere, a follower, I believe, of the Dalai Lama whom the Communists forced out of Tibet, uses this film to get his shots in at his mentor's enemy. Anyone who thinks this is just a coincidence is pretty naive. Nonetheless, the facts support the film's stark, brutal portrayal of Communist China's leadership. At the very least, it shows a regime unwilling to hear both sides of a story. (Hollywood has often given the same treatment to the U.S. government, showing it more often in a corrupt light, which is ludicrous compared to restrictive Communist China.)

Anyway, Gere really dominates this film, being in almost every scene. This is your basic frame-up-then-prove-your-innocence-in-court story. It keeps your attention throughout although I thought the ending was a bit confusing because things happened almost too fast for the viewer to take in. At two hours, the film could have been trimmed a tad but the lulls in here were not much.

Overall, an underrated film and unjustly criticized by the national critics, most of whom don't like it when communism is bashed.