ofpsmith

For whatever reason Chinese movies aren't given a whole lot of attention among the film community (at least in the United States). At the very least Chinese movies aren't nearly as talked about as say Japanese movies are. Admittedly I haven't seen that many (in fact I can name only two other mainland Chinese films other than this one. And that's a shame given that Spring in a Small Town is a good movie. It's set (unsurprisingly) in a small town, namely in the compound of the formerly prosperous Dai family. Reminders of World War 2 still loom and the Chinese Civil War remains a threat. The four characters Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei), her husband Dai Liyan (Yu Shi), his sister Meimei (Hongmei Zhang), and butler Lao Huang (Chaoming Cui) all live uneventfully until a mutual friend Zhang Zhichen (Wei Li) shows up. It's very much a human driven story and it's very subtly done. There's nothing overly dramatic about it, it's all very calm and collected. It's a film I rarely hear about unless I seek it out and that's a shame because Spring in a Small Town is a good movie.

Thunderball is one of the James Bond film from which the parodies derive the most material from. SPECTRE's plan in the film, to hijack two nuclear warheads and hold the world hostage, was notably the same plot used by the villains in Austin Powers. Thunderball is likely one of the first movies people think of when they think of big and overblown Bond. But it's still an enjoyable movie It's very archtypical of the Sean Connery movies and is very '60s, though not in a bad dated way. I've heard criticisms that the film drags too much (with the surplus of underwater scenes especially) but it didn't really bother me all that much. Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) is a fun villain and the cinematography is excellent. It might be easy to laugh at but it's still one of my favorite Bond films.