I watched “Eat Drink Man Woman” a few years ago and loved it. I especially enjoyed the relationship between the father and the young girl form whom he makes lunch each day.

The best part of the movie is the title. “Face” is a pretty huge thing still persisting in our culture – like how rich people need to maintain certain standards when they throw parties – chinese girls and boys are expected to marry well (hopefully a doctor) and their family will be very happy, and then the parents can compare who’s got the better daughter/son-in-law. Everything in the movie really fitted well with the title. The main actress in the movie is Chinese American I believe and she won a couple awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan for this film. It was a nice and different film. Usually I’m not so keen on films portraying chinese people because it’s often exaggerated but this one was really real. I have a suggestion for you Jayne if you liked this one. You may have seen it but it’s called “Eat Drink Man Woman”. I think it’s all in chinese so it’s major subtitle reading~ it’s more chinese since the setting is not America, but it was a pretty good movie.

I liked it, in general, but the subtitles bugged the hell out of me as I actually understood the Mandarin portions, and they were quite badly translated, which confused me since the script was obviously written by someone who understood both languages, so why on earth were the subtitles incorrect.

You’d think subtitles would be easy but from the badly done ones of English language films that I’ve seen, it would appear not. I recently watched a French film and the director was complaining about how the English subtitles weren’t an accurate reflection of the dialogue. And he was in on the subtitling process! He told them that certain lines were wrong and told them what should be there and it was still not right.

Also, as I remember, the movie had smatterings of dialect as well as Mandarin, which is a bit confusing since I doubt many American Chinese learn both Mandarin and dialect, but I let that one go as I cannot confirm either way.

Maybe this is from the actors themselves? On the director’s commentary, Wu mentions that she got a lot of the secondary actors from open casting calls.

Also, as I remember, the movie had smatterings of dialect as well as Mandarin, which is a bit confusing since I doubt many American Chinese learn both Mandarin and dialect, but I let that one go as I cannot confirm either way.