The Joy Luck Club

I heard of the movie before I heard of the book. Because I thought it would be some horrid chick-flick, I avoided the book for several years. When I finally read Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club", I was astounded to find a book that brought me to tears -- as hidden stories from past lives unfurled on the pages and found themselves reinterpreted in another generation, on another continent. Last week, I saw this VHS for a quarter (see the pattern?), recalled the book's beauty, and I decided that I had probably misinterpreted a commercial somewhere along the line.
As one of the mothers in the script would probably admonish, I should not doubt myself so.
It really is a chick flick. The super-sappy mother-daughter retch-bonding kind, complete with wretched treacly background music. (Killing me softly with her songs.) I seem to be the only one who feels this way, but I found (much of) the acting deplorable. Rather than empathizing with the daughters, I wanted to slap them. And the actors often appeared too young or too old as the story skipped through the decades.
Not a complete wash, the film did contain vestiges of the book's potent storytelling. Certain scenes were so powerful as to be almost too much to watch. But when the film's dominant thread picked up again, all was lost. (In the first scene, the protagonist doesn't understand Chinese, but she goes on to speak it fluently in China the next day?) Rated 6/7.