CULTURE
First of all, the movie portrays the mother's very differently than the book, this is not inherently bad; however, in the movie the mothers don't act Chinese. Half of the book was about cultural differences of China and the US and how the Chinese mothers dealt with their daughters adopting western culture. In the movie, this is not present at all. The mothers act like any American mother would so that the audience would be able to relate to the characters. But I'm doing this, they have missed half the point of the entire book. This would be fine if it chose to focus on another aspect of the story. But it doesn't. The movie just goes through the motions of each story in a non- creative way.
PACING
And what might that be? Well, all the stories are shown through flashbacks. The present day is a going away party for the character June to see her long lost sisters. Boy oh boy does that tank the pacing. Everytime the movie flashes back to another story, you can almost hear the screeching of tires as the pacing grinds to a complete stop. This is because the people making the movie didn't know how to properly convert a book into a film. Which brings me to my next point: the voice over.
THE VOICE OVER
The movie is over reliant on voice over to explain the story to the audience. This happens a lot on book to film adaptations, either because the writers aren't talented enough to adapt an almost entirely expositional form of entertainment into a visual form, or they are just too lazy. Not 10 minutes goes by in his movie without some voice coming in over top of the action to explain everything that is going on to the audience. It is incredibly easy to tell that this movie was based off of a book because of this, and it is very distracting. Speaking of distracting:
THE SCORE
Lordy. This score made me want to rip my ears out. Soooo overdramatic. It was absolutely ridiculous. Anytime there was a heartfelt or intense moment, the overbearing score immediately ruined it. You don't need loud, sappy music, to convey emotion. It's cheap and it's annoying. Good writing, good acting (the acting in this movie is competent btw), and good cinematography should convey emotion. All of which this movie doesn't have. But the awful overbearing score makes it 2X worse, especially with the ending.
CLICHÉ
The movie ends with close up camera shot that slowly pans up and out into the landscape where there is a massive amount of people bustling about while the loud overdramatic music plays in the background. So original. Never before done in a film.
But hey, at least there was some okay acting (Not the actor who played Harold though he was atrocious)
But hey, at least there was some okay acting (Not the actor who played Harold though he was atrocious)