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Reviews
Lamb (2015)
Film that could not have been made by a Westerner
Boy tries to earn enough money to rejoin his father who left him in the countryside with relatives while trying to find work in Addis Ababa. The lessons learned, futility in having the money to take a sick child to a doctor, interference, relentless poverty (the older people remark that they ate better growing up than their grandchildren do) that only worsens.
This film could not have been made by a Westerner. Audience sat stunned at the end. Where is the turnaround, happy ending, even the girl getting together with the boy or her hero? She does everything possible to meet her hero but audience knows what will go wrong with her plan. By the end we have been shown why there are no other possibilities.
A boy wants to save his pet sheep but in this place of limited resources everyone, even the sheep, has a plan and a need for what a sheep can bring into their lives, be it a nutritious meal, a party,companionship, bus fare to an easier place or enough money to take a child to a doctor.
Ping guo (2007)
Lost in Beijing is not as sordid as it seems at first
A lower class, working, married woman gets pregnant with lots of plot twists, money, moral dilemmas and human intrigue. If a travelogue/vocabulary brush up is your motive for watching there are some shots of Beijing looking bleak in winter, Tienamen Square, and the Forbidden City in the background during a conversation. My food-traveler mother wanted to know if there was food. With the key character being a pregnant female, she's eating all the time. If low-grade, sordid, masseuse/hooker scenes are what you seek, quit watching after the early drunken rape by boss scene. Otherwise that cutoff point is where you will quit watching, disgusted, wondering why the film wasn't cataloged as porn, but it is also exactly when the film gets interesting and stays interesting to the end. I started cleaning the kitchen at that point but checked in on the film running in the background just in case it redeemed itself. It did redeem itself, and turned out to be captivating.