Watch Mao's Last Dancer For Free

Too much of everything

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

In a village of China, the eleven year-old Li Cunxin is selected by the Comunist Party to study ballet at the Madame Mao's Dance Academy in Beijing. Years later, he travels to Houston in a cultural exchange program invited by the artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) and he is promoted to principal dancer of the Houston Ballet. Meanwhile he secretly dates and falls in love with the dancer Elizabeth Mackey (Amanda Schull).When the China's government asks Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) to return to his country, he marries Liz and defects to USA. He is forbidden to return to China and has no news of his parents and family. Meanwhile, his marriage with Liz ends and he misses his parents. But five years later, he has a great surprise during a performance. "Mao's Last Dancer" is a film about the true story of the Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin. The engaging biography of Li Cunxin is an example of discipline and strength associated with courage to make the right decisions, and it is amazing how a boy from a poor village in China could have become a great ballerino in the West. Bruce Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan and Joan Chen are well known actors and are fantastic, but Chi Cao, Chengwu Guo and the rest of the cast and dancers have also top-notch performances. Everything is perfect in this film, from the direction of Bruce Beresford to the cinematography and art direction. My vote is ten.Title (Brazil): "O Último Bailarino de Mao" ("The Last Ballerino of Mao")

One clever element of this film is the way in which various people who are significant in Li Cunxin's life, tell him stories with a message. The frog trapped at the bottom of a well is one. He hears from a toad at the top of the well that the big wide world is worth seeing.The whole film is a story with a message - and the message is one that uplifts without in any sense being cloying. Beresford, the director, even manages at several stages to invoke the idiom of Chinese revolutionary film and theatre. The scenes actually shot in China are some of the most authentic in the film, which is not uniformly good in this regard. Somehow, the slightly stagy acting of some of the Huston Ballet Company characters, ceases to matter because the lead parts are well carried and the storyline is strong.Li Cunxin defected to America partly for his art and partly for love. The wonders of the materiality of Huston are perhaps a poor substitute for losing your country; yet that country was deeply scarred by the Mao's cultural revolution. To watch the part early on where the benefits brought by Chairman Mao to the Chinese people, are laid out by Party Functionaries, has a dark poignancy, given that today we know he was directly responsible for the death of many, many millions.The dance sequences are done very well and the film pleases at that level as well as a tale with more twists and turns than you might imagine. A film of some subtlety and considerable beauty; recommended.

I found this film to be as much a brilliant masterpiece and just as much a tear jerker as "Driving Miss Daisy". Bruce Beresford gets deep into his subject, often times closely examining things. The muffin Ben Stevenson offered to Li was one, and it was quite funny being thought of by Li as being offered horse dung. Others included dancers working with each other on technique, correcting each others' posture and steps. Details like this pull the audience into the time and place of the movie, getting them really involved. Beresford got the overall story of Li, and the development of the man, very well.The music was so touching, especially the Chinese, music which pulls something deep in my emotional makeup. Being of Irish descent, I detected something of its character sounding quite Gaelic, particularly the meter. The classical ballet music always gets the heart racing.I also add points for filming on location. The bold move by Beresford to film in China despite the "missing" permission of the government, was something that shows the man has guts. The ambiance of Li's childhood and adolescence would have been lost without the authentic Chinese landscape that any other location, in any other part of Asia, could likely not provide. This includes the brief appearance of one beautiful steam powered train that caught the ambiance of life there in the early '70s. With the Houston scenes at the Miller Theatre in Hermann Park, The Wortham Theater Center, and China Garden restaurant, being filmed on location, you got the feel of one of the places where Li actually lived much of his life, and the whole history of evolving events.However, some things I don't understand. One is why Li, on arrival at the airport, was not greeted by the Academy Principal, Clare Duncan, as written in his book. He was on a scholarship and it would not be protocol for the Principal to be left out of the greeting party. There are also some things I don't understand about location management, that is, why the other outside scenes were not filmed in Houston. The Chinese Consulate, as shown, was on a very hilly street, presumably in Sydney, as was the street outside the Li apartment, stated in a critique in IMDb, as being near Darling Street there. Both could have been better filmed on location in Houston, which is notoriously flat compared to Sydney. Li described the Consulate in his book as being located on Montrose Blvd, near a Walgreens. Both locations (that I believe were in Australia), were supplied with cars, mostly American, and really BIG, with left hand drive. It must have been a nightmare to arrange for vehicles there, for obvious reasons regarding Australian traffic regulations. It should have been in Houston, with less hassle. The Academy exterior was apparently at the stunningly beautiful Carriage Works in Sydney, said to be Sydney's home for contemporary arts and culture. It is magnificent, but the Houston Ballet and Academy came from humble beginnings. In 1980 it was housed in a more earthly set of digs, a storefront in a strip mall on Colquitt Avenue, off Kirby Drive and Richmond Avenue. The building appears (GoogleMaps) to be there now as an art gallery. It may have been "borrowable" if for just for a couple of hours to quickly hang a Houston Ballet sign in front for effect, and shoot a few feet of film. If not, well, Houston is full of look-alike strip mall locations. Sydney and Houston are both beautiful cities, each in their own way, but the history of that era of the Houston Ballet would have been better set in that lowly strip mall.I have no critique for the city not being shown as it was 30 years ago, as some here did. The Director can't do everything as budget parameters probably precluded elimination of post-1979 buildings using CGI. In the book Li referred to the Houston skyline as "spectacular", and it was so when filmed, so what's the difference? That, and use of sound stage shots for interiors, would have made NO difference in the fine quality of this picture. The main artistic problem to me lay in exterior location management for "missed opportunities" to keep the feel of Houston in 1980. Houston in the 1970s was well exemplified in "Terms Of Endearment". "Driving Miss Daisy" had that feel for Atlanta from the late 1940s to early 1970s. Small problem with the Charles Foster portrayal. Not knowing what the man sounds like, the "Houston" accent sounded like a mouthful of taffy. Native Houstonian accents swing between a "Texas twang" and no accent at all. Now for the biggest problem, which is no fault of the Director. That is: distribution. This picture was released in the summer of 2009. As I write this, it will not be available in the USA on DVD until the end of March, or beginning of April, 2011. This is almost two years thence, and I am flabbergasted at the idea that a quality motion picture like this, by an acclaimed Director, would have been delayed a whole year to be shown to American audiences, and that in very limited numbers of theaters. Some theaters in Chicago and St. Louis have been showing it for months, perhaps still now. It seems most likely the picture was shown in art houses, for lack of availability of the multi-cinemas, which were generally showing "Vampires Suck", "Bad Company", et cetera. Beresford's movie does paint the United States of America and her people in a very favorable light, pretty much as Li did in his book. So is it unclear if distribution was affected by anti-USA sentiments, objection by the Chinese Government, or whatever, but it is quite suspect.

What can I say about this movie that other reviewers have not already said? I went to this movie because I'll go to any movie that incorporates ballet. Yes, the dancing was top notch; however the movie was so great on so many levels that I wish I had talked my non-ballet-liking husband into going with me. It is a very human story encompassing many of the international changes that took place over the last half of the 20th century and people caught up in them. Although close to two hours long, the time flies by and this was barely enough time within which to tell the story. Now I'll have to read the book.In the US the movie seems to be playing only in little "art theaters". Too bad, because it is a blockbuster of a film.