I saw this movie over three weeks ago and I can't find my notes but whatever. This is a slow-burner likely only to appeal to people with a previous interest in China or Jonathan Rhys Meyers. The aforementioned plays a Japanophile British journalist looking for a scoop on the 1930's Japanese occupation of China. He hustles his way onto a Red Cross truck to Nanjing in time to see that southern capital raped, and after almost getting bonzaied by a samurai executioner he loses love for the Land of the Rising Sun and decides to join the resistance. The next few hours see him holding court in an orphanage in the rural town of Huang Shi, ducking Japanese bombs, giving and taking valuable life lessons, and evidently introducing the concept of agriculture to the most efficient agrarian society on earth. Rhys and crew (including the orphans, a hot morphine-addicted American nurse, and a grimy communist) end up marching 2,000 km through the Central Asian desert of northwestern China to escape the melee. Like I said, this movie has little to offer if you're not already into modern Chinese history, which I am, and Children covers all the important bases: Japanese imperialism, the strange bedfellowship between Chinese Nationalists and up-and-coming Commies, opium, missionaries, meddling foreigners, etc. I understood enough of the Chinese to chuckle to myself when the bumbling Brit introduced himself as "pumpkin" in Mandarin, but then Chow Yun Fat translated the joke to English and it was less funny and other people laughed and I felt awkward. It reminded me of this time I was watching Pulp Fiction dubbed into Chinese with this middle-aged engineer from Shenzhen and in the opening scene when Bonnie and Clyde are about to stick up that breakfast joint she calls him "pumpkin" and the dub translated the literal word for pumpkin and I thought it was funny and chuckled to myself but nobody else laughed and the dude ended up hating the movie, or just being confused by it, and that's when I realized Pulp Fiction can only be good in English (maybe French).

-Josh Feola