Lang bei zhang fu qiao jiao qi (1993)

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Director:

Zien Zhang

Genre:

Comedy

Plot:

A Ph.D. invents a drug to make his wife more sweet-natured but he gets unexpected results. |

Cast

Lantian Chang	...	Ph.D.
Heling Li	...	Wife
Yi Wei	...	Son

Country:

China

Language:

Mandarin

Color:

Color

Company:

Xi'an Film Studio

Stupid work that is an insult to the victims of the actual event

The literal translation of the title of this film is: Embarrassing Husband and Lovely Wife.

Very stupid and lousy attempt to rewrite some misfortunes in real life into a comedy. The real event happened like this:

In the rapid economic development in China, people are feeling the pressure that is common in west, just like in any highly competitive capitalistic society, but the social services in China could not keep up, and in fact, nearly none existent until the late 1990's.

Some criminals take advantage of this situation by marketing the so-called 'medication' for psychiatrist/psychological treatments, promising miracles, and one of the miracles is just what this movies describes: Turning ill-tempered people into sweet-natured people.

Obviously such medication does not exist but when authorities finally shut down the unlicensed underground plants that manufactured such so-called 'medication' and arrested the criminals, the damages had already been done, and many ended up in mental wards after being given the 'medication'. On the other hand, the public were less sympathetic to the victims because no medical professionals gave out any such stupid prescriptions, and if they were foolish enough to take the 'medication' themselves or convincing others to do so, without the professional medical advice/supervision, then they would only have themselves to blame for.

However, even for the less sympathetic public, this movie simply went too far, because it ridiculed the victim by changing such misfortune to a comedy and capitalizing on it for commercial gains. There was a difference between less sympathetic and capitalizing it by making fun/money out of the tragic experience of the victims.

This is why this movie did not created comic effect it originally intended, but instead, created a big controversy, but the controversy did help it in making big bucks in the box office.