by Luanne Paul King

Up The Yangtze

Directed and written by Chinese-Canadian Yung Chang. 93 minutes. English and Mandarin. DVD to be released November 2008.

This cinematically breathtaking film of the Yangtze River is also an intimate portrait of teenagers whose lives are changed by the giant Three Gorges Dam project in China. Four years in the making, the documentary focuses on Yu Shui, a 16-year-old girl from a peasant family, and Chen Bo Yu, a 19-year-old young man from the newly wealthy middle class. Yu Shui’s parents have no funds for the education she wants; they barely have enough to eat. They tell Yu Shui she must leave to work on a cruise ship that travels the Yangtze. When Yu Shui arrives at the ship with her plastic bag suitcase, she is renamed “Cindy” and is assigned to wash dishes. When Chen Bo Yu is hired, he is renamed “Jerry.” He works “upstairs” and delights in receiving tips from passengers who shower him with $20 bills. Jerry is confident and ambitious. Cindy is shy, homesick, teased for her rural manners and fearful of her unknown future.

The cruise gives Western tourists a glimpse of “traditional Chinese life” and a landscape that will be forever altered once the dam is finished. The displacement of millions of residents and the destruction of many ecosystems and cultural landmarks will be inevitable. We see Yu Shui’s father carting off remnants of his home on his back as the water rises. A shopkeeper bundling up his inventory to move from his village declares, “We must sacrifice the little family for the big family,” but he weeps as he says it.

Mamma Mia

Rated PG-13. 108 minutes.

In March 1975 the Swedish music group ABBA was recording the backing track for their song “Mamma Mia.” Benny Andersson realized that “Mamma Mia” wasn’t working well with just a piano and guitar. Adding other instruments and even vocals didn’t capture “all the whims and harmony parts, riffs and whatnot,” he felt. Then, he spied a marimba sitting in a corner of the studio; he picked it up and started playing it. “It changed the course of the song … made for a really catchy start.”

The song was part of an album but there was no single made of it until RCA, ABBA’s Australian record company, talked the Swedes into allowing a single — a single that did phenomenally well in Australia, and later met with great success in Europe. Today, a third of a century later, “Mamma Mia” is much more than an album track; it’s also a blockbuster musical and a movie.

The movie musical Mamma Mia, starring Meryl Streep and other talented actors, dancers and musicians, is mostly a delight, although sometimes “over the top.” It’s the story of a young woman about to get married on a Greek island where her mother lives. She has invited three men who might be her father; she has never met any of them. I especially loved the empathic Greek actors who comment and react emotionally to the twists and turns of the story. The ancient classical Greek chorus returns!