Movie Review: American Dreams in China

A rags to riches story of three young Chinese men (played by Huang Xiaoming, Deng Chao, and Tong Dawei) begins with a brawl which after one of them provokes the rest by reading English slightly too loudly from his window. Hong Kong director Peter Chan channels this encounter for the rest of the film, as the idealistic but volatile group of boys become men who build a massively successful English language school called "New Dream." Their development is witnessed as they initially grapple with how to elicit the affections of women, before eventually finding themselves in a legal dispute with an American educational board. Meanwhile, mirroring their own growth is a nation that begins to take its "rightful place" on the world stage, with the film featuring the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the eventually successful bid for Beijing to host a modern Olympic Games.