These include L'Arroseur Arrose, or The Hoser Hosed (you could say the movies have progressed, or not, from this 1890s prank film to the career of the hoser Tom Green). The most likable scenes show a Chinese crowd 'aahing' in admiration over early films by the Lumiere Brothers. Shadow Magic tries its best to win the affections of viewers for the early primitive days of the movies. It also prejudices Liu's slender case with pretty Ling, since her father fears cinema, thinking that it might put performers like him out of business. So, Liu's connection to Wallace is disapproved of by his family and his boss. Understandably, Liu isn't interested besides, he's in love with Ling (Xing Yufei), the daughter of the famous and enormously pompous Peking Opera star Lord Tan (Li Yusheng). Moreover, Ren has interceded in the boy's life, arranging a marriage with a homely, fat-faced widow. Master Ren (Liu Peiqi), who runs the Feng Tai Photo Shop, is constantly on the verge of firing Liu, but the master likes him too much to go through with it. Wallace sets up a small theater in the marketplace and names it 'Shadow Magic.' His only supporter in this scheme is Liu Jinglun (Xia Yu), whose fascination with Western gadgets has already gotten him into trouble with his boss. Hu and four other writers-here, no doubt, was a crisis in itself-suppose that an itinerant magic-lantern man named Raymond Wallace (Jared Harris) arrived in Peking, trying to sell the idea of pictures that move to the Chinese. Set in 1902, Shadow Magic is director Ann Hu's speculation on what the arrival of movies in Imperial China might have been like. Shadow Magic isn't well made enough to qualify as that.

WHAT COULD BE more welcome, in these crisis-ridden times, than a film that counsels friendship between China and the West? The answer is a good movie about friendship between China and the West. 'Shadow Magic' imagines what the arrival of movies was like in early China Learning to Love the Light: Xing Yufei and Xia Yu star as a young couple caught up in the excitement of primitive cinema.

Without a doubtful shadow