I can't see how anyone could find this movie tedious. It was glorious, life changing and...FUN! It's a great docu-movie, full stop. But I have a thing for eating something appropriate with a movie and that opens the possibility to make this one extra entertaining. You can order online from a well known online marketplace the exact same teas he is tasting in this movie. After his visit a number of the growers he visits formed co-ops and they sell their tea online. I got a pound of really nice oolong at a reasonable price and a 14 year old puer that is un- freakin-believable. It's exactly like the black cakes with the depression in the center in the movie except that they're single serving sized. Man, was that a great combo with the movie!The rating on this is WAAAAY too low. I can only conclude that there are a lot of anti-intellectuals voting.

This movie literally changed my life. It cured the common cold and anthrax, in case you didn't know this already. When David puts his face into those sacks, my God was it beautiful. I put my face in sacks almost daily now. I've created a shrine to this movie in my closet, complete with a bubble gum figurine of David Lee Hoffman with a wig made out of discarded tea leaves. I recommend you all do the same so that the tea fairies don't come steal your soul in the middle of the night. I am giving you a fair warning, my soul was almost stolen by these creatures until I realized what they wanted. Regardless of this small inconvenience, the movie is worth seeing and I would have built the shrine even if my hand wasn't forced.

Obviously tea is central to this documentary. What is on screen is a guy looking for "real" tea to import to the USA and encounters with locals, etc. This film documents a quest! A Bang your Head against the Wall quest of a mission to get people (that includes the USA as well as the Chinese) to wake up and recognize what is being lost to the god of efficiency and profits. Along the way, we can almost smell the 500 year old tea bushes on the dirty, foggy mountain slopes that are getting pummeled by progress. We see firsthand what it takes to get a Chinese trained bureaucrat to think (actually think! - he visually strains) about what he is trying to push upon the Yankee peddler. Yes, Hoffman is a bit much but that is what makes a good story, right? Enjoy every minute of this quest to the final frame (hope someone appreciated the ending like I did). Oh, and the music is worthy of a soundtrack CD.

I'm a tea drinker: always have been, always will be. So I was quite disappointed with this film, which is focused very narrowly on a Marin County tea maniac and his efforts to establish a wholesale business that will also help independent Chinese farmers maintain a sustainable, pesticide free industry. That's all well and good, but the lecturing, hectoring tone of ugly American tea evangelist David Lee Hoffman is tiresome and vaguely offensive. Hoffman seems to be a self-taught expert: he lived in Asia for a decade (without, apparently, bothering to learn any local languages) but doesn't seem to have any formal training in the science or art of tea growing. He's a tea pornographer: he sticks his nose in a bag of tea leaves and knows good tea when he smells it. Fellow tea drinker James Norwood Pratt is even more enthusiastic: he actually thinks that, by drinking a cuppa, we can replicate and share the experiences of Queen Victoria. There's surely a decent tea documentary to be made, but unfortunately, this isn't it.