I have just seen this movie on DVD and found it fascinating. The scenes were presented with a good balance of realism and restraint. I found it acted and directed well enough to immerse the viewer in the story. The pace of the movie supported a sense of suspense as hope alternates with anguish, and choices confront a number of characters. The character of the (Chinese) father is one that especially impressed me. The movie provides an opportunity for people like me who are privileged in many ways to reflect on what life and humanity is about, and it does this without sentimentality. It is not a movie to watch for mere entertainment. It provides an opportunity to connect with the world we live in, and to be reminded of the pain, tensions, choices and hope that are often part of the lives of many people in our world.

This movie is terrible, it was so difficult to believe that Katie became a heartfelt teenager with the power to save the pity Chinese people, the movie didn't show any convincing argument to prove that. And the rest of the plot didn't make any effort to show us more than a cheap common sense... The plot is ridiculous and the only thing we can extract from it is that it demonstrate how arrogant a human can be. Katie must have inherited her arrogance from her mother, the most annoying character I have seen for a long time. The acting and scenery were OK, but the plot ruins everything, full of cheap clichés and hypocritical scenes, I expect not to see this movie again in my life. Skip this one!

Yes, it hits you in the face with its message long before the action even starts. Yes, the dialog is terrible. Yes, it's melodramatic. But still... wait, I can't think of anything good to say."Smile" would be great for a young, prone-to-tears teenager, but for the rest of us, the sweetness will gag you, start to finish.It's got a great message, don't get me wrong, it just runs it into the ground a bit. Again, for younger audiences, this might be necessary.Still, I'd be a frigid cow if I didn't mention that it IS moving at times, but the director/writer person would reach more audiences if she learned a bit of subtlety, and let the story tell the story.

Not to be confused with Michael Ritchie's nasty 1975 beauty pageant spoof, this "Smile" is a down-turned example of those good intentions paving the road to hell.The film parallels two stories: an impoverished Chinese father sacrifices his wife and son to raise a facially-deformed orphan named Ling (Yi Ding), and a TV-spawned Malibu family act out "Gidget Get Birth Control." Katie (Mika Booram, the third Olsen twin) plays a spoiled, self-absorbed high schooler distanced from reality. Her teacher (Sean Astin) paves the way for a school trip to China aimed at showing students how to work with deformed children.The film uses deformity as a means of suspense by treating Ling like the Frankenstein monster. Kramer continually masks her deformity through hats, hoods and camera placement. This approach exploits the freak show quality inherent in the material. She may be uncomfortable with the way society views her and Kramer's answer is to cover her up until the big reveal. Why disturb your audience with such unpleasantness? We see her face briefly at the end and only minutes before closing-credit snapshots of her after surgery disclose a swan beneath the harelip. It is not good enough to give the girl a reason to live; what is imperative is Ling being equally as hot and popular as Katie.Funding for the film came from a trust established by the late Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. They envisioned a heritage of quality family films. Give me "Son of Paleface" any day.