Love Say Anything..., which is still John Cusack's finest hour.

It's nice, but his finest hour is definitely Grosse Pointe Blank.

Do these titles just go direct to streaming and/or dvd? Haven't seen this in theaters, mainstream or the two indie houses in the area.

QiuJu was pretty remarkable for taking a look at government malfeasance, the frustrations of dealing with bureaucracy, and the workings of China's fledgling legal system. Even the notion that rural peasants have rights they can enforce against leaders. Part of the point of the film is that even as QiuJu pursues her case through the modern legal system, she is still looking for honor and apology, traditional redress, not the kind of impersonal money the modern system offers as recompense. She is frustrating because she seeks a traditional remedy via a modern system. In some ways the modern legal framework doesn't satisfy anyone involved, but it still seems to creakily work. There's a new paradigm in which village leaders can't just abuse their charges, and apologies aren't forthcoming. It all comes down to money ...

Another aspect of the film, as you mention, is that glamorous Gong Li is made up as a heavily pregnant peasant wife who trudges through the film. Very clever counter-casting. Zhang YiMou was criticized for continuing to show less savory aspects of China, and wallowing in backwardness and poverty when China wanted to show off its nascent boom. Soon enough this would result in Zhang getting banned from filmmaking briefly and moving towards more anodyne features that the censors would allow (which is why we get junk such as Shanghai Triad).