Best and Worst (abridged)

I have watched several Slice of Lifes that deals with corruption, social issues and every other thing of that sort, so I invite you to watch this one to collect a new public service dept. : the Comission of Human Rights.

BEST:
1. Deals with Human Rights directly. Another perspective of Justice. You ask yourself and even conflict yourself with some situations.
2. The Main Lead is a very strong female Inspector. She's a very good actress, and you wonder how in that mind of hers she can deal with the toughest of situations. Not going to spoil why. You must watch it.
3. The support male role is not your ideal of handsome. Sometimes, it's needed to have realistic guys around, but the casting when far ahead and chose a guy who is scarier than a gangster. First episode was funny.
4. They used classic songs as main theme (not OST). Some people may not know them but they're very significant for the culture and politics of South Korea.

WORST:
1. Sometimes it drags on during the plot. The series is 14 episodes, and they divided 7 stories in series of two by two. So you'll know when to skip and watch the next one.
2. A certain character was meant to have a romance, but it didn´'t pull through. 14 episodes...
3. It's 0CN so... they never skip dark situations. It's more psychological than gore.

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I was told to watch this first

If you read Takeshi Kitano's bio, you may have observed that everyone knows him for his movies and the Japanese know him as a comedian. Well, I'm not even Japanese and I first knew him as Count Takeshi for a sporty and humorous TV show Japanese show from the 80s with a parodic dubbing. This guy, who is a cinephile and has followed Takeshi's movies, recommended me to watch Hana-bi before any other one because it was for "non-initiated" so I'm guessing two things: this is going to be the mild version of weird for a Takeshi movie and this is A cult film.

It feels as if the movie was very simple and extremely dramatic and sad at the same time and it will continue like that until the very last second. The main music was very beautiful and I loved the symbolism and artistic expressions in it. Sometimes, in some scenes, I got reminded of Tarantino or Scorcese as how spontaneous and surprising they were. I got startled several times and felt relaxed at others. It was as if Takeshi put a spell of some sort because it wasn't boring at all despite your tipical Japanese still-life quietness (don't forget you could get startled). It doesn't have a higher score because there are things to improve on (maybe in the other movies, Takeshi has evolved in one or another direction, this is supposedly the mild version of Takeshi as director).

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If you want to watch a proper parody of Journey to the West, I suggest to watch the original version: A Chinese Odyssey (1995) part1&2 and the "prequel" of this movie that it's still greatly better with so many Easters from the classic adaptations. This time, Stephen Chow just wrote the script and didn´t direct it so maybe that's why...

I don't even need to justify why I didn´t like it, I simply watched better ones before and then I encountered this. I tried to enjoy it as a mere entertainment, but I couldn´t. The main character that is the monk, doesn´t convince me as a monk, the Monkey King is just plainly angry all the time, the pig has also another complex and the fish... I wouldn´t know how to describe it. In general, they don´t possess a very deep character development, even as a mere way of attempting to entertain, it was difficult to swallow.

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