Unremarkable

Standard romcom story contract marriage to love, but in 5-minute episodes. He's engaged for business-finance reasons, and falls for FL first so does what he can to dodge the engagement. She has a real suitor that she's not interested in.
Nothing remarkable about their acting. A few amusing scenes as she tries to ditch the various blind dates her mother sets up for her. Her mother was completely unexpected; absolutely the most memorable character. Episodes were so short there was nothing unnecessary or annoying. Despite short episodes, there were no weird gaps in the story.

Sound dubbing was weird in the version I saw -- you'd get about a minute or 1:30 with no sound at all. Auto-generated subtitles.

Read More

They did the "lost memory" meme really well

This was a really well-done analysis of someone who has daily memory loss (no ability to store new long-term memories). They presented the story really well from the perspective of the ML who is the person with the memory issue. They capture his confusion, and all the methods he uses to keep track of his life (post it notes, videos, etc), and the little things he struggles with. They capture his emotions, angry, sad, happy, and manage somehow to convince you that he doesn't get depressed about it but instead choosing to live in the moment.... but it's realistic because there is a scene or two when he does show the anger and depression that results from the ailment. They talk through a variety of psychological / therapy approaches, and give you a justification of what works and doesn't. (No idea if any of this is medically plausible, but it's believable). Jasper Liu gives you a very believable character.

FL does a fabulous job showing how she deals with her job as therapist and finding herself falling in love with her patient. Both the ethical boundary, and how she resolves it. Then once the relationship is established, the way she protects him and supports him when other people might get angry.

The couple have great chemistry, and broadly the cast as a whole comes together nicely.

The twist could have been handled really badly. As soon as the event happened, I thought "oh dear, that's another show that will get a bad review from me," because I thought there was no way they could do a good job. But they handled it EXTREMELY well; in a genre that is done badly so often, doing it well earned them huge positive points. Watch all of the end credits to se how things progress over multiple years.

In "50 first dates," the FL is the one with the memory issue, and the story is told from the ML's point of view (i.e. we don't really see what's going on in her life). It was nice to see it done from the perspective of the person with the memory-loss.

Read More

This show was about a cold female CEO with a warm-bubbly male partner. It was a half-hearted attempt, at best.

The FL was cold, but didn't give me a "capable" sense -- she worked crazy hours, but I never felt like she was taking the world by storm. Her interactions with her uncle were particularly lame. The ML was not the warm-bubbly type, but just sort of there. They set him up with a weird disability that I've never heard of, but then we only hear about it perhaps twice again. The chemistry between FL+ML was good while negative/hate, but then suddenly shifted without much warning into CP. I had to blink and rewind... I hadn't seen any clues that either was falling for the other.

The 2ML and 2FL were a great couple. Laugh-out-loud funny.

The first few episodes were much more focussed on comedy. Despite story-line problems, I was really enjoying how silly it was. Best scene: when the ML's home becomes a "for-the-experience" restaurant. That faded in later episodes, and I was watching simply because the series was so short.

The last episode is a left turn out of nowhere. Neither necessary, nor explained. It was a head-spinner. At least it didn't destroy the rest of the show.

Pacing was strange. Sometimes strangely fast (e.g. switch to CP), sometimes strangely slow... like 10 minutes of music and people running around looking for something.

Acting was not memorable -- neither bad nor good. FL lead's crying was better than many other female actresses.

Read More

Good story + acting, but directors watered down WeiWei

I really enjoyed the basic plot of meeting in the online game (first third of episodes), leading to a real relationship (second third), with the business aspects of the gaming industry (last third). Good chemistry between the leads, and between the four guys (Xiao Nai and roommates). I liked the way they constructed some of the lessons about reasonable behaviour, for example when FL WeiWei explains "love" to SML Cao Guang.

All of the characters were very stereotypical and pretty one-dimensional with no real character growth. Since there were so many characters, that was mostly OK.

The movie version of LoveO2O handled WeiWei's character MUCH more effectively. In the TV serial, she is an empty shadow that is hard to respect. (I think the actress did a good job, but the script & directors failed.)

Loved the visual presentation of the game. I would probably enjoy playing it. Music was very repetitive / annoying... almost anime... enough so that the non-watchers in my household knew what scenes were the romantic scenes and what were the busy/work scenes.

I found myself rewatching a lot of the early episodes, because of the game graphics, the relationship development, and details like the YuGong's failures when he used idioms. Subtitles were excellent, even the idioms, for example YuGong's idiom mistake 暗度仓库 (an du cang ku = hidden warehouse) which should have been 暗度陈仓 (an du chen cang = secret liason) was translated as "eating the forbidden brew" and "eating the forbidden fruit" respectively.

DISLIKES

* Kiss scenes. She looks downright terrified in almost every kiss scene (even the one where she's daydreaming).

* Bei WeiWei is supposed to be a really strong character. She's supposed to be #1 2nd year computer science student, at #1 STEM school in China, #1 female player in the server / #6 overall. She runs circles around the guy-programmers. But during the last third of the episodes, they completely water her down. UGH. She gets food for the guys while they do the real work. When they do the final couples-quest, he's the one who gets all the puzzle-solving while she sits in a dark room... it's not a couple's quest at all. She raises baby tigers rather than work or go on complicated quests.

* There's a layer of controlling somewhat-creepy behaviour from Xiao Nai. It's OK in the first half (he knows who she is while she doesn't, but he doesn't abuse that knowledge). But in the second half, it changes -- her salary even goes into his bank account not hers. She isn't given choices about ANYTHING -- for example , even though we know she'd choose to marry him and not return to her parents, he doesn't ask about either... even their wedding night he says "I can't wait any longer" . She isn't an equal in the relationship.

* There were some minor plot gaps, for example she knows he's a 4th year student at same university who wasn't living on campus for the first half of the year... but even when they finally meet F2F, that's somehow been forgotten.

* Some of the computer science items are atrocious... for example, the "server statistics" in one of the last episodes is (literally) just a directory listing!!!

* WeiWei's roommate ErXi was unbelievably annoying. (Actress was fine, character was not.)

Read More

Simple story, relatively well-executed

Basic concept is two young people with unrequited high-school crush, and their parents (his dad, her mom) want to marry. Awkward all around.

Fairly fluffy story with no major angst. Acting was pretty good, esp FL. The three couples were all plausible, and there were no love triangles. Chemistry for main couple was iffy -- sometimes great, sometimes contrived. Simple sets (new city apartment, work location, and village home), but each felt pretty real.

Even with only 22 episodes 15-minutes-long, the story was well-developed. While you may not agree with all the decisions, each character was behaving *in* character (i.e. script writers didn't make them do things that didn't fit).

Overall, worth a watch when you don't have time to invest in long episodes.

Worst part was the subbing -- in the subbed version I saw, sound was off by at least 2 seconds, and English/Chinese subs were disconnected. Subs were OK; only a few that made you roll your eyes. Watch it in Chinese-only if you can; sound was aligned with speech.

Read More

Relationship is not believable

The usual trope of CEO demanding marriage in exchange for help. Each of the actors does their own part pretty well... they just don't come together as a cast. We are supposed to believe they fall for each other, but he's a jerk and never changes, and she tolerates it because he's had a "tough" life. The one saving grace of this show is that she finally does dump him because he's a jerk. Sadly, they do get back together, in theory because he's finally addressed his psychological issues, but it's not believable. I ended up reading episode summaries rather than watching, and skipped large chunks after about episode 10 or 12.

Read More

Disconnected scenes and shaky cam

It's a great start, in terms of actor choices and story line. Story concept is good, and I was really looking forward to it after You Are My Hero.

Where does it fail?

* The FL (a senior medical resident) is a whiny little girl who makes remarkably stupid decisions. In ep 1 she wants something she doesn't deserve, and squats/sulks. There are multiple cases where she makes a decision that is both dangerous to herself and her team, such as not telling her team what she's doing and going off to search for victims on her own. This characteristic doesn't improve over the episodes.

* The 2FL, a firefighter, squabbles with her team. She doesn't listen to orders and she acts like a spoiled brat. She is also extremely clutzy, tripping and falling regularly. There is no way the team would tolerate her on the squad, and I can't believe she passed any of the tests. (FYI: I'm ignoring the pretty overt sexism, in that she is the only female firefighter, and the rest of the team supports her giving her the easy tasks etc.)

* Shaky cam. All of the dangerous scenes (fighting a fire, cleaning up after an earthquake, etc) are shaky cam. Episode 2 actually made me nauseous. But it's not just the dangerous scenes. It's everywhere. We even see it in restaurants, when people are sitting and chatting.

* There are multiple occasions when things are just bizarrely unprofessional or unrealistic. For example, leaving a doctor to tour the firefighting facility on her own, with no guidance about what's dangerous or where she can't go (and surprise surprise, she gets in trouble). Or having the firefighter fix the engine of a modern car out in the field (they never tell us what's broken).

* Scenes are cut really strangely. It jumps. Sometimes I've wondered if I accidentally skipped an episode. For example, there's one scene where FL says something to ML, and that's the end of the episode. You expect start of next episode to continue the conversation... but it jumps to a following day. It's almost impossible to tell how much time has passed between scenes. There's a woman who gives birth to a baby... in about 2 minutes of screen time... and in the background *nothing* else has happened in the course of the rescue operations (no victims extracted, etc).

Why should you watch? Simon Gong.

Read More

Tedious

The best part of the drama was the relationship square (each male making incorrect assumptions about the other). I liked the relationship between the second couple, except for the episode in which they finally get together. The three of them (SML, SFL, his daughter) had great chemistry, but she was a little too tentative. Loved the little girl. There was nothing else in this drama that really caught my interest... but since there was nothing outright offensive, I didn't drop.

Dislikes:
* First couple no chemistry and just not that believable, from either side.
* The Taekwondo was long and not explained well. The coach was not professional. The competitive girl wasn't believable -- just spiteful.
* I don't recall the music at all, which tells me it didn't contribute to the show.

SPOILER:
* I view the scene where the second couple finally get together as a rape. She's blind drunk and says she loves him, he kisses her, and they wake up naked the next morning. This is not OK. Just to make it worse, it's only a few minutes between the point where she was sober & went into the house & started drinking, and he follows her in -- there's no way she could get that drunk that fast.

Read More

A walk down memory lane

The main reason to watch this is Nostalgia. You want to see Beijing in the early 2000s.
And, of course, the main actors, who are all eye candy.

But there's just not much to it. The story is bland, and it's really hard to stay engaged. There is a handful of youth actors and their parents. The story's main focus is the interpersonal relationships. You can kind of put up with a few episodes of the background/bland, but then somewhere around episode 6 or 8 it's time to move to actual plot. I can't even say that I think the huge cast of characters had particularly interesting personalities... I did make it through to the end, but only because there really wasn't anything else going on.

Best acting was in episodes 16-18, from ML Zheng SuNian (Lin Yi) and his father Zhen Jin (Fang ZiBin). Lin Yi showed a new skill compared to prior shows (crying, although Dad was still way more believable).

Worst feature of this show: NONE, and I do mean not a *single* one, of the youth actors look like they could be high school students. I believe Lin Yi was the youngest actor (born 1999, age 22), while Chen YuQi is the oldest actor (born 1992, age 29). And they're all supposed to be high school students. It works (or can work) for occasional flashbacks, but not complete episodes.

Read More

Usual cute high school drama with angst and gap

Enjoyed the high-school drama for a while, but it grew tedious. The three main actors (FL=Xia AnSheng, ML=Mo ZiChen, 2ML=Yan Mu) did a good job with their roles. The other characters did their part without any surprises.

Multiple threads woven together in a bit of a weird way. Awkward family relationship, childhood frenemies, bullying, deathly fear of something. And it didn't quite work. You could kind of tolerate it for a bit, but then nothing gets explained to anyone, so misunderstandings abound. Broadly, nobody tells each other anything, so it's frustrating.

The thing that really shot this down and put it in waste-of-time category was the transition from high school to post-university. Five years have passed. Several couples are now married. But ML hasn't grown up *AT ALL*. He's still the dumb-childish-frat-boy-annoying-brat that he was in high school. It's the normal depiction of the non-genious highschool boy in Chinese dramas (i.e. can't be more than 12 years old), but usually they grow up and become adults during the 5-year gap. But in this case, he's still 12 years old. If I were the FL I would dump him in a heart-beat, asking myself why oh why could I have ever liked this dude?? Meanwhile 2ML hasn't grown up either... he knows better than to keep chasing her, but he doesn't even change his tactics slightly.

I needed something to fill the gap. This didn't even fill that need.

Read More

Best friend group, with well-built relationship structures

Story starts at 8-years post university graduation, and focusses on friendship, love, and death. The 9 friends were presented very well, each with real back stories and real personalities. It definitely draws out viewer emotion more than most dramas. I generally do not like dramas with a lot of angst because it tends to be very fake and created for the plot... in this show, the angst was natural, and a part of the characters.

Storyline was interesting, with surprises. The natural ebb and flow of friendships was presented extremely well. The viral-video meme was done OK, but used as more of a plot-hack than a story-driver. I found it annoying that almost every negative character behaviour was pointed out much too late, e.g. "this drove me utterly crazy, but I never told you," and this caused no end of problems.

I felt like all of the (many) romantic lines were somewhat strange. For FL, one line was bland, the other demonstrated consistent immaturity. For ML, one line was stereotypical and over-done, the other demonstrated a strange level of stupidity. Among the friends group, the "social center" had a romantic story that didn't seem to fit his decisive personality.

Acting was superb, notably the very believable crying scenes (which are usually a pet peeve of mine).

To enhance the emotional scenes, things tended to get dragged out. For example, we'd see someone walking around their apartment "thinking" for 5 or more minutes. I found the music annoying... the same 8-measures played over & over.

Read More

Read the novel if you want a complete picture

I loved this show. I love Mo Bao Fei Bao's writing (both novels and scripts), and I think Allen Ren and Bai Lu made a perfect couple. They both fulfilled their characters perfectly, and the rest of the cast was well-chosen too. The cast as a whole came together beautifully. The sets were stunning, costumes lovely, perfectly suited to the story.

That said... it wasn't perfect. There were gaps in the story that would not have made sense without the book. In the latter half, there were way too many scenes in bed (usually on an IV drip).

In comparison to the book... It filled several holes that weren't well-explained, such as Zhou Wen Chuan's story arc, which seemed kind of arbitrary in the book. Some of the scenes improved, such as the step from "not married" to "married"... where the drama gave her a say in the matter. I loved the way that grandma was woven into the drama; she became a very interesting character.

Lots of comments seem to be upset about the lack of kissing -- Allen Ren's contracts usually have "no kissing"... (and the one kissing scene isn't, if you watch closely) but I personally didn't find it lacking. They had enough chemistry without the kissing. I did find it annoying how they stopped the kissing scenes with stupid stuff... like people walking in, or suddenly she has something to say (that could have easily been said a moment earlier). None of that was necessary.

Overall
1. Watch "One and Only" first -- it's a really nice complete version of their past lives
2. Read the book (hui3r.wordpress.com)
3. Then (and only then) watch "Forever and Ever"

Read More

Beautifully heartbreaking

Season 1 was very addictive. Three couples, each of which has a very strong female character. Realistic relationships, friendship, betrayal, complex decisions, happy times, desperate times. You fall in love with the youngest couple (Zhu Qing + Guo Zhen) and understand why and how they became so dependent on one another. The other two couples are believable and show a slice of society that we rarely see done well. The end of the season is utterly heart breaking.

I needed a break before Season 2. Season 2 dragged a bit, but brought the story to closure in a way that was very satisfying. A nice history of Taiwan. I was pleasantly surprised by the acting of Cindy Lien (Zhu Qing) -- she showed far more flexibility than I had seen in season 1.

All non-Chinese characters were truly awful. The "priest" in season 1 was particularly jarring. I don't know who wrote their scripts, but it really should have been scanned by a native English speaker.

This is a favourite drama for me, but I won't rewatch because some of the scenes are burned in my mind, and I don't need to.

Read More

Nice story about recognizing differences

Thoroughly enjoyed the simplicity of the well-executed story. Great chemistry between ML+FL as their relationship changes. She starts the final high school year looking down on the entire class, and grows to become part of their group in a very believable way, recognizing that each personality type has advantages and should be respected. Likewise, she starts much more mature than her classmates (given that she's had 10 more years of life), and they grow up to meet her expectations really nicely. Well-constructed interactions with students and teachers around the school, and she uses her "future knowledge" really well. I liked all of the second relationships. No strange complications. and

Read More

Great start that crashed and burned

I love both Gao HanYu and Jade Cheng. I love food flicks, and the focus on food as a heart-of-the-family was amazing; Recipes that could be repeated.

Episode one was everything I could have hoped for. ML notices all the social cues he should. FL is competent and capable at work, while also showing her care for work colleagues and awareness of work/life balance. ML promotes FL to director clearly through a show of her skill. We see ML as isolated and lonely, hiding his warmth and caring nature. The recipe was completely at-home repeatable. FL+ML have perfect chemistry. Second couple is a wonderful pair, and teases/supports main couple beautifully.

The next few episodes you have the usual tropes that come with lonely CEO who only has work to accompany him, and FL trying to balance it all. Some of the tropes are pleasantly flipped, like when the CEO is the one who trips and accidentally kisses the girl.

Somewhere around episode 8 I realized that I had been fast-forwarding through a lot of scenes. Repeatable recipes had vanished. Second couple stereotypical but supportive of first couple; waste of time to watch them. Third couple weirdly supporting each other's stalker behaviour; just irritating.

Main couple finally get together episode 9, at which point I realized that both ML's competence at work, and social awareness has been completely written out of the script. He does stupid stuff at the office that's completely out of character. But first dinner with mother-in-law he's completely out of it, for example literally grabbing soup-poured-for-mom and drinking it himself.

Why do script writers feel that they can have such completely implausible behaviour? I know the story is good when I want to yell at the characters. I know that the story is bad when I want to yell at the script writers.

I skipped ahead to the last episode, and watched as much of it as I could. The timing is seriously weird, both the relationship, and the show. In the relationship, they go from barely speaking to each other to marriage proposal ("I've changed") in only a few days time. In the drama, he proposes and The End.

Read More