Reviews

Shin hye sun is my favorite actress

really good film...and this actress is an exceptional actress...she plays wonderfully well...all the roles she plays makes the series or film splendid...I loved this film.... .. I loved the film, it's really very good, as the plot unfolds, we become more and more involved, and the film has very good quality, everything seems very real, it ends up that even we ourselves become sad and with angry, but then he becomes very excited and happy, I really liked it, I highly recommend it, I thought it was a series but then I realized it was a film and honestly I didn't give anything for this film, but it delivered everything, it surprised me, it's very good and cool, the fight scenes are really well done, man this movie is wonderful.

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Love Wins All

I really never expected. The producers of this film made this movie sharply. South Korea is now one step ahead of others. They are not only making BLs but also making so many unique dramas/ movies about LGBTQ+ society.

Firstly the actors just nailed their characters. As I already read the novel so I was worried at first but now all the thoughts of mine are gone .
The actor who played the male character expressed the emotions of his character completely. The sufferings, happiness, sadness everything will attack your heart directly. This drama tells us love has no boundaries.

Talking about the female lead , she is mature, strong and also supportive. She understands his emotions with her heart .

The story is funny and emotional at the same time . When the ml and fl fought with each other ( cat fight) , I really can't hold my laugh. Sometimes I felf they are lovers or besties . There is nothing which they couldn't do like throwing slang words to each other , kicking etc etc .

If you want to watch a good movie with your family members then don't hold yourself back . Definitely worth watching.

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Oh, what a web we weave, when first we practice to deceive or ... blow people up

The Web of Death was a Shaw Brothers fantasy and action fueled story with special effects revolving around a spider that could shoot the rainbow out of its spinning hole and create colorful explosive and poisonous webs. In 1976 the creators may have expected the audience to take this movie seriously but I laughed hysterically throughout it.

The 5 Venoms Wu Du Clan is holding a meeting regarding the big martial arts tournament to be held on the Wudang Mountain. Snake Clan Chief Liu Shen wants the Wu Du Chief to allow them to use the Five Venoms Spider to defeat their enemies. The chief refuses saying that if the wrong person got hold of the weapon the world could be threatened. Liu Shen starts the gossip that the weapon which has been hidden for 100 years is about to be found believing the good guys will find it for him. Sure enough, the Wudang Clan immediately sends Fei Ying Xiang out to see what the scoop is. He runs into a woman disguised as a man who tells him she might be able to find the spider for him. Turns out she’s the Wu Du Chief’s daughter. While she has nothing nefarious in mind, not everyone may believe that.

Yueh Hua played the righteous swordsman Fei Ying Xiang while Ching Li played Hong Susu, the deadly swordswoman from the “bad” clan. I know I was supposed to be invested in their Romeo and Juliet romance but it didn’t really pull me in. This film was packed with Shaw Brother favorites. Lo Lieh was the duplicitous Liu Shen-always a delight to see. Ku Feng took on the role of a “good” clan leader while Wang Hsieh gave one of his more sympathetic performances as the “bad” clan leader.

The special effects were low budget 1970’s fare, but there were plenty of them. Sparkling lights, smoke, fire, fireworks, and colored lights. There were hidden traps, acid baths, and poison everywhere. The spider spewing out smoke and lights was a chef's kiss of cheesy effects. And this tarantula could also make elephant trumpet calls while standing on his hind legs. The sets were decked out like a Halloween spider fun house. I’m not an arachnophobe, but I also don’t like seeing them. These decorations looked like something a grade school came up with so were not scary to me at all. There were only a couple of shots of a real tarantula (surrounded in rainbow light) for anyone who needs to know for trigger warnings.

Very little time elapsed between fights or traps. Trampolines, wires, and reverse shots were all utilized in the place of serious martial arts, but the fights were still fun to watch as people fought on fire or dodging fireworks. Whoever doubled for Ching Li was quite acrobatic, flipping and twisting around her enemies.

As I was watching this movie, my first thought, after laughing about the “chase the rainbow” spider, was that I’ve seen this story before. Turns out it was a reworking of Cheng Pei Pei’s The Thundering Sword. Maybe this time the doomed love would turn out better and the good guys wouldn’t be close-minded jerks. Or maybe not.

The Web of Death is really only for fans of old kung fu movies or people who enjoy cheesy special effects. Turns out I love both and had a blast watching this fun house of horrors. As always, I grade old niche films on a curve.

10 October 2024

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Before Hu Bo created his only full-length film, An Elephant Sitting Still, he made this short film about two children attempting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Filmed in black and white without music, the film comes across as bleak and desolate---a warning of man’s destructive nature.

Two children are seen searching for anything to eat, knowing they are starving and could die. Their world is decaying and crumbling apart. Every step crunching on the ruins of civilization emphasizes how they live in a godforsaken land. They search a blown-out building and find a man tied and chained to a wall. Realizing he might be someone else’s food cache; they work quickly to secure him for themselves. Is he dead or still alive? And does that even matter anymore?

This is not a great film, but one that people who want to annihilate others should see. Governments who believe there is such a thing as “limited” nuclear war should see. Our mutually assured destruction can put us in a position where those who survive have only the bodies of other unfortunate souls to feed upon. Hu Bo’s pessimistic vision of the future is a dark place of utter misery. Children who should be giggling, playing, and well-fed have become scavengers in a wasteland spiraling down a hole deeper than any well.

10 October 2024

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This is a miserable movie, and it will make you miserable.

Superior acting from the leads Ishihara Satomi, and Aoki Munetaka. It is no exaggeration that Ishihara spends about half the screen time crying or breaking down in tears. I can't imagine what it took to be that emotionally exhausted for the filming period. I can't imagine what it would be like to have your child go missing, but I imagine it leaves you searching for your sanity in a way that closely resembles what Ishihara portrays in her role as the mother.

There is very little, if any, levity to be had in this movie. Despair grows and continues throughout the movie and I found myself being emotionally taxed by the end of it. It's just setback after setback for the couple who are trying desperately to cling to any shred of hope that might come their way. It just always ends in more despair.

There is no happy ending here and the movie wraps up with no conclusion, a reflection of reality when a child goes missing.

(I'd love to just be able to ignore the rewatch value metric here. I don't think this is a movie you would want to watch more than once because it's A LOT, but giving it a low score also feels unfair).

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Tried to be chaotic and heartwarming, but didn't really come across that way

First off, this would've worked way better as a miniseries, there was just way too much going on for it to be a good hour and a half movie without it feeling like one character got too much screentime and an another got too less.

Second, making it a miniseries may have helped with getting the audience more invested in the characters because by the end, I didn't really care much about any of them. Maybe one or two, but they were focused on way too little for me to actually determine just how well they could have been developed.

Even the story came out very rushed and a little insensitive. The points they were trying to make and the things they tried to address were quite serious and genuine, and while there is a way to talk about them and develop comedy from other aspects, they pushed it all together and it just came out quite badly at times.

I love a good chaos comedy, but you need to do it well for it to be enjoyable and unfortunately, this didn't hit all the marks for me. Some better writing and longer runtime may have helped because I have no complaints acting wise. The rest? Should've been better.

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"War is fun when you're winning"

Casting Blossoms to the Sky is an anti-war film that took 2 hours and 30 minutes to try and make its point. Much was made of, “That which fills the gap is imagination.” Thus, characters spoke directly to the audience and ghosts walked about as if that was all very normal. This film was not what I expected after reading the synopsis. The victims of the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima disaster were almost an afterthought. Instead, the majority of screen time was dedicated to the 1945 bombing of Nagaoka a couple of weeks before the end of the war. The premise centered upon how fireworks and bombs are similarly made, both being explosives while one celebrates beauty and the other destroys it.

Rieko Endo is a journalist who decides to go to Nagaoka for two reasons. She wants to find why the town opened its doors to refugees from the earthquake/tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster. Her ex-boyfriend also sent her a letter inviting her to a play at his high school. While in Nagaoka she meets numerous people connected to the bombing from 1945 and the making of fireworks.

This is the type of reflection and healing film I would normally love, but I did not love how it was pieced together. Characters speaking to the audience was distracting, though it dissipated as the film went on. There was repetition upon repetition. Some scenes from the bombing and making of the school play were replayed over and over and over and over. It began to dull the instrument of storytelling. The flashbacks almost gave me whiplash. The flashbacks would bounce around 2011, then to the 2006 earthquake, to 18 years ago when Reiko was with her boyfriend, flashbacks to another woman’s breakup, flashbacks to the Boshin War, along with the history of making fireworks and their use in the area, and flashbacks among numerous people and events leading up to, during, and after the Aug. 1, 1945 bombing. The bouncing around and circling back was headache inducing.

“We have nothing to do with war.”
I still have no idea what Rieko was talking about when she kept saying this regarding her broken relationship. The acting was serviceable though Matsuyuki Yasuko did more posing than emoting. All of the ex-boyfriends involved didn’t exactly evoke emotion as there were no interactions with the ex-girlfriends for the most part. Characters spoke fast and earnestly. There were unicycles everywhere, not quite sure what they symbolized. The real and surreal were often intermixed.

You will need a strong stomach for the vivid descriptions of what fire and bombs did to the human body. While I applaud the pacifist agenda, there were times it didn’t come across very realistically. “If they could see us, they wouldn’t bomb us.” The Japanese soldiers could see the civilians in Nanking and had no problem mowing them down. The comfort women were mentioned and then just as quickly dropped. The Japanese soldiers saw them and sexually abused them in every vile way possible. If every gruesome detail had to be described during the bombing repeatedly and in Soviet Union POW camps, maybe the lack of humanity for the other should have been equally described. There were plenty of atrocities to go around. And that would have made the argument stronger. During war, terrible things happen to real people. People with families, friends, jobs, children, and dreams. No one wants to suffer horrible deaths or imprisonment. No one wants to be forced to do things against their will. No one wants to see their town and home destroyed. No one wants to see their children starve to death. Why not treat everyone with respect and work through problems with words? Even if we got rid of bombs people would go back to killing each other the old-fashioned way with guns, swords, arrows, knives, spears, clubs, rocks, and/or fists. The problem lies within us, that thing that must be healed. It’s more important now than ever as we live in a world with diabolical weapons. Director Obayashi already had my attention and concurrence with, “Be friendly to each other.” Would that it were that easy.

“We have to use the pain caused by war for peace.”
The Nagaoka officials tied the fireworks into a healing and memoriam display though it was traumatizing for some of those who lived through the bombing. Many modern veterans of different wars and skirmishes have similar PTSD reactions to fireworks—the fireworks might be pretty but they sound too much like bombs. In 2011 and 2012 there were firework displays honoring both the victims of Nagaoka and Pearl Harbor in both places which was a nice reaching across the ocean in a display of peace.

“There’s Still Time Until a War.”
To stop the war? Or live life to the fullest? Casting Blossoms into the Sky was a bold, imaginative effort to show the horrors of war and why war must be avoided. The film could have been trimmed by an hour and had a stronger impact for me. I began to feel like I was stuck in a death loop watching the same gruesome events over and over again. Instead of convincing me that peace was possible it made me feel that war, like death, is inevitable.

8 October 2024

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Short but emotionally packed

I loved this, simply put. 6 episodes of only 18 minutes each but was packed from start to finish.

The chemistry between Dong Hui and Ho Tae was truly outstanding! Hats off to the actors on that, in fairness, their acting was bang on throughout.

The cinematography was fantastic, slow mo"s at the perfect times, the intensity of the stares, the beauty of the scenery in general.

Soundtrack was equally great, music perfectly timed, subtle, emotionally evocative and not overused.

This was such a beautiful sad romance, two people in love and never realising it or being brave enough to voice it. The family dynamic broke my heart at Dong Hui's suffering.

I dropped the story point simply because i wanted a more definitive ending, sad or happy, i justed wanted not an open end.

Well worth a watch and because of its shortness, easy to rewatch.

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