Reviews

"...you're trying to catch the train of humanism before it's too late..."

The Human Condition 1: No Greater Love is the 3 ½ hour first installment of a 579 minute three part film. I will admit to being trepidatious at the running time. I may be The Butterfly, but I have the attention span of a gnat and 208 minutes for the first film was pushing it for me. Thankfully, Kobayashi Masaki and Nakadai Tatsuya did not disappoint in this anti-war film.

During WWII, Kaji presents a report to his boss in Manchuria detailing how treating foreign labor humanely could result in a higher production for the company. His boss decides to either let him try or give him enough rope to hang himself. He’s also gifted an exemption from military service. The mine is in a remote section of Manchuria run by the Japanese but worked by the locals. Kaji marries his girlfriend and the two set off in the back of a truck on their honeymoon to the new destination. At the mining camp, Kaji discovers rampant abuse and corruption. Before he can actualize many changes, a feared Kenpeitai military officer delivers 600 Chinese POWs weakened by starvation and dehydration. Kaji’s only support against the vengeful pit bosses is a reluctant Okishima.

Nakadai was perfect casting for the idealistic and dangerously stubborn Kaji. While he attempted to implement better treatment of the workers and POWs, he was still required to do distasteful things, some of which were sanitized. One of those things was being in charge of the Chinese comfort women (I seriously hate that name), these sex slaves came across as cheerful brothel workers instead of the reality of being forced to service numerous men every day, Chinese and Japanese alike. The treatment of the POWs and laborers was rather gentle compared to what the history books imply. Despite my concerns regarding the kinder, cleaner treatment of the women and men forced to work at the mining camp, it was one of the few films I’ve seen where the Japanese acknowledged these humanitarian violations from the war.

While the film did touch on the conditions at the camp, it was Kaji’s external and internal struggles that were the highlight of the film. As anyone who has ever tried to enact a procedural change in an office can attest to resistance, this was similar only on a more violent scale. The Chinese were not seen as human so beating or killing them was not a concern for many of the pit bosses and slave handlers. The Japanese were also stealing the workers’ food rations and what they didn’t eat they sold for a profit. The Kenpeitai were of the mind that torture and execution were the most effective means of motivation flying in the face of Kaji’s more egalitarian beliefs. Kaji’s management style did result in higher production, but that was not enough to convince the pit bosses who preferred the whip. His marriage suffered as Michiko didn’t understand why he always came home late and frustrated. A gift of flour and sugar from the wife of a pit boss earned his ire as he knew that it was taking food out of the workers’ mouths. Ultimately, Kaji had to decide if his beliefs were worth his life.

Every shot was beautifully framed, designed to evoke the highest level of emotion. The film did dig into melodrama but watching Kaji fight to determine what his beliefs were worth even when he often failed was fascinating. Regardless of race, country, ideology, or religion, we all need reminders that everyone is human and deserves to be treated as human and humanely. Depriving others of life and dignity is not a reflection on their humanity, but the perpetrators’ instead. Once I’ve recovered from this draining film, I’ll move on to part 2. I have a bad feeling that part 1 was a just a warm-up for the pain to follow.

“You’ll either be revealed as a murderer wearing the mask of humanism or one worthy of the beautiful name…man”

5 February 2026

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The Sweetest Story Ever

A Korean version of the American movie 50 First Dates without the offensive stupid guy humor that Adam Sandler is so famous for. This is the sweetest love story between two high school students. One, the FL, who had an accident that left her with the type of amnesia where her memory is erased every night while she sleeps. Enter the ML, a shy but handsome boy who asks out our FL on a bet so his deskmate will stop being bullied. However, he's noticed this girl before so doesn't really mind. The majority of the movie is their dating life, which is sweet, meaningful, and will tug at your heart. Their time together is short but strong and significant. That's all I will say and leave the rest for you to watch.

I have to say that I came home today from work having a really hard, emotionally taxing day and watching this movie was exactly what I needed. A special thanks to the screenwriter for an excellent story, the director, the production crew and all the actors who brought meaning to the story. You touched my heart.

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Not enough Wong Jing-ness

Offering up a weird, part quasi-spiritual sequel to his own remake of Buddha's Palm and part spoof of the whole phenomenon, Taylor Wong's Kung Fu Vs. Acrobatic is a gloriously scrappy feast of pure adrenaline, minimal budget and maximum commitment. Far from polished and definitely not subtle, there's an attempt at crafting a modern-day homage to the black and white Chinese fantasy flicks of yesteryear; unfortunately, that all seems to have been thrown out from the moment the opening credits have finished rolling. The film has all the right ingredients for a lively, engaging romp, but the concept seems to have been stretched to 100 minutes, which ultimately feels longer than anyone on set had material for. It definitely feels like the sort of film that Wong Jing would have been better off directing himself, as Taylor Wong's direction is fine for what it is. It just leans way too far into uninspired slapstick, complete with obnoxious sound effects, despite the presence of a few good jokes, Yuen Wah's hitherto unheralded break-dancing skills and the sudden appearance of a mystical hammer-wielding cartoon ninja turtle. The action certainly speaks louder, and the film's cast is clearly putting in more effort than necessary, with Andy Lau having a limitless amount of charisma to burn, and the gorgeous Joey Wong is merely reduced to window dressing, presumably drumming her fingers whenever she's offscreen. Ultimately, despite some genuine enthusiasm here and there, Kung Fu Vs. Acrobatic amounts to little more than daft fun; had it been made a couple of years later, perhaps it would have found better luck, but as it stands, it's a lacklustre, oddly disheartening send-up of films that were far wittier and imaginative.

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so.... we learnt NOTHING from 21st centrury girl or what

i cried. ALOT. esp in the 2nd half... i dident expect this movie to have that much effect on me (whats what we all thoguth about 20th century girl too) but the storyline is BEAUTIFULLLLLUH!!!!!!!! i mean when i read some of the reviews they said the japanese one potrayed the role of ji min (SL) better but i havent seen the japanese one so just based on the korean one i think her role was very important but not much seen?? if that makes sense. but then again we cant expect a movie to have the same effect as a 16 episode long drama right? coming to my point, the plot was amazing, the production - crazy. the colour grading in some scenes actually made me feel something... and towards the end , the scenes where they show the main lead slowly remembering all of the memories she made with jae won- THAT BROKE ME YA ALL. also when he died. that was kind of a shock? cuz that came out of NOWHERE. i wish he had like a little bit more backstory? few more signs that hes going thru smth related to his heart.. i rmemeber there was that once scene when he tried to run and his chest starts to pain or smth and he starts gripping it, and that he cant play sports nd stuff due to his heart.... if they started with this like not playing sports or games , id assume hes rlly studious and does not like to waste time on things like that but when he was talking to ji min was when i realised he had a heart condition..... maybe thats where the plot was lacking a bit? EMOTION WISE yes it made me feel a lot, it terms of trauma movies since this is similar to 20th century girl im gonna place this righttt under that cuz i feel like 20th century girl was a bit better... Totally recomend this film!!!

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IT'S TOO BITTER THAN SWEET

While the plot remains the same as the Japanese film, a girlwith anterograde amnesia and the boy who chooses to love her anyway, the Korean adaptation changes the flavor of the story. Unlike the Japanese film, which uses a lot of future-looking flashbacks, the Korean version is more linear. It feels more 'present', making you feel the weight of each day as the couple lives it. Director Kim Hye-young leans heavily into the idea of sensory memory. The film explores how the body and heart might remember things (like the feeling of a hand-hold or the rhythm of a walk) even when the brain resets. Additionally, the visuals are less 'golden-hour vintage' and more 'crip, modern K-romance'. It feels a bit more grounded in reality, even while dealing with a tragic premise.

Furthermore, Choo Young-woo brings a more protective, slightly more mature energy than Shunsuke Michieda's version. You can really see the 'quiet exhaustion' in his eyes as he works to fill her diary with happy memories. While Shin Shi-ah captures the 'first-time' wonder perfectly. Every morning she wakes up is a performance of rediscovering her own life, and she portrays that vulnerability without making the character feel like a victim.

In conclusion, keep the tissues close for the scenes involving the father's photography studio. The Korean version adds some extra layers to the family dynamics that will absolutely wreck you. （＞人＜；）

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Losing something you did not even know you had it

Love Letter is one of those movies that feels less like a movie and more like something that has always existed, something passed down quietly, the way families pass down stories, or pain, or love they never fully talked about. It’s visually stunning, yes, but its real power comes from how deeply it has embedded itself into collective memory. Like Titanic in the West, its scenes have been recreated endlessly, its emotions echoed across music videos and films. Even before watching it, I already felt like I knew it.
And maybe that’s why I waited so long.
I knew this film would hurt me. I could feel it. And I think part of me wasn’t ready to sit with that kind of sadness.

Plot*
The story follows Hiroko Watanabe, a woman still grieving her fiancé, Itsuki Fujii, two years after his death. Time has passed, yet Hiroko remains unable to let go. While going through Itsuki’s old belongings, she comes across his high school yearbook. Inside, she finds his old address, and despite knowing that the house was destroyed years ago.
Almost impulsively, she writes him a letter. Maybe it’s for closure, maybe it’s simply because she doesn’t want to forget him. To her shock, she receives a reply.
The letter is not from her deceased fiancé, but from a woman who shares the same name: Itsuki Fujii. As they continue exchanging letters, Hiroko learns that this woman went to the same school as her fiancé. Through their correspondence, the film slowly reveals fragments of the past about the man Hiroko loved, and about the lives of two women connected to him in very different ways.

Watching My Heart Slowly Break*
As I watched, I felt myself sinking deeper into the story, almost without realising it. The sadness isn’t loud. It doesn’t scream. It creeps in quietly, through small moments and gentle discoveries. When Hiroko begins asking female Itsuki to share memories, the truth begins to surface.

Female Itsuki never knew. She never realised that the boy with the same name in high school, the boy who lingered, who always found reasons to be close, was in love with her from the very beginning. His feelings were constant, invisible. His confession never reached her. She lived her life unaware that she had already been loved.

At the same time, Hiroko, who loved him openly, deeply, and completely begins to understand something devastating. That perhaps the reason he fell in love with her at first sight was because she resembled the girl he had loved all along. That realization doesn’t erase his love for Hiroko, but it complicates it in a way that feels unbearably human.

What broke me most is that there is no visible romance in this film. No grand declarations. No dramatic embraces. Despite being called Love Letter, love is discovered only through memory, silence, and absence. Through things that were never said.
Female Itsuki, realising love was next to her and lost it before she ever knew it existed. And now, she can never go back. He is gone. That kind of loss feels especially cruel, the pain of understanding too late, of mourning something you didn’t even know was yours. This made me so melancholic!!

I don’t know if it hit me this hard because, in some way, we’ve all lost something we didn’t even know was ours to begin with. Maybe it was love, a job, a friend, or an opportunity. Grieving something you never truly got to hold in your hands, something you only realise mattered after it’s gone, is a unique, type of aheartbreak.
When the film ended, I walked outside and just stood there, staring at the sky, feeling hollow. Not crying, just… heavy. Like the film had reached inside me and rearranged something.

Acting*
Nakayama Miho, playing both Hiroko and Itsuki, is astonishing. For the first few minutes, I genuinely thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The resemblance was uncanny. I had to pause the film to check the cast. Yet as the story unfolded, I never confused them again. Her acting creates such a clear emotional divide that they feel like two completely separate souls, carrying different kinds of loneliness.

Otaru, Hokkaido *
And then there’s Otaru. Snow-covered, quiet, almost suspended in time. The winter landscapes give the film a dreamlike quality, as if everything exists inside a memory rather than reality. It makes sense why couples still travel there, even in the harsh cold, to chase a feeling this movie captured so perfectly.

Final Reflection*
Love Letter is not just a classic, it’s an emotional experience. It’s about grief, unspoken love, and mystery. It reminded me that some of the most painful realisations in life come not from what we lose, but from what we never realised we had.
Even now, whenever I see snow falling in Japan, my mind drifts back to this film.
And I don’t think it will ever leave me.

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How to train a Zombie

At first glance, this movie makes no sense, but in the end it was worth watching. Since it is based on a webtoon, I can understand the flow of the story, which changes its story arc every ten minutes—just like episodes in a comic book. The story is therefore straightforward, with many different elements and characters appearing and disappearing, each adding a bit of flavor.

I didn’t especially like the first 20 minutes, with the strange depiction of what we might call a zombie apocalypse, but then the real story begins: a father secretly raising his zombie daughter. Zombies are expected to behave in a certain way, and the young actress (Choi Yu-ri), who plays the teenage zombie, had a really challenging role. She did better than I expected, but I would still have preferred her to commit a bit more to the weirdness of zombie behavior.

It is also obvious that being a zombie here can be seen as a metaphor for puberty, but beyond that, it also symbolizes raising a child with some form of disability. When viewed this way, the movie raises awareness and conveys a very positive moral lesson about the importance of parenting and the value of every human life. I also appreciated the connection to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the social commentary on government rules that seek the common good, sometimes at the expense of personal rights. All in all, this is a well-made, funny, touching, and morally grounded movie.

PS. What's with the cat?

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I Don't Recommend This Movie

I like tokusatsu as a genre and I watched many Kamen Riders at this point. I had some expectations for this movie but I am going to be honest, even for someone like me it was hard to watch. Plot is basically paper thin and it's just an excuse to show more fight scenes. Fight choreography is great, but don't expect much from VFX side of things. Seeing all the beloved Riders together was cool but that's the only good thing I can say about this movie.

If you are Kamen Rider super-fan and you want to see some of your favourites once more, give it a go. It provides small information about main plot of Ex-Aid, but honestly, it hardly justifies going through this whole movie.

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Good movie, just kinda overhyped.

I liked this movie, the plot was really touching and beautiful it just was a little disappointing. I usually don't cry at the movies so I didn't expect to cry on this one. And it didn't happen. I don't know about the japanese version, but this one is just not really that sad, because this whole movie is just about life. Something that can happen to everyone. It's quite iluminating to be honest. It teaches you that you should be happy to remember every moment and enjoy it, because not everyone gets to do it. Also it teaches you that no matter how hard you will try some things you just can't change, because in the end Jaewon dies and Saeyoon only remembers him as a character that was in her life.

"Scars don't disappear. But the pain doesn't last forever. If everyone is forgetting you little by little then I'll try to remember you little by little." This line is so beautiful, it made me think of other lines in songs that really fit their story for example "If the moon went dark tonight and if it all ended tomorrow, would I be the one on your mind, your mind, your mind? And if it all ended tomorrow, would you be the one on mine?", "Sometimes I just can't believe, You happened.", "And God knows that I am the girl I am because of you, You know I'll always think of you, I'll love you 'til the end of time" and "You're just a stranger I know everything about."

I've never watched anything with Shin Shi-ah, that's why her acting was a nice surprise. I'm really excited for her next projects. She really reminds me of Jisoo and Wonhee when I was looking at her face.

GOOD POINTS
- I really liked Jimin's character, she was really a good friend.
- The scenes before Jaewon's death were really beautiful, even if the movie was happening in the past year it felt really nostalgic.

BAD POINTS
- I don't really like Choo Young-woo's acting, it feels like he always plays the same character. He's good at playing this nonchalant, emotionally closed character because this is the only emotion he can show. Other actors had to work for him to make his emotions visible.
- I feel really disappointed by the fact that we never got to see Saeyoon's past before Jaewon and also how Jaewon's dad felt right after his wife's and his son's death.

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Not bad, but why bother?

This film wasn’t bad if taken on its own. But it hewed so closely to the very good Japanese original that it was impossible to avoid making comparisons and that is where it falls far short. In particular:

• The pacing was off. This remake was too slow in places where it should have moved faster and too fast in places where it should have slowed down. The net result was to rest emotional resonance (not that it wasn’t plenty emotional, just not nearly as much as the original).
• That acting (particularly the leads) was noticeably inferior.
• We got a very washed-out version of one of my favorite characters (the FL's best friend).
• The original benefited greatly from being told primarily from the point of view of the FL. In switching much of the attention to the ML, they miss out on some of the best parts of the story,.
• Neither the overall production nor the OST were as good.

But despite all these criticisms, I did enjoy watching this remake as a way to pass the time.

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Even if This Love Disappears Tonight (2025) : 2/4/2026

This movie was really good and really mad me cry, even though I already knew the plot. This is because there is a Japanese version which I have already watched. However, I liked that instead of just being a remake there were some differences from the Jversion. For instance, I like that the best friend had a love interest, that was cute to see. I also liked that you are really going in blind, not like the Jversion where you kind of know the ending. I also really liked how it foreshadowed the ending, it was explicit, but you could tell it was relevant. The only thing I didn't really like was that we didn't get to see her expressing her emotions after what happens, mainly because I feel by seeing it in the jversion it showed how much it hurt for her to remember each day. It also gave more sense to why the people around her made the descion they did. I'm also a lil mixed on the final ending because while it was bittersweet I kinda liked how sad and heartbreaking the jversion was.

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Ashfall: Explosive, Predictable, and Disappointing

Ashfall was honestly disappointing, especially for a Don Lee movie. I went in expecting his usual grounded intensity and instead got a pile of disaster-movie clichés stacked on top of each other. The constant back-and-forth between the protagonist and antagonist wore thin fast. After a while it stopped building tension and just felt repetitive, like the movie didn’t trust itself to move forward without circling the same conflict again and again.

What really pulled me out of it was how absurdly convenient everything became. Team members just showing up exactly when needed, situations resolving because someone happened to be there at the perfect second. It stopped feeling like a high-stakes disaster and started feeling like a checklist of plot necessities being ticked off.

And the personal drama didn’t help. The captain’s wife surviving everything, making it onto the bus, and then ending up with Robert felt forced and unnecessary. Add in the magically successful phone call in North Korea at the exact right moment and I was fully in “you’ve got to be kidding me” mode. It wasn’t emotional, it was eye-roll inducing.

The effects are decent and there are moments where the scale works, but the writing undercuts all of it. For a Don Lee film, this felt oddly hollow. Not terrible, but definitely a letdown, and far more predictable and contrived than it had any right to be.


Watchable if you like disaster movies, but nowhere near Don Lee’s best and way too convenient for its own good.

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