Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal
1 people found this review helpful
A great show for kids...of all ages!
Many of the online reviews kick this movie for the CGI not being "up to par" for 2015...Most people watching a show like this are not critiqing the CGI, but simply want to see CGI that works for this particular movie. I liked the CGI here because it seeemd to 'work' for this movie!
Another critic critcized the movie for putting a handsome man playing the part of Zhong Kui...
Do you really want to scare off all the women watching the movie?
I often crticize movies for not being historically accurate, but this is a fable/myth/fairy tale/whatever, not history.
If you read the works of the (late) great mythologist Joseph Campbell, myths change with time and need of the audience, and more likely change over thousands of years of time.
Even if you know the original myth, does it hurt Zhong Kui beng less ugly than a couple of thousand s of years ago?
I found the movie refreshing, entertaining, and only a couple of places did it really show any gore (blood), so most audiences should be entertained by this movie without too much complaint.
Forget if the CGI may not be up to Hollywood standards, this CGI made you believe that the actions were actually taking place!
The main and support cast all seemed to work well together to bring about a good movie and only in one scene did I not think that the main leads may not be sincere, but that was just before the action hit its apogee and I forgot about it.
The cinematography was good, and I liked the angle changes on some scenes.
All in all, I think it is a movie that kids of all ages can watch and re-watch again, and enjoy themselves doing it!
Let the critics watch some ugly guy in another movie....
RE-WATCH VALUE: Yes!
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Unparalleled Yanshi: Gracious Master of Emei
3 people found this review helpful
This review may contain spoilers
Not bad.
Yeah really not bad. Like the story is decent but it didn't give me a wow factor. Maybe I am just too used to watching dramas lol. Ost is almost non existent so i dont know. For the acting, they did well. I think they're newbies sonce never encountered them? Or maybe not popular ones.All in all it is a nice leisure if you have one hour plus to waste hahah
The story started with Emei peeps having an epidemic. Most of the time they can manage it but this time it was worse so they invited a male doctor. Take note Emei is exclusively for female disciples so they're really desperate. The leader too was infected I think so she went close door cultivation. Then one time there was this male disciple from another sect who was bitten by a poisonous snake and need help. This male disciple was helped because Emei is indebted to his sect. This so called victim is the villain. He caused ruckus to get the martial arts. To achieve his goal, he made use of the fact that the seven lead disciples are scrambling to get the position of Acting Master.
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This review may contain spoilers
A very short movie - only 72 mins. long - about two gay lovers, Ootani and Tachibana, who have been together since high school, and their little bout of jealousy, brought up by their old female high school friend entering the picture again after many years.That's pretty much it. Basically, a slice of life story about an old and never resolved misunderstanding. There's nothing deep or, I don't know, groundbreaking about it, it's just a sweet little bit of a story. But it's true that their little necking at the end was hot. It really felt like they were longtime lovers, familiar with each other in the most intimate way.
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You will cry. When you watch this, you will definitely cry. Very much.
You will cry like an elephant, like a pig, like a monkey... You will cry wishing you had an arata mackenyu in your life. you will cry resenting the writers of this movie. you will cry because he takes on that role. In conclusion, you will cry.
I do not like this move. I love it and hate it at the same time. It is so sad. I knew what was coming- it is so cliche you will predict it, yet It still hit me like a train. I cried so much my eyes are puffy. and I am now suffering a headache that won't go away.
I also wanted to keep the rewatch value blank but they wont let me.... i dont think ill ever rewatch this. but i wanna see his face again. His personality- his character in the movie is what i love the most. AND THE MUSIC- SO GOOD.
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She runs away to Tokyo and contacts Ueno Station #54, an online friend she made on Haikyo.com, a website where she found solace as it was the only place where she could talk about the ditsy rebelious side of hers, the side which doesn't want to embrace the peacefulness of Tokoyama. She gets embroiled in an absurd business which offers services to roleplay as family members, roles that nobody else wants to play, and in the process, loses “herself” completely.
“Everyone wants to be champagne, not the glass. A flower, not the vase. But the world needs glasses and vases. These roles need to be fulfilled.”
We are all playing certain roles in our life, we are playing daughters, sisters, mothers, brothers, father; we are playing at being a family. While the first half of Noriko’s Dinner Table is mildly suspenseful and mostly just confusing, the latter half is a psychological horror which propounds the fluidity of our identies or rather, it's fragility, which can mould and morph or shatter completely. Today she might be Noriko, tomorrow she is Mitsuko, then she is somebody else and then Noriko again.
Moreover, Noriko's Dinner Table is a social commentary on suicide and the ramifications of the internet. The film is an onslaught of depression and loneliness which has no cause and does, because why should Noriko feel so unhomely is a place which is so tranquil, with a family that is so loving? Is it because her father simply refuses to cover the story of the 54 teenage girls who suicided at the station and continues to print happy stories on the Tokoyama Public Library and it's cacti gardens.
This film, like any other Sono Sion film, is like the gamma waves that are unfoundedly believed to stretch our brain. Unlike gamma waves, Noriko's Dinner Table will stretch your brain.
There are certain Sono Sion movie moments that tend to stick in your brain and I'm not talking about the blood bath or the shocking complacency with which it is shown. In Strange Circus it was the moment when the girl was sitting in the cello; Noriko's Dinner Table has such unforgettable moments, for me, it was when Tetsuzo looks at his daughters through a crack in the wardrobe, at girls who aren't his daughters and somehow still are.
The most powerful juxtaposition in the movie was perhaps that of Noriko and Kumiko, the former who was once a girl brought up with love but feels hollow and eventually becomes a spectre of herself and the latter being a girl abandoned in a locker, who is only capable of creating an illusion of happiness but bathes in her chameleon personality. Noriko who ultimately becomes Noriko, and Kumiko who is still stuck in roleplay.
“If some people are lions, others must be rabbits. Some must die for the rest to truly live.” So let's be rabbits for a while, says Yuka, as she is surrounded by her faux family. Or perhaps they are her real family. Life is a strange illusion and Sono Sion asks a lot of questions in this tragic and incendiary movie, some which go unanswered, some which don't have one and some which are indecipherable.
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This review may contain spoilers
Wow...what a movie.
Now, before I start, I just want to say that this review is subjective. It is not a disincentive for you to not watch this movie.Real, is one hell of a movie.
Real, in my mind, 1st watch, was about--sex, drugs, gambling, mob, Kim Soo Hyun. The amount of unrealistic bed scenes in here was too much. But I understand why it was added for some of them.
Real is confusing for me. Now after I was done watching the movie, I read some of the reviews listed underneath here. It makes sense now why Real was so confusing.
If you're looking for a movie that has a easy-to-grasp plot, this isn't it.
The plot is here, unlike what other said. It's just difficult to find. The writer/director decided to create this movie in a difficult way, therefore only few know what the plotline is.
That's why I wasn't one of them.
I couldn't grasp the plot until, what, maybe 10 minutes left of the movie? I had only just known, then, that Siesta was a drug used to get high. The antagonist plot, I didn't get at all. But, once again, if you pay attention to the movie (which I clearly didn't enough), you will understand the movie at a better level.
The acting--Kim Soo Hyun continues to impress me. He portrays the two characters so differently--without changing their physical appearance. The way the two talk, smack their gum in their mouth, their eyes and how they act on their own, their reactions to events--they are different. And that's something that I was amazed by. Jang Tae Young was acted greatly by him.
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This review may contain spoilers
Slightly better than Sexi Is Zero 1...!
Same group of misfit college students but love wins out on its own this time...This film continues combine a group of misfit college students together in a college/university setting and show a good entertaining movie as well!
Using the first movie's typical love story format, a non-traditional college student Jang Eun Shik (Im Chang Jung) hits on the swim team athlete Lee Kyung Ah (Song Ji Hyo) but his awkwardness still makes it harder for him to seal the deal, as in Sex Is Zero 1.
junior swim star Kyung Ah meets and is then wooed by Eun Shik (after Eun Shik's first girlfriend from the first movie, Lee Eun Hyo [Ha Ji Won], leaves college) . Kyung Ah finally accepts Eun Shik, due to his being nice to her when others were not.
The couple's main problem is the lack of "bed time' between the two of them, a fact that both couple's friends tease them about!
In this movie, the handsome prosecutor Gi Joo (Lee Sang Yoon), becomes the third element of this movie's love triangle. Gi Joo. a student in Sex Is Zero 1, has now graduated college and became a assistant prosecutor in the city. Kyung Ah and Gi Joo attended high school together earlier and a chance meeting makes Gi Joo start thinking about her again .
Enter Lee Kyung Ah's mother, played by actress Kim Chung; she turns nasty after her daughter Kyung Ah hurts her leg and is told she probably would never swim again. She pressures Eun Shik to drop her daughter as his girlfreind and let Gi Joo give her a more stable future. Gi Joo, wanting Kyung Ah again after their chance reunion, tells Mommy that Kyung Ah can accompany him to the United States as he goes there for further education, where athletic medicine is more advanced than in Korea. Mommy goes all-out in a meeting with Eun Shik to remind him that her daugher would be better off with a man with a degree such as Gi Joo, not a deadbeat like him.
There is a few flashback of Lee Kyung Ah being bullied by the other university students; she was raped in high school by her high school swim coach,; wanting to kill herself, due ot the bullying she is consoled by Eun Shik shortly after she thinks of suicide. He who did the same for his former dance team girlfriend, Lee Eun Hyo (Ha Ji Won) in movie 1.
After being humiliated by Lee Kyung Ah's mother, Eun Shik decides to kill the relationship with Kyung Ah, though his superb acting showed that he was doing it for true liove, opening up Lee Kyung Ah to be able to choose Gi Joo and possibly saving her swimming career...
However, Lee Kyung Ah still doesn't believe in letting go that easy; she does not know that Eun Shik dropped off a birthday present for her after she passes out from too much liquor, but even without knowing this, Kyung Ah invites him to bed with her one final time, after a chance meeting with Eun Shik when he had passed his civil examinations. The night before she is scheduled to leave for America comes the most most depressing scene - Kyung Ah, now drunk keeps asking Kyung Ah to stay and sleep with her; both are crying: Eun Shik cries since he is trying to let her go for when her mother believes to be a better future for her, and Kyung Ah cries for what she believes is Eun Shik's final rejection of her...so sad!
Only at the airport does her female 'friend' remember the birthday gift he left, and she decides that Eun Shik is the better choice for her future! She assed out, saying that Eun Shik didn't even call her on her birthday, but her friend takes his call after she is passed out; he also had bought her the very expensive pair of shoes she had seen in a department store's window, when he was carrying her home from another night of too much drinking!
Weaved around this love triangle story is the antics of a typical mischievous college students; again this makes the two movies seem more live-like, in my opnion. As a former college student myself, even a conservative college in America's Midwest can admit that such antics take place, and it made the whole movie seem real.
I loved the specal guest appearance of Ha Ji Won, as Eun Shik's Sex Is Zero 1 girlfriend leaving college at the beginning of the second movie, and I also LOVE the fact that the director/staff placed bits of the hilarious "behind-the-scenes" shots of how much fun it was to make this movie ; many people forget that this movie was planned and written and shot for entertainment and not real life. By including the takes where the cast was (mainly) laughing too hard to do a scene right makes for good publicity, in my book (See the endings of the American series of "CANNONBALL RUN" movies for a similar use of funny takes by the director and staff.).
Even though this and Sex Is Zero 1 are rated by many as terrible movies, others say that the antics portrayed in these two movies remind them of their college years, although the movie antics are a bit "exaggerated"...
Minimal nudity (mainly breasts) exist in this movie as well, along with references to sex acts and eroticism throughout number 2 as well; NOTHING THAT WOULD OFFEND A 15-YEAR-OLD OR OLDER.
I thought that the cinematography of this AND THE FIRST semi fast-paced movie was good; and both the main and support cast worked well together, especially since most appeared in the first movie as well!
All in all, a very enjoyable movie, as the first one was. The only problems I saw were a) some of the movie seemed to be taken verbatim from the first movie, and b) some believe it was slow at points...I say, WHO CARES!
It was still anther good movie from the director and cast!
RE-WATCH VALUE: definitely!
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Life: Love on the Line (Director's Cut)
3 people found this review helpful
A must-watch!
I didn’t know I needed this till I watched it. I hadn’t any expectations from it, and it was surprisingly beautiful. Really good story.I think is one of the best BL’s I ever watched; probably it’s the most pretty, simple, and realistic. It was so unique and cute. I loved it.
The actors have great chemistry, it felt so real and natural watching the relationship of the characters.
I definitely recommend it, I watched this version because I saw that it was a little different and better than the episodes and I think it won’t be necessary watching them anymore, I’m well-satisfied. It was so wholesome! I even wanted to cry because of how sweet it was.
10/10
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Beautifully Written
Tragic but beautiful movie which explored the suicide of a young middle school girl. Her sister and mother wondered why it happened and as the movie went on, we came to find out what the cause was. Bullying.The way in which the story moves is ever so carefully and almost silently like Cheonji. It goes well with the main characters overall and their mood.
This movie was realistic and explored the psychological/peer pressure that the girls in the class took part in. the victim knew it was going on around her, the giggling, secret texts etc making her seem like an outcast.
After the suicide, it's like there was a blame game as everyone felt guilty in one way or another. Whilst the family search for answers, the use of the yarn and the thread to uncover cheonji's last words was beautifully written. Holding onto her last words/thoughts were shown by the literal ball of yarn that she left for everyone.
Cast performed very well showcasing subtle actions but were so emotionally powerful. Beautifully written movie which opens up the conversation regarding peer pressure and depression.
In conclusion, please do check out this movie and give it a go.
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I have no idea if the manga is a musical, but I did watch the anime--
I want to give an honest review without comparing to the anime (I'll try) as every movie deserves to be rated on its own.Let me give a summary first.
The good:
- Yamaken
- Takahata Mitsuki's singing
- some comedy scenes
- plot not dependent on knowing the story of the manga/anime
The bad:
- don't know if I'm watching hard core comedy or a musical, too bad it's a mix of both and I can't jive with it
- some awkward scenes
- female lead is a shallow character (no development)
- I'm not a musical fan and it's a musical movie so there
Cast/Acting:
I've enjoyed some jokes, Kaku Kento is a very good actor (he's funny so it makes sense the director always has him in his movies). Takahata Mitsuki is a great singer. I'm certainly going through a list of Yamaken's movies one by one, although I can see somehow that his acting is not that great (this is the 3rd show I've seen that he is the main chara).
Story/Plot:
A good thing about the movie is that the plot can standalone and doesn't depend on the viewers having read the manga/watched the anime. It's ok to watch on it's own, which IMO should at least be a standard to all live action adaptations. However, I'm not the most eager musical-fan out there, so it might be a crime but I skipped all songs (and only kind of listened to Mitsuki's solo near the end).
So if it's only the story, I think I only have one complaint. As a "nerd" I can very much relate to the characters. It's true to the title, as how being an otaku affects our daily lives. But somehow I wished the female lead is not just a hollow human being regardless of being an otaku or not. Her character could've been better. Tho I think they did well with the male lead's character development. But it's still quite disappointing, really.
Overall:
I can't like the movie. It bothers me that I don't get the movie's tone at all. Is it a comedy? Ok, fine. Is it a musical? Ok, fine. Is it a musical comedy? I definitely can't vibe with the mood since the comedic scenes really clash with the musical pieces, I didn't really watch the songs ok, but what I want to say is, the kind of comedy the movie delivers does not suit the musical quality that it also happens to have. It's like watching 3 different movies at the same time. I get it, it's not a crime to have the mood shifting, but it's just the change/flow confused me. Nothing jives. It might be the comedy scenes should've been toned down a bit to make way for it being a musical. I wouldn't mind that I guess.
Re-watch value:
It's hard to re-watch anything especially if you know there are awkward scenes/acting. And comedies usually don't do so well the second time around. Though definitely re-watch it if you wanna see more Yamaken (who wouldn't wanna see him as an otaku?).
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This is good Movie
The flow of the story is relly good but its relly detailed so you need to understand everyting. The casting is so good and all of them did so well. I like how the story of the 2 flowed in the movie though they gave an open ending. I dont really know if they continue to seoul or something but I wish the two male lead will meet, while watching the movie I just realized that, Indeed, Goodbyes that aren't said are the most painful goodbye, I was really hurt when hyun min leave like that but I understand his reason... I was ready to cry when seol was leaving because Its really sad that those people that are left behind wouldn't able to see you in a long time but yeah, in the movie they didn't continue what happened that night. I read a comment that the lamb that gave birth is a sign of hope so maybe ther is still a hope for their story, I wish they give us continuation. Overall I love this movie so much, I learned a lot!Was this review helpful to you?
The casting was perfect and everyone in their character did an awesome job, especially, Jin ki joo and Wi ha joon. Even though Wi ha joon's character's only job was to swear, hit people, manipulate everyone and getting away after doing some very impulsive actions that explicts shows that he is the serial killer. Honestly, I feel that the latter half could have been better if they didn't try to stretch the movie by showing a lot of unnecessary chase scenes and very predictable plots.
I didn't even notice that the movie had any music because I was just staring at the movie for the sake of finishing it. I really expected something better after watching the trailer and the teasers. I thought it was going to be an intense mystery and a psychological battle between the female lead and a serial killer as there aren't many K-movies that shows something like a mental fight with a female lead. But what happened was that they revealed the serial killer to everyone too soon. They should have gone for some more manipulation from Wi ha joon's character, instead of those impulsive actions. It would have created a fear in the viewer's heart(?).
I am not someone who like action scenes in thriller or mystery movies. So, it might not be for me. But if you are someone who likes action scenes and mystery, then it might be a good movie for you. I would recommend it. But the story didn't seem that interesting to me.
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A Great Battle indeed!
As the movie name suggests, this 2 hour movie is about the 2 month battle between the 5,000 army of Commander Yang in Ansi vs the 200,000 army of Chinese emperor Taizhong.Not sure how accurate the war strategy depicted in the movie, but while watching with my friend, we were thinking, if we were Yang, how can we defeat a strong army with few troops and limited resources? The answer is a lot of strategy, courage, and faith. We did think they could have done more to defeat the Chinese army, like using fire and pushing the ladder much earlier but i guess they delayed these for a more epic scenes.
This movie boasts of an ensemble cast so they tried to have some story for each one, like Samul's trust in Yang, the rivalry between the Hwalbo and Poong, the tragic love story between Paso and Bekha, and love between Woo Dae and his mom. Jumong's bow added a mythical touch to the story (like King Arthur and his sword or Thor and his hammer).
Rating: 8.5/10
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The only thing that will not let me watch it again is the amount of sadness that is in my heart now 💔💔
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