All posts tagged lin chi ling

THE MONKEY KING 3 (2018) review

Though Monkey King films – and fantasy films in general – have been produced with remarkable regularity in China in the past six years, few have managed to spawn a franchise, let alone a trilogy. And if we don’t count Jeff Lau’s belated – and dire – A Chinese Odyssey Part III, then Soi Cheang’s The Monkey King 3 bears the distinction of completing the first artistically unified (Soi directed all three films) big screen Chinese fantasy trilogy based on Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. After a dodgy franchise starter in 2014 that benefited from Donnie Yen’s impressively athletic dedication to portraying a young monkey but sank under the weight of its interminable and poorly-rendered power battles, and a sequel in 2016 that was a marked improvement and was made memorable by Gong Li’s powerhouse White Bone Demon, here comes the third installment, with all the key cast members returning, except for Kelly Chen, who has been replaced in her customary cameo as Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy by Liu Tao – not that too many people will notice.

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DIDI’S DREAMS (2017) review

After co-hosting the wildly successful TV show “Kangsi Coming” for twelve years, Kevin Tsai make a joint big screen debut as writer-director and lead actress respectively with Didi’s Dreams. It follows aspiring actress Didi (Hsu, who’s the sister of Barbie Hsu), who goes from thankless walk-on roles to degrading appearances in commercial and TV shows, ever stuck in the shadow of her estranged older sister, movie star Lingling (Lin Chiling). In a recurring dream, she is the owner of an interstellar noodle shop who falls for a handsome space janitor, but she is called back to tragic reality when she is diagnosed with a brain tumor that gives her a year at most to live. She throws herself oblivious into any work that comes her way, ending up in a viral video that makes her an overnight sensation. Now she is being offered to co-star with her sister in a lavish film about palace intrigue, and the estranged siblings will have to resolve their differences.

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THIS IS NOT WHAT I EXPECTED (2017) review

The directing debut of editor Derek Hui, who in his relatively young career has already cut films for Derek Yee, Chen Kaige, Teddy Chan and Peter Chan (who is a producer here) among others, This Is Not What I Expected stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as Lu Jin, a filthy-rich hotel acquisition consultant with exacting expectations when it comes to accommodation, service and food in the establishments he visits. As he appraises the luxurious Rosebud Hotel, he finds much with which to be dissatisfied, until he tastes a dish prepared by young sous-chef Gu Shengnan (Zhou Dongyu). It’s a revelation for Jin, and though he keeps butting heads with Shengnan outside of the hotel, he finds himself enthralled by her culinary skill, as she keeps surpassing herself in the hopes to save the hotel from a buyout. Slowly, unexpected feelings start burgeoning between the germaphobe perfectionist and the quirky, hyperactive chef.

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by LP Hugo on April 25, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Film Reviews

Tagged chang kuo chu, lin chi ling, peter chan ho sun, romantic comedy, takeshi kaneshiro, tony yang, zhou dongyu

Posted by LP Hugo on April 25, 2017

https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/04/25/this-is-not-what-i-expected-2017-review/

WHO IS UNDERCOVER (2015) review

Fan Jianhui’s Who is Undercover cashes in on the success of classy and starry Chinese spy thrillers like Alan Mak and Felix Chong’s The Silent War or Gao Qunshu and Chen Kuo Fu’s superb The Message, with a story that borrows heavily from the latter film (though set slightly earlier in Chinese history). In 1934, the secret services of the Kuomintang government round up suspects (including Lin Chi Ling and Gillian Chung) in a military base and torture them in an attempt to identify the undercover communist agent among them while on the outside, the head of the underground communist party (Tony Leung Ka Fai) tries to control the damage and free his agent, known under the codename “The Joker”. Beyond a shared premise, Who is Undercover is often so strikingly similar to The Message that there’s more than a whiff of plagiarism about it. The way the story unravels (with a mix of tragedy and mystery, regular torture scenes, an emphasis on coding and constant twists and scenes replayed in flashbacks to reveal their true meaning), the arc and hidden identity of some of the main characters, and key plot points (which we won’t reveal not to spoil either film) are exactly the same. A few scenes are basically transpositions of ones found in The Message, striking the same dramatic beats with the same narrative or visual tricks. At some point there’s even a key line of dialogue that is a verbatim repetition of one heard in the 2009 film, carrying the same implications. In the end, there’s enough differences that it doesn’t constitute a remake, but enough similarities that it feels redundant and borders on shameless copying.

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