Recent movies

Finally signed up for Letterboxd so I have a place to track my movie-watching + reactions. The lack of privacy settings makes me feel so exposed though...

想見你 Someday or One Day: The Movie (2022)
STREAMING ON: Youku

It’s a good adaptation but not an especially great one, on account of how it rehashes the same types of story beats for the 2 main leads in the drama and doesn’t add much to the conversation.

However, I loved every bit of Chen Yunru and Wang Quansheng’s interactions, which tied up a loose thread in the TV series and was a lot more satisfying than Huang Yuxuan’s pep talk at the end of the drama. This movie was worth watching just for that! But I'm kind of mad that one of the characters still ended up tragic.

It's also really dissatisfying to not truly have Chen Yunru's POV and still know nothing about her life and relationships—she seems like a really interesting and cool person, and it frustrates me that she's not given the space to be a character outside of her romantic relationships in this movie.

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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
A very well-crafted movie, but I was very stressed. ^^; I haven’t seen a movie in a while and this felt like a movie by people who love movies. In some ways it renewed my love for them. Even with my lack of film literacy i could feel when they were paying homage to their influences and it all felt so sincere, even when it was a lot. 😂

LIKED:
- The Chinglish + codeswitching + the personal experience of processing CN dialogue & ENG subs at the same time. it was just really nice to see such a professional, involved approach to languages! and so comfy to hear the natural transitions.

-the satisfaction of all the little details & jokes they were setting up get their follow-through.

- the music & sound choices! wish i’d watched with earphones, actually.

- the nihilism and the visual representation of it, big mood lol

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Well-executed entertainment that doesn't try to be anything more than that——which to be honest I found refreshing. It's a self-contained story that's easy to watch because of how predictable but logical the sequence of events felt, the shapeshifting was very cool, and the action scenes were staged well and easy to follow (notable because I usually zone out of action scenes).

I also liked how the comedy was just woven into the story instead of being built on carefully crafted quips. I wasn't really invested in the characters (other than Holga), but I loved that the heart of it was about families, lost and found. And I really liked how they didn't pair up Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez's characters together even though they were co-parenting the same child!

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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
STREAMING ON: Netflix

Set in Italy at the onset of World War 2, this movie follows the story of a grief-stricken carpenter saddled with a chaotic wooden boy who proclaims to be his son, and a wooden boy who rejects authority and loves his father in the only ways he knows. The first half was very stressful for me (lol) and I still got wigged out by the Talking Cricket in its 3D animated form——but it's a movie that understands loss and cost and worth, and it builds up that emotional vocabulary for the audience very well. There's really not much else to say about this because it's a movie by people who definitely know how to tell a story, but it's still sad that it took a long time to be funded.