halfcactus

thumbnail posters of Going by the Book and Chang'an

Chang'an (2023)
Animated movie that traces the relationship of Gao Shi and Li Bai as unlikely and yet fated soulmates. This is a really good movie to watch if you're familiar with the poems as well as the poets and historical figures in this era—if not, well, it's educational! And it all comes together gloriously in the Bring in the Wine sequence that is its centerpiece, in which the down-to-earth Gao Shi is finally brought, through wine, into Li Bai's point of view, and takes the audience in with him. After that, the film kind of just plods on with the An Lushan rebellion until it reaches its ultimate conclusion.

In terms of storytelling, I found this lacking in both emotional drive and a central commitment. The animation is beautiful, with absolutely breathtaking scenery, but there were parts that had the feeling of a storyboard put to motion but not quite into life, to the point where I thought that live actors would have been more effective. In spite of being such a visual medium, it still relied heavily on narration and too many audience stand-ins to explain the outcomes and reasoning. And it felt like it couldn't quite figure out the balance of embellishing for effect and sticking close enough to the facts. But still, it did a magnificent job with characterizing the poems.

Overall, I think it just didn't manage to make Gao Shi a compelling enough PoV character to be completely worth the entire runtime, even though he himself was an interesting anomaly among his peers. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more at the cinema! It's also definitely much more enjoyable for its target audience, ie. local Chinese who grew up with the history and likely know all the poems by heart. But as

superborb pointed out, there was "not enough baby Du Fu". XD

(PS. This was very good to watch with a group, both to tide through the length and to engage with the movie at different knowledge levels.)

Going by the Book (2007)
Korean remake of the 1991 Japanese movie Bang! that I haven't watched, recommended by someone in a small and now dead Discord server several years ago. (I hope that person's doing well.)

Going by the Book is a comedy thriller in which bank robbery runs rampant in the port town of Sampo. Lee Seungwoo, the ambitious and newly appointed police chief, proposes a televised bank robbery simulation as a PR move. He designates the role of robber to Jung Doman, an unassuming and law-abiding traffic cop, who takes his job so seriously that the simulation goes off the rails and the SWAT team gets involved, bringing with them a hostage negotiator and national media attention.

Due to the nature of the plot, this has all the energy of a tense thriller but none of the actual stakes, with comedic interjections from people who are playing the part as the hostages, which makes it very fun (though somewhat stressful) to watch! And it definitely feels like a 2007 movie—the flip phones, the bulky desk computers, the straightforwardness of the screenplay, and the complete absence of social media and any fancy visual effects. Its runtime is an appropriate length of one hour and forty minutes.

Content notes (might contain spoilers):

rape as one of the simulated scenarios