Recent movies

[halfcactus]

Movies I watched in the past two weeks:

不說話的愛 | Mumu (2025)

Father-daughter movie where Lay Zhang plays the deaf-mute father who is trying to keep custody of his daughter Mumu. A decent tearjerker when you don't think of the plot or its messaging... I suppose that given how patriarchal society is, it wouldn't be too out-of-pocket for a father to choose to do dangerous crimes rather than accept money from his ex-wife, but the movie's intentions are obviously a lot more simplistic.

The child actor who played the titular Mumu was so cute and a delight to watch! It was also nice that they cast people from the deaf community to play supporting roles. I wish we got more closure about Mumu's relationship with her mom, which only seemed to exist as a device for plot and conflict, or see how the mahjong parlor was doing, but I guess it's not called Mumu for nothing haha.


Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025)

Entertaining enough when you watch it in the theater, but it's objectively a mid movie and worse as an adaptation. I did kind of enjoy this as a brief refresher of the first few volumes of the novel even though they changed a lot of details. I just wish they'd rewritten everything. The more they tried to follow the plot, the more the story suffered from poor pacing and lack of character/relationship depth. There just isn't any time to know the characters enough to empathize with them or cheer for them. I'm generally forgiving about adaptation changes, but the problem with this one is that it doesn't really hold its own as a standalone movie, and even less as an apocalyptic movie, so it's all very unmemorable.

The abrupt cuts also made everything look cheap, like they couldn't afford to film the parts that took the characters from one place to the next. The movie experience was DEFINITELY not omniscient. In fact, it was the opposite, it never shows you the necessary parts lololol. The dokkaebi were so cute though!

Misc. notes about the movie (contains spoilers)

This movie is extremely PG13 and I don't know how much of the changes are to keep it PG13. They don't really show blood, and they usually cut away from violent/killing scenes.

Movie!Kim Dokja is a very typical isekai power fantasy protagonist. His backstory is that he was bullied in school (they don't tell you WHY he's being bullied, so it's just a generic bullying storyline). His most traumatic memory is, apparently, the time when he and his classmate? friend? were forced to beat each other up, and the day after their teacher announces that the other student has passed away.

The part where Jung Heewon gets sexually assaulted has been completely cut out. Her sole motivation is to avenge her friends. One can argue that this made her revenge scene un-cathartic, but that scene was so cheaply shot eitherway...

In the movie, Kim Dokja explicitly states that the reason he saves Jung Heewon was because she's a character from the novel and is one of his favorites or something. This is already his reason for pretty much every character in the movie! In the train scenario, he doesn't try to help Lee Gilyoung either (like he literally takes the ant farm from Gilyoung and doesn't leave him a single ant! LGY survives, but it's no thanks to KDJ) . What a wasted opportunity to make Kim Dokja a protagonist you can root for.

An Cailín Ciúin | The Quiet Girl (2022)
A healing movie about a neglected child who gets sent off to spend the summer with her aunt, who teaches her what it's like to belong in a family.

Nothing bad happens but I was so stressed........ There's implied abuse in the early parts of the movie, plus the pervasive implication that someone died here, so I just couldn't relax. In some ways the first parts reminded me of the experience of reading End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower (cnovel), just so much unease, though The Quiet Girl is thankfully less sinister. The ending montage was 10/10. Recommended if you like a quiet movie about summer in the farm with a lot of gorgeous shots and negative space.


未來讚美詩 | Hymn (2025)
SF short film starring Cecilia Yip and Steven Zhang (Zhang Xincheng) about emotional exploitation and predatory technology, kind of like Black Mirror? (I say without having seen a single episode of Black Mirror.) This was pretty interesting! It definitely benefited from being short. Because Cecilia Yip is Cantonese-speaking, ZXC gets two Cantonese lines. XD I'm not entirely convinced by his smoking, though... He's still too clean for these types of lived-in roles, but I like that he's been taking these film projects. (Especially since I barely watch series anymore.)

I have uploaded this movie on Dailymotion for personal backup reasons.

Also wrote a longer post about this here!