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tristram
Script? What script?
I love Holland for all he has done (and represents) for the LGBTQ community, and I'm thrilled that a KBL finally has an openly gay actor playing a lead. But the production company didn't even try with the script. In fact, calling it a script might be too generous - it's a few ideas strung together with nothing connecting them. Which is a bummer, because the characters did have promise if you squint (a shy, gullible chef trying to start a restaurant paired with an outgoing, business-savvy drifter who's like, "I must help this sweet fool before he loses the shirt off his back." Aaand I just made it sound way more interesting than it actually ended up being. In reality, they just skip from plot point to plot point with no progression or logic.)The direction must have been pretty poor because I KNOW Han Gi Chan can act, but in a lot of scenes here, it seemed like he couldn't. Holland's acting skills didn't come across too well either, but I'd give him another chance if he tries acting again, because (*gestures toward Han Gi Chan*) even a good actor seemed middling in this drama. To be fair, there were some scenes that I thought they acted out decently.
The (literal) ocean was very pretty. I also liked that this drama skipped a lot of the common pitfalls in BL - both of them were nice guys, neither of them was an alpha, they didn't sexually harass or assault each other, and no one fetishized them. Finally, I enjoyed the homophobia-free environment! But without an actual story, it was all so very bland.
Here's hoping that these actors' next projects are with companies that will invest in quality scripts and directors. Our trailblazing icon Holland deserved better than this for his acting debut.
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Wow, that was traumatic
Writing this quick review for my LGBTQ+ community because all the positive reviews did not prepare me at all. But like...this short series packs in an unnecessary amount of trauma and I wouldn't recommend it to other LGBTQ+ viewers unless they're up for that kind of thing. We've got gay bashing, run-of-the-mill homophobic school bullying (and authority figures failing to properly intervene because they are also homophobic), attempted suicide, a forced breakup due to the characters' sexuality not being acceptable to a parent, and a father literally pointing a gun at his gay son and threatening to kill him unless he agrees to marry a woman. There's a third character not involved with the main romance, Xu Yang, whose entire purpose in the story is to illustrate how much gay boys get bullied in school. He gets almost no characterization, and he's not even friends with the main boys (he's from a different class). Yet the story keeps cutting back to him so we can see how he's getting bullied and gay bashed now. Then he tries to commit suicide after reaching out for help to adults multiple times and getting ignored. The story thinks it gives him a happy ending, but even in the last scene we see him, the entire school laughs at him for dressing up as his favorite character (Sailor Moon). So that wasn't cathartic! Justice for Xu Yang!And like, the romance isn't even worth all the trauma. The boys are great actors, but Xiang Wan kind of harasses Zhi Chen at times, and their only kiss is nonconsensual (with Zhi Chen trying to push Xiang Wan off him while Xiang Wan forces it. Zhi Chen does eventually give in, but that doesn't make Xiang Wan's actions okay.). After their forced breakup, they reunite after thirteen years and just ride off into the sunset together without talking much.
I feel like the show was trying to make a statement about how horrible homophobia is, but it went over the top without balancing the trauma with enough hope. Like, at least give poor Xu Yang scenes where we get to know what he's like as a person and not just a target for homophobes!
Also, I know not everyone is sensitive to this, but the story includes an arc about (high schooler) Xiang Wan getting out of a romantic relationship with his male teacher before he moves on to Zhi Chen, and the series doesn't portray the teacher/student relationship as predatory. If anything, it could be interpreted as portraying *Xiang Wan* as inappropriate for pursuing a married man, instead of acknowledging that his teacher is the one at fault for getting intimate with a minor in his care.
So like all around just not a lot of good vibes. Great acting and music though. Take care, y'all!
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Wish they had sent the script back for a rewrite and gotten better actors
What I liked:- A healthy, consensual main relationship between two nice, adult leads.
- Gay uncles that one of the MLs could go to for advice!
- A working-class lead, with classism addressed.
- A doctor whose schedule felt realistic, with the impact that would have on him and his relationships considered.
- Gay/straight friendship solidarity.
- Very little homophobia - these characters could be openly gay in public, and everyone was either supportive or neutral.
What I didn't like:
- The actors playing the leads couldn't really act, especially the one playing Tawan. They also appeared to be uncomfortable kissing each other. They're both supposed to be mature adults who've been in relationships before, but they barely touched lips.
- The show spent the majority of its time keeping Tawan in a relationship with his cheating boyfriend. Wish that had wrapped up quickly, so we could focus on the friends-to-lovers plot.
- Mork kept having the same epiphany that he was in love with a guy for the first time, over and over again, and every time he acted like he'd forgotten all the other times he'd realized before lol. Combining this with the last point, the show felt like it was just spinning its wheels.
- Transphobia/misgendering. We've got a version of queer utopia here where no one really cares if anyone is gay - why couldn't that have extended to the trans characters? This is a very side issue, since there were no speaking trans characters, but the double standard for trans acceptance was disappointing. (A side character has a meltdown after realizing the girl he likes is trans. He constantly misgenders her after finding out her legal gender and is told that true love doesn't care about gender. He eventually decides to continue pursuing her while still thinking of her as the wrong gender. I hated the way this was handled. Straight men like women, some of whom are trans! It doesn't make a straight man gay or bi if he likes a trans woman. In an LGBTQ+ show, especially based on material written by a gay author, I expect this to be handled better.)
- The second gay couple could have been cute, but the harassment crossed a line from "teasing the boy I like" into just being a jerk.
- The straight couple was boring, and I'm saying that as one of the people who DON'T fast-forward through the straight couples in BL. Also, the woman was kind of classist and rude to the guy.
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Beautiful production, passable acting, and lots of steamy scenes...but romanticized abuse and a weak plot.(Tw: child grooming/pedophilia discussed in next paragraph)
Let's hope the people who had the idea to combine child betrothal with an age gap just didn't think it through, because if not we've got people totally fine with child grooming and pedophilia on our hands. And even though this issue is STARING us in the face (the leads are literally shown meeting when one is an infant and the other is like...seven), it's just absolutely never addressed. Instead, we have the older ML saying things like "I've never not loved you" and "I've been waiting [to have sex with you]" to a brand-new adult to whom he has been a family friend since the guy was born. (Yes, this show made me google the age of adulthood in Thailand. Yes, I know that the age of consent is younger. That doesn't matter to me.) So these statements imply that this man who has been an adult for about seven years longer than his partner has been sexualizing him for...how long? This isn't 1815, when Jane Austen's Mr. Knightley could get away with telling Emma he fell in love with her when she was fourteen and he was twenty-something. This is 2022, when we know that sexualizing minors when you're an adult is wrong. This could have been easily avoided if the creators had just made the leads closer in age or clarified that the older ML only started to see the younger in a romantic light once he became an adult, but for some reason they just... didn't do that.
And that's not even touching on how controlling and stalker-y the older ML is, which plenty of other reviews go into detail about. The writers took the most regressive parts of heteronormativity and pasted them onto this gay relationship, with the younger ML playing the part of the naive, submissive woman who needs a man to make all her decisions for her because she can't think for herself. Then the writers tried to combine that with pro-LGBTQ advocacy messages here and there, and the result was jarring. It's nice that they care about rights for LGBTQ people, but it would have been nicer if they had actually cared to like...meet actual gay people and find out what their relationships are like before writing gay people as committed to replicating unhealthy heteronormative standards.
The writers liked the abusive dynamics in the first couple so much that they just recreated them for the second couple, with even less explanation as to why that couple has that power imbalance. And in both relationships, it's all romanticized and not challenged at all. (Commenters need to understand that Dom/sub relationships require CONSENT. Someone who's trying to control their partner and his life without his consent isn't a Dom; they're an abuser.)
Outside of the ethical issues, the plot of the show was pretty weak. It hinges entirely on the leads' lack of communication - only the younger ML discovers pretty early on that the older ML actually knows everything he's been trying to hide, but he just... decides to forget it? Like truly, if that revelation had followed out to its logical conclusion, the lack of communication could have been solved fairly quickly. Then the leads could have worked on being better, more honest partners to each other. But nonsensically, we didn't get that.
The two younger best friends had more rapport, real affection, honest communication, and (dare I say) chemistry with each other than with their older partners. Their friendship was a bright spot in this drama.
I only finished for the third couple. I was really interested in the idea of a super religious guy who sees no conflict between his religion and his sexuality, but sadly, they got little screen time.
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This movie is made for people who are already familiar with the life of Dogen Zenji - it skips from event to event throughout his life with little exposition. As someone who watched this because I am interested in learning more about Buddhism and who had not heard of Dogen Zenji before, I was left disconnected from the story and did not take much away from it. I wasn't sure WHY anything was happening; it just did, and then we skipped ahead a few more years. The positives were that the acting was solid, the music was nice, and the production had a pleasant slice-of-life approach (except for a few CGI missteps, as The Butterfly mentions in their review). The film covered some Buddhist teachings, but it didn't go as deep into them as I expected from a biopic about someone who introduced a new form of Buddhism to Japan.
Where this movie most offends me, however, and the reason that I rated it so low, is that the writer looked at the real life story of Dogen Zenji and thought, "You know what this story about a Buddhist master needs? Sex appeal!" And then they introduced one (1) female character, with no basis in history (I checked), only to show her having dubiously consensual sex and then later getting actually sexually assaulted. Obviously these scenes do not include or involve Dogen Zenji, so they're just there because the writer thought they spiced up the story. Thankfully, this female character does get her own arc and character development, but there was absolutely no reason to show those particular scenes, neither of which is addressed with the seriousness that breaches of sexual consent deserve. I'd rather have no added fictional female characters than have this kind of crass and traumatic representation. I came to this movie expecting to learn more about enlightenment and left with a sour taste in my mouth.
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Beyond Beauty, Taiwan From Above
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I was going through the list of highest-grossing domestic films in Taiwan and was really surprised to see a nature documentary tied for 15th place. I'm a big nature documentary fan myself, though that side of me hasn't crossed with MDL before, so I was excited to track it down. As someone who has only seen Western-produced nature documentaries, watching this was an eye-opening experience! The first 25 minutes of this film have about five lines of narration. Mostly, the viewer is left alone to watch aerial shots of Taiwanese nature accompanied by beautiful instrumental and folk(?) music. I'm used to there being a story or constant facts in nature documentaries, so the lack of narration was a challenge for my attention span. I decided that the director must have expected the audience to meditate on the natural beauty being shown, and since this obviously wasn't a problem for Taiwanese moviegoers, I should work out my meditative viewing skills.
After those 25 minutes, the director decided that we've meditated on nature long enough, and the narration returns to tell us how human exploitation of the land, greed, and over-consumption are causing huge environmental problems for Taiwan. This was much easier for me to get engaged with, as I greatly care about environmentalism. Even in this part, I could still feel a difference from the Western documentaries I'm used to seeing. When those tackle environmentalism, they usually focus on the need for action: "If we don't do something in X amount of years, the impact will be irreversible." The focus of this was, "Look at the harm we have done, are doing, and will do to our country unless we make changes today." So the call for action was mixed with a call for personal accountability, which I think a lot of Western documentaries shy away from because they don't want the audience to feel they're being guilted. I liked this approach. I also thought it was funny, because I read a review on Letterboxd that said this film was only advertised in Taiwan as a nature documentary and NOT an environmentalist film, so people who went to see it in theaters expecting only to feel pride in Taiwan's beauty got hit with an environmentalist message that they might have otherwise avoided.
The film ends on a hopeful note, highlighting organic farmers who are trying to live in harmony with the land, before returning to its meditative origins and showing the beautiful scenery of Taiwan accompanied by a song calling for change. I thought the ending nicely balanced out the earlier, heavier middle. The viewer is left with the feeling, "Yes, we are personally responsible for hurting our country, but we can also be personally responsible for healing it."
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Terrible production quality but the least-censored censored Chinese BL I've ever seen
(Yes, even less censored than Word of Honor)The production quality is poor. The script introduces a lot of ideas that it doesn't develop, and nothing really happens in the first half. Yuwei in particular gets little character development. The English subtitles are sometimes incomprehensible. The dubs are delayed and actors are mouthing out whole sentences that are covered with just a few words. The acting is passable but doesn't really tap into the emotional spectrum of the characters, and to top it off, the main leads don't know how to properly hold a cat.
And yet, the second half still charmed me in its own way (but I almost dropped it before then). At first, especially after seeing the comments, I thought this was going to be the typical censored Chinese BL where you have to really squint to read between the bromance lines. But Cheng Han confesses his feelings twice (2x)! Cheng Han asks Yuwei whether he wants to be "together with me," and Yuwei answers in the affirmative, puts his arm around Cheng Han, and lays his head on Cheng Han's shoulder! Cheng Han asks Yuwei to "wait for him" at the end when they go off to different colleges! How are the comments interpreting this as a bromance?! You know straight people don't talk to their friends like that. I don't understand how this made it past the censors, because these boys verbally confirmed their feelings for each other in several different scenes.
So even that was a nice treat in a Chinese show, but what I really enjoyed was the small side plot with their moms. After Yuwei's mother overhears Cheng Han's first confession, she forbids Yuwei from seeing him again (see, even she knows their relationship isn't platonic). Cheng Han's mother responds by personally going and talking to Yuwei's mother about it, telling her their sons are happier and better together. Yuwei's mother thinks about it and later tells Yuwei that having a "bosom friend" who "can light up his inner world" might be hard for him in the future, but she wants him to be happy now, so she's giving permission for them to see each other. Then she tells him to invite his bosom friend over for dinner.
Um, my heart?? Literally one of the most supportive parent plot lines I've yet to see in Asian LGBTQ film/dramas, with parents from *both* leads on board! It made me really happy.
So I wouldn't necessarily recommend this due to all the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, but it does seem like a landmark in Chinese BLs. I'm happy it got made, and I look forward to the day when having filmed media in which LGBTQ people can openly talk about their feelings and have their parents support them won't be such a rarity for China.
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We have not one but TWO genuinely nice male leads, which is refreshing. I love the focus on friendship between the four housemates. I'm really hoping Netflix renews this so we can finish the story.
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