I love watching Kent Cheng

This is a comedy drama and I just love watching Kent Cheng in action. He has always been great to watch act, and here in this role he is witty, smart, experienced and really had great comedic timing. He stars as a wealthy business man that has a highly dysfunctional family with a son that won’t listen to him, a girlfriend who he won’t marry and a daughter who hides stuff from him. One of the best scenes was when he finds his daughter, played by Kelly Fu, living in poverty in Hong Kong because she divorced her cheating husband - a husband Kent forced on her - and when Kent finds out he sarcastically replied, “Such a small problem and you never told me?” Just pure gold!

Kent’s quips are also on point, just so sharp and with no hesitation and he doesn’t filter his emotions either. Watching his interaction with each member of the cast is just so funny, especially with Edwin Siu and Archie Sin.

The main driving plot so far is that Kent was abducted and was threatened by his kidnappers to give them money or else. They even threw in a line “someone in your family made us do this”, to which Kent grew suspicious of everybody in his inner circle. Episode 5 brings this plot point to a “conclusion” but Kent is not convinced so this is still the main drive of the plot.

So far a very entertaining drama. I can’t wait for more episodes next week!

Episode 6-12: Kent will a still on top of his game. All the best scenes have him in it and when Edwin Siu is with him and they banter back and forth it is just extra special. The story so far has some twists and turns but as this is a comedy, it doesn’t go too insane. The abduction is now old news and no longer a driving plot point.

The biggest stereotype this drama throws out there was how the IT guy could do everything to do with computing. Hacking, Photoshop, video editing… the IT guy could do it all. And the best part was that he was the ONLY IT guy in the entire company. I know that this is just a comedy so it was done for comedic reasons and as a plot driving device, yet I kept shaking my head at the ridiculousness when everybody went up to him with all problems related to using a computer. This is like expecting a baker to know how to fix an oven when it breaks and how to make a Consommé.

Amy Fan, for now, is by far the most annoying character in the series for me. Damn, her character just sucks. So much nonsense is caused by her and her… secret son? I hope she gets her just desserts.

Episodes 13-17: man I am getting so sick of the love themes in the drama. Edwin Siu and Kelly Fu have a love theme sang by Edwin himself but it is an awful song that sounds like Edwin is trying to summon a demon through a straw. Then we have Archie Sin and Yuki Law who have a romance going in the drama and they also have a love theme that is sang by both of them. The song is a cover of a classic and the both of them butcher it, like just ruin it with their incompetent singing. Both love themes play almost every time the couples are onscreen and when there is a pause during their conversations that it not only becomes predictable but also incredibly annoying. What on earth was the sound producer thinking?

Amy Fan is the girlfriend of Kent in this drama but she keeps acting all chummy and friendly to this guy played by Felix Ng. I’ve waited ages to find out what relationship they have because they act like they were having an affair behind Kent’s back but are never given a chance to explain. Later we get a chance to find out when Kelly asked her what exactly their relationship was, but Amy refused to reveal it saying “what does it matter?” It matters to the viewers dammit! Don’t tell me you are mother and son and it’s “normal” for you guys to act like that? Geez just reveal it already!

One thing that did change for me though was the most annoying character was no longer Amy but Raymond Cho. As the character of the son to Kent, he is rude to employees, feckless and idiotic and doesn’t listen to his father’s wisdom. Instead he made so many stupid decisions that his father had to help him get out of, and later for some stupid reason he teams up with his father’s competitor to teach his father a lesson, even stealing an important document his father could use to defend himself against a false claim of recipe plagiarism. What son would do that purposely to their own father? Wtf? When Kent decided to teach his son a lesson by making him bankrupt I was fully onboard. Raymond can get stuffed! What a stupid character.

Final update: what just happened? I watched the final 3 episodes and I am still getting over how bad the ending is. Yuki Law - as the granddaughter of Kent Cheng but not really - did a sudden heel turn and took over Kent’s business when Kent signed over everything to her as insurance when he went for heart bypass surgery. Yuki took this opportunity to take over the entire company and made huge changes, fired a bunch of people and even took over the main home. Her excuse was that she knew she was not really Kent’s granddaughter since she was 8 and she was only doing what her grandfather taught her.

Suddenly, in the final episode we find out that Yuki was only doing it to teach her grandfather a lesson so he would change and for the family to get back together again because the conflict within was pulling all members apart. Why did she decide to do it all of a sudden? Because - and get this - she was reading an online novel written by some Korean called Harry Park, that just so happened to be about a family in the same situation they were in, so Yuki thought that by following the plot of the novel it would also solve the issues in her family. Wtf? And this somehow works! After Kent finds out about this, he quickly accepted it and all is well. Do you know what a real old cranky Chinese man would do in real life? Curse the granddaughter because that is some BS you don’t do to your family.

I know this is supposed to be a happy ending but come on, this is so contrived and out of left field that it requires effort to write something this bad purposely. If it wasn’t for Kent this drama would be a steaming pile of crap.

And Raymond Cho stilled sucked at the end. Man, his character is so lame.

Read More

Was expecting more

I am a huge fan of the original anime, so when this was announced for Netflix I was hyped!

And then it was released.

Dammit, I wanted to like it so much but the Netflix series ruined a lot of the good stuff with the anime. I liked the actor playing Yusuke, he was likeable, but they took huge liberties with the story to squeeze as much as they could into 5 episodes. They took many of the beginning arcs and stripped them down and tried to squeeze them into 5 episodes. Why? Was it a budget thing? They completed skipped some important character development arcs such as the Genkai Tournament, the 4 Saint Beasts, and the best arc the Dark Tournament. For example, instead of Yusuke earning a place as Genkai’s student, he is just taken to her home in the mountains and starts training.

The action scenes were really good for sure, but they butchered all the great character development and stories that made Yu Yu Hakusho great to begin with.

Read More

Just watch the original

This is a remake of the original that had the legendary Julian Cheung, Steven Ma, Charmaine Sheh and Nancy Sit. Here we have… yeah…

The remake sucks. This is the short version of the review. The best thing about the drama is the music, but this is only because it is a cover of the original song, sang by Hubert Wu. There is also a cover version where Hubert sang the cover with his co-stars Regina Ho and Joey Law, and let’s just say you should stick with the Hubert only version because those two cannot sing. Hot dang they cannot sing.

The story almost follows the original beat for beat except that it is based in Hong Kong and has a variety of changes to keep things “fresh”, but honestly it is terrible. Hubert does well as the mute Man Cho and Mai Suet was great as Sa Kiu, but holy crap what were the casting crew doing putting Regina Ho as Kwan Ho and Joey Law as Sito Lai Sun? They are just awful! Especially Joey Law, that guy has one expression that he uses in every role he has been in and it gets real old real fast. It is like watching a wooden board flopping in the wind every time he was onscreen; I’ve seen more emotion coming from a pomelo than from him.

I found Charmaine’s Kwan Ho annoying in the original series and put up with it because it was offset with the always charming Julian Cheung, but here Regina’s Kwan Ho was just goddamn unbearable. She was better outfitted than the original character for sure, but her high pitch whiney voice and acting just got on my nerves. She made Charmaine’s Kwan Ho look like a Goddess.

Some of the changes were things I wanted in the original like Kwan Ho not being with Sito Lai Sun and instead staying and being with Man Cho, but one of the changes was a massive sin against the original and I will never rewatch this drama again because of it. Man Cho manages to regain his ability to speak in the original, and he does so here as well with Hubert speaking about 2/3 the way through, but while the original kept his ability to speak, the remake decided to give Man Cho sudden throat cancer - wtf - so he had to go mute again. They did Man Cho real dirty here and I found it inexcusable. I think the TVB writers were trying to balance the “you get Kwan Ho but you must lose your voice” but I think that’s bullshit. Man Cho already had a tragic back story, he didn’t need that extra blow. No, this remake can get stuffed

Read More

Disappointing

As this was a Youku joint production with TVB, I knew to expect the typical Youku grim-dark grey sombre tone they love to slather all over their dramas, and yes, it's here. As soon as episode 1 started, it was just full of pure grim-dark seedy Hong Kong undertones.

I don't hate this drama at all, don't get me wrong. It has Moses Chan as a terminal cancer sufferer who was locked up for drug dealing, and after over a decade in prison,wants to spend his last remaining time alive dealing even more drugs. Then we have Nancy Wu being this strange shades-of-grey character that has us guessing if she is helping Moses or not. Then we have the police officer played by Edwin Siu, who has mild brain damage so is unable to feel emotions properly, which really frustrates his ex-girlfriend played by Kelly Cheung, who still has feelings for him. It is all great acting and I enjoyed it a lot. What ruins the entire drama is Matthew Ho's character and how some of the writing just makes no darn sense.

Oh yeah, there will be spoilers, so just warning you.

Matthew Ho plays this mute food delivery guy that communicates using Hong Kong sign language. This was great, I thought, because we wouldn't have to hear Matthew speaking, because I do find his acting rather terrible. He always plays the same role of "oblivious idiot is oblivious", but they added voiceovers spoken by him to let us know what he is saying anyway. That's pretty normal for mute characters on TVB though, so that is not my complaint. My complaint is that it seems every single person, for reasons unknown, cares a lot about him a lot for NO REASON. It makes no sense why they all care about him so much as there were no events that had Matthew do stuff to make them indebted to him. Instead, they just somehow slowly grew protective of him over the course of the drama, and I kept wondering if I had missed any episodes where these people owed him... but no!

For example, Rosita Kwok's character grew up with him so her caring about him I understand, but later we see the reporter Bowie Cheung suddenly caring a lot about him. Why? And then we had Moses Chan's Man Wah who meets him once after Nancy Wu introduced them, and then suddenly - out of the blue - Moses claims he treats Matthew like family and wants to give him all this stuff to help him. Why did that happen and when? And everybody learns sign language in record time to be able to read his hand signs.

And the thing that broke the character for me was when his kid sister was kidnapped and is later accidentally killed due to a plan gone wrong. The cause is related to Moses and yet somehow Matthew - who knew Moses was involved - is completely okay with the guy and even speaks to him soon after while calling him a friend. Dude... your sister died because of that man, what is wrong with you?

One great thing about the drama though is the great main theme song. Dang, that is one cool canto metal track, but it can't make me put the score higher than a 6 out of 10 overall. Matthew Ho ruins it.

Read More

A great drama!

Yes it has all the typical forced and contrived relationship nonsense in there but man I really liked this drama. I loved the odd combination of Rosina Lam and Kalok Chow, but it works. I also loved David Chiang turning up in his Al Cappuccino role for a a few minutes and then immediately putting him into the dad role, that was unexpected but quite lighthearted fun.

The pets they used were really well trained. In the entertainment business it is said that there are two things you should try to avoid giving dialogue if possible, very young children and animals, and yet here the animals were great especially the golden retriever. But what I found really weird was how all the animals could understand each other, a dog could chat to a cat and parrot, and yet cannot understand human speech. If we as humans cannot understand foreign languages then how do animals of different species understand each other? The Chinese do have the saying “duck and chicken talking” meaning they speak but so not understand each other, so I found it really weird. The dubbing is also weird as the animals do not move their mouths, almost as if it was telepathy.

The thing that made me laugh the most was how the golden retriever was said to have the mental acuity of a child, maybe 5 years old, but somehow in its dubbed dialogue it can throw out profound and complex poetry, and yet on the other hand doesn’t know what a flip phone is. This just adds to the ridiculousness of the entire show and it was hilarious.

I recommend this show purely for the silliness or if it all, and the show knows it is silly and embraces it.

Read More

What happened?

Part 1 had its problems and was not bad as it had a real gripping ending, but part 2… what were the writers thinking?

I don't know how important CSAT exams are, but this exam is one of the driving plot points of part 2. What makes no sense is that humanity faces extinction and yet all these kid could think about was getting into college. I am sure there are more important things to worry about than college entry at a time like that. This becomes such a central plot point that one of the characters literally goes insane after finding out the 2023 CSAT exams were cancelled and were to be held in 2024. This leads to the drama ending not to a final showdown against the alien threat, but the final boss being this kid who has gone insane and had somehow activated god-mode in his final rampage.

The ending was anti-climatic and skips ahead to 2024 where humanity has wiped out 99% of the menace so had the threat under control. Okay... so we are supposed to imagine the final desperate struggle and not be shown it? Instead we were given teenaged angst drama with automatic rifles? Sure.

Read More

I won't rewatch this

Jessica Hsuan and Frankie Lam are great in this series. The history of their characters stories is really quite traumatic if I am honest, and Frankie always being the thoughtful mature guy to the really insecure Jessica really grated on my nerves but it all ended ok. However, I refuse to watch it again. Why? One word. Cherry. F*** Cherry. Natalie Tong really made the character this hateful witch I just wanted to strangle, and that ladt scene with poor Vincent... nope. Unforgivable! How was that character written that way ans allowed to win awards? The awards were rigged!

Read More

Great drama, terrible main theme song

I love this drama, always puts a smile on my face.
It’s a shame Linda Chung cannot sing.
It has a fantastic cast and great story that is just fun and gripping from beginning to end.
But Linda Chung really cannot sing.
Bobby Au Yeung is fantastic to watch and Joey Meng is darn beautiful in her role, it just blows my mind.
And yet Linda Chung just really cannot sing at all.
Overall a great drama to watch and great to rewatch, just remember to skip the intro and ending credits because the singing is terrible.
Did I mention Linda Chung cannot sing?
Seriously, who thought she could sing and allowed her to sing so many songs at TVB? She has this low hoarse voice that makes songs sound like they are being wrung out of her throat instead of being sung, and yet somebody at TVB thought “yes, she can sing, make her sing!”
Other than that small black mark, great show! Just stop Linda singing, for the love of God.

Read More

This is a pretty good show but one thing ruins it for me

I’ll admit, I loved the first Big White Duel season, so I was hoping for more awesomeness in this. I suspended my disbelief for some of the miraculous surgeries carried out in this drama by the amazing cast, and I can ignore some of the small plotholes it presents, but one thing I could mot forgive is Natalie Tong. Why does she nearly always play a dumb character in these dramas? I really, really hated her character Cherry in My Unfair Lady and how she treated Vincent Wong I wanted to throw my teacup at my TV, and here she does it again by being an unbelievable idiot that it blows my mind. In the drama it shows she made some past decisions that were extremely childish and selfish, and in the present day while dating Kenneth Ma’s character Dr. Tong Ming, she again makes stupid decisions that lead to her misfortune - her own fault - and she decides to just be friends with Tong Ming. Like wtf? This show should he an 8 or 9, but her character pulls it down to a 7.

Read More

Anthology of 3 short movies, 2 of which disappoint

This movie is an anthology of 3 short movies. The first is called The Chink that talks about a pop star who moves into a new apartment as a secret love nest for her and her boyfriend slash manager. The second is called In The Mall following a KOL live streaming while walking around. The third and last movie is called The Tenement dealing with a rain soaked mysterious woman blocking the way for the residents of an apartment block.

The first two short movies are terrible and boring af, I did not care what was happening to the characters because they were all huge a**holes and deserved what they got. This is a shame because the second movie had Jerry Lamb in it, and I do enjoy watching him act but he was so unlikeable here.

Now, the last movie is the best of the bunch as it has a group of apartment block strangers working together to deal with this strange wet figure blocking the stairway that seems to be kill anybody trying to leave the block. This movie had Richie Ren in it and it was so great to see him in a cantonese acting role doing his best to speak canto, and most of the funny and scariest moments were here as well, but sadly the ending was too abrupt due to the time constraints of the anthology.

The first two movies were so bad that I cannot rate them because it would just be a zero, but the 3rd short movie on its own pulls this up to a 6. If the third movie was able to become its own feature, this score could have been higher, but the bad aftertaste of the first 2 dragged it down.

Read More

What drugs were they taking to make this?

Man, as I have seen the previous Flying Tiger I knew what to expect from this formulaic series, but I was not prepared for the new depths of suspended disbelief I had to sit through. Many big TVB names are here like Kenneth Ma and Michael Miu, and my favourite wonky canto actor Michael Wong was in it as well speaking in his unique way, but this is all ruined by the inclusion of Lee Pace. Don't mistaken me, Lee is a great actor and has done amazing stuff, but h is completely wasted here in this series. Some scenes with him had me go "what the fish?" because it made no sense, like throwing a can of... I think shaving cream... into a microwave, which destroys a house. That had me laughing so hard! And when Lee Pace's character sees his parents die, the shots to show how sad he was was done so poorly I had to shake my head, and I never do that, and he gets over his parents death so quickly I got massive whiplash. Also, talking about his parents, the terrorists of the drama held his parents hostage so that Lee's character would comply to their demands, but before Lee could carry out any instructions the terrorists kill them anyway, losing any leverage they had on him, and yet he continued to follow their instructions. What sort of writing is that? Man, there is suspension of disbelief, but here you need to be suspended by a cliff to follow this properly.

On the bright side, great soundtrack.

Read More

Not as good as part 1, but still a fun movie to watch

Ah it is great to see another movie with Janice Man in it being all pretty while also authoritative, loved seeing her back in this movie. What lowered the score of part 2 for me was that it missed Donnie Yen, and that was a crying shame due to how awesome he was in part 1. What also brought down the score was how rushed everything felt in part 2 as well. They should have made it into a trilogy to better pace the story of each arc. However, this is offset but the fact that the canto voice actor for Zhou Zhi Ruo finally stopped sucking on helium and actually adds depth to her voice acting thanks to the evil turn of the character. That was a massive relief for me as I watched this flick.

The final boss of this movie is Cheng Kun, which made sense if you followed the both parts and watched how he sneakily manipulated his way to power, but man the fight at the end could have been done a little better. There is more CG this time around as well, which appeared a little off at times but never to the point where it distracted too much from the main story. A good movie and rewatchable.

Read More

I loved this movie

I watched this in Cantonese because if I was gonna enjoy this movie, it was going to be in Canto! Comparisons to the original Jet Li movie is unavoidable, but this movie is - in my opinion - entertaining af. Seeing Louis Koo in ancient chinese outfits was a great throwback to his TVB days, and Donnie Yen as the awesome Zhang San Feng was great as well as we rarely see Donnie as an old and invincible martial artist. I don't know why people are complaining about Raymond Lam being too old for the role, the film makes it very clear his character is in his thirties, and Raymond easily passes for someone in his thirties. Sure it does't follow the books 100%, but this is a movie and not a TV drama, therefore some liberties had to be taken.

Although I had fun watching this film, what annoyed me the most was the canto voice actor for Zhou Zhi Ruo. Hot dang, was she sucking on helium or something, I really hated the voice acting on her. On the opposite end, I was enamored by the actress Janice Man as Zhao Min, she is a fierce looking beauty that had me enjoying the scenes she had as she shared them with Raymond Lam. Her voice actor also did a great job as well, providing authority in her voice.

Read More

What a pile of crap

The only redeeming feature of this movie is Philip Keung in the third story, but even then the story is really weak and the only scary thing was the terrible script Philip was given to work with. He did his best but it was as immersive as a dirty toilet bowl.

The first story involved two friends, one who wanted to be a screenwriter and one who wanted to be a director. They go to a special props shed with many preserved animals, where the scriptwriter writes this amazing serial murder script and wants to be the director of the movie. The aspiring director gets upset at this and claims the screenwriter was being selfish, there is a scuffle, and the screenwriter predictably dies. Aspiring director guy panics and, predictably, he put the screenwriter’s body into a suitcase and pours formaldehyde all over him to preserve the body. The director guy later is able to make the movie using his friends script but then oh no, the cops ask him questions about his missing screenwriter buddy. He claims he hasn’t seen his friend in months and realises the cops are gonna find the location where he killed his friend so decides to go back to burn the place down. This is when - somehow - he discovers his screenwriter buddy had murdered 3 people in different ways as inspiration for his script and had the bodies hidden around the prop shed, which he somehow also discovers. Plot twist, the screenwriter wanted to be the director because he knew it would be the first and last film he would make as he would be arrested soon after it. Oh no, I don’t care.

The story was boring and the deaths were all so crap and had no stakes at all so I didn’t care what happened to anybody. I didn’t even care about the two male leads because they were so unlikeable as well. My biggest issue with this story is that a few months have passed already since all the murders, but when the director guy finds the bodies they are all still fresh and not rotting at all. Do you think corpses stay fresh for months and not rot when stored in the Hong Kong heat? I don’t care how much cling film you use and formaldehyde you use, no body can look that fresh for that long. Also, won’t some dude who doesn’t work as an undertaker be refused purchasing of large quantities of formaldehyde? I am sure you need a lot for 4 cadavers. And also that suitcase where the screenwriter was thrown into must have been made using some legendary material because it was clearly a cloth-like material suitcase and yet none of the formaldehyde leaked out, not even through the zipper gaps. They should have gotten a suitcase sponsorship to promote how great the waterproofing was inside and outside.

The 2nd movie was a slightly better story about 2 girls as aspiring screenwriters (see a trend here?) and the younger girl copying some of the ideas of the older girl to write a great screenplay. The older girl was slightly upset about it, but ultimately let it go. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the younger girl goes missing and the older girl starts seeing the younger girl and thinks she’s a ghost. Oh no! We find out later the younger girl got into a taxi and the taxi driver murdered her because… I dunno. The older girl was hypnotised to try and bring back any useful information about what could have happened to the younger girl. The taxi guy just so happened to work at the same studio as the older girl so he tried to silence her. Suddenly, as the older girl was riding in his taxi and realised the taxi man was likely the murderer, the cops arrive and arrest him. Older girl’s colleague appears and says “yeah I totally suspected him so I called the cops.”

My biggest issue with the 2nd story is that we do not get given any context into why the taxi driver killed the younger girl. We do not truly understand his motivation, the story just goes “oh she died he killed her” and that’s it. We get one scene where taxi man talks to his wife and his wife shouts at him for a variety of things, as if it was trying to imply he was looking for a way to release his pent up anger but it wasn’t enough and I wasn’t convinced. And the “ghost” situations were all in the older girls mind as a result of hypnotism. That was lame.

The third story is the best of the bunch but that’s not saying much, that’s like saying the diahrrea I did today was better than the diahrrea I did yesterday. This is the story that has Philip Keung, who wakes up on a wet floor with temporary amnesia. As he runs around this warehouse he keeps seeing ghostly figures appearing and disappearing around him. Eventually he meets a woman and starts talking to her as if he was very familiar with her but she won’t follow him as he is trying to make her leave with him due to the ghosts that were there. She eventually goes with him and in a room where he saw a ghost there was no ghost there, so she tries to leave and kicks Philip in the balls using a very fake and terribly unconvincing manner. Later we discover Philip was a triad boss and his wife wanted to leave him, so he killed his wife and poured acid all over her body so she wouldn’t leave him, and then be became a vagrant out of guilt. Later some guys drugged him and his friend and took them to a warehouse to conduct illegal experiments as a way to cure this disfigured and ill woman at the behest of some guy. Philip woke up and killed a lot of the people at the warehouse out of anger and passed out due to being injected with something during one of the scuffles. All the ghost stuff and the woman he was talking to were all in his head as he was recovering from the injection. He catches up to the disfigured woman and is about to lill her when all of a sudden someone smacks him at the back of the head and kills him and the story ends.

Story 3 was a confusing mess and what illegal experiments were being conducted to fix what ailment of the woman? Nothing is explained. The story started off pretty good as Philip was dealing with possible supernatural stuff, but it immediately fell in quality the moment the woman - as his hallucinated wife - kicked him between the legs. It was poorly edited and looked incredibly fake that it took me out of the immersion immediately and the rest of the story just fell apart.

Avoid this mess of a movie.

Read More

The CGI is pretty good but this drama is so full of things that annoyed me.

It started off pretty well and gave us enough exposition to explain the current situation, but suddenly stuff goes sideways and we see how inept and pathetic the Republic of Korea Armed Forces were. They are so undermanned that they had to rope in 3rd year High School students to help fill in the numbers.

Now these kids.... they make some really stupid decisions that had me asking if any group of rational people would make the same decisions they did. And some scenes made no sense, like in one scene they were stuck in a garage and the danger was coming in through the roof but the car keys were stuck behind a cabinet. They made it very clear it would be in any moment and yet found 10 minutes to draw lots to determine who would be bait and lure it away so somebody could try to grab the keys... the same amount of time they could have easily moved the cabinet and grabbed the keys! That is just one of many idiotic moments that had me cursing at my TV.

Best moment is the huge sacrifice at the end. Really emotional and was a great way to end part 1.

Read More