Used up all my creative juice for the Indonesian movie, so just 3 will suffice and I choose these 3…
100 Yen Love (2014), I wanted to see because I saw the Chinese remake YOLO recently and I was very curious to see how Jia Ling adapted the movie. This post will be full of spoilers. If you have an intention to watch any of the movies do skip this part.
32-year-old Ichiko (Sakura Ando) lives at home with her parents, passing the days in self-indulgent grunginess. Ichiko’s recently divorced younger sister Fumiko has moved back home with her young son. One day, after a particularly heated argument, Ichiko charges out of the house for good. With few employment options to support herself, Ichiko works the night shift at a 100 yen shop (dollar store). On her way home each day she passes a boxing gym where she watches Yuji Kano (Hirofumi Arai) silently practice, developing a crush on him. The pair starts seeing each other and things change for Ichiko… At last, the bell rings and longtime loser Ichiko’s rematch with life begins!
The initial difference one would notice is the tone. If YOLO is a drama-comedy, 100 Yen Love is on the other end of the spectrum. It’s a sheer downer, grungy and not pretty to look at. There is comedy but it’s a lot darker. The poor girl even got raped. It more or less follows the same emotional beats, but Ichiko isn’t a fat slob like Le Ying, more like a lazy layabout with no direction in life and boxing gives her that. I like that she works in a 100 Yen shop and the irony is perfect. There is a line she uttered that hit me hard. She says she is worth 100 yen and she doesn’t deserve anything better than that. Let that sink in. There is no enlightenment, just a full realisation she is worth nothing. When she eventually works her ass off for a boxing tournament, you will feel and root for her. YOLO does it like any sport genre movie – training montages are portrayed as entertainment and inspiration (YOLO even uses the Rocky theme for good measure), 100 Yen Love doesn’t do that – nothing about her training montages are flashy. It’s a one-woman against herself and the world. She wants to win just one time because she wants to know she is worth something.
The final boxing match is portrayed more or less the same way for both movies, but Jia Ling has a cool sequence that furnishes her character with the motivation for punishing her body to the extreme. It is the ending that differs for both movies. YOLO portrays Le Ying as a woman who has found her self-worth and she runs off into the night saying no to dinner with her ex-boyfriend. 100 Yen Love’s ending has Ichiko crying in front of her ex and she utters pitifully: “I wanted to win so much”. I don’t know man… I really didn’t like that and it was the same sentiment with 3 other friends who saw it with me. Ichiko continues to sob as she walks home with her ex. The ending felt so counter-productive and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Then I met my friend who lent me the blu-ray and we got to talking about the ending and I saw light from his point of view. He said that the Japanese movie has never gone round to portray a Hollywood type of sunset ending and it shows you the cold hard truth. The truth is that sometimes hard work doesn’t equal success. Sure, at that moment Ichiko is feeling like she is nothing but she will come to realise she is a different person from the one before she took up boxing. Sometimes it is about the process rather than the end product. I like what my friend shared. In that sense, Ichiko’s story is not over and her future is bright. (3.5/5)
I wanted to like Monkey Man (2024) more, but too many bad choices prevented that from happening.
Dev Patel plays an anonymous young man who unleashes a campaign of vengeance against the corrupt leaders who murdered his mother and continue to systemically victimize the poor and powerless.
This is one-man army action film. I have nothing against that. If done well, it will make me want to step into the movie and help the protagonist pummel the scumbags to hell. But writer-director Dev Patel in his directorial debut mistakes shaky cam, quick cuts and disorienting pans for great storytelling. The movie doesn’t subscribe to the adage “less is more” and even doubles down on “style over substance”. There are some great character moments but before we can become emotionally vested in his plight and character motivation, a quick cut will curtail the emotional impact to become a soft whimper.
The movie is very aware of the comparison to John Wick and it will mention its illustrious partner early on. Oh… there’s also a cute doggie. I can see Patel favouring kinetics and vibrancy, but the camerawork is so shaky that I couldn’t see what was going on during the action sequences. The violence is gratuitous – at first it looks amazing, but after the umpteenth violent scene it feels the movie only knows one way to depict violence. Let’s not even talk about all the one-note characters.
I really appreciated Dev Patel’s intention to write, act and direct the movie. In a snippet of an interview, he mentioned that the Indian actor is always stereotyped in Hollywood and can never be the hero in an action movie. So he decided to make that happen for actors of his race. I feel he has succeeded to a certain extent but I wish it had been a better and stronger film that will open doors to Indian actors. The movie just manages to stay afloat because of the charisma of Dev Patel. (3/5)
Zhang Yimou’s Article 20 (2024) is a Chinese New Year offering and in a busy movie schedule in China it has come out tops.
The namesake of the film title refers to a clause in China’s Criminal Law which permits an individual to take action to prevent harm from happening to themselves or others without facing punishment. Before you start thinking it’s a clear cut law, think about how intense you can defend yourself or others until you become guilty of a crime. The law has rarely been enforced successfully in the courts of law, despite being in place since 1979. Article 20 is a social drama in a sense and it has the noble aim of tackling this contentious issue. It will take all the humanism, political tact and bureaucracy know-how of Zhang Yimou to make the heavy subject accessible (to the masses and the government) and rousing.
Prosecutor Han Ming (Lei Jiayin) longs to take it easy but he is under increasing personal and professional strain. He is thrust with the difficult case of Wang Yongqiang (Yu Hewei) who is accused of murdering the man who raped his deaf-mute wife Hao Xiuping (Zhao Liying). On the home front, Han’s teenage son Yuchen’s academic future is in the wind when he injured the school bully while protecting a fellow student. To make matters worse, the bully’s father is the Dean (Zhang Yi). Han persuades Yuchen to apologise, but his wife Li Maojuan (Ma Li) insists their som did nothing wrong and does not need to apologise.
Then there is also Han Ming’s lead prosecutor and ex-flame Lu Lingling (Gao Ye) who is the spanner in the works. Their methods clashed, leading to much friction.
The subject matter is deathly serious, but Zhang manages to bring so much hilarity to the proceedings, especially in the first two acts. The strength of the movie is the stellar ensemble cast which includes actors who have worked with Zhang in 6 movies in 5 years. I love watching the verbal sparring and jousting between Lei and Ma. The animated banter is hilarious and how they poke each other with words is funny with arguments easily going off on farcical tangents. There are so many double-entendres that I was swimming luxuriously in them. The chemistry between them is so natural. They might be at loggerheads with each other, but their love for each other is undeniable.
Then it started to get real serious. The change in tone is at first jarring but it kind of reflects how fast funny news can become angry retorts in a flash of an eye in social media.
The last act in the court room goes too overboard for my taste with Han holding court and delivering a Braveheart-like didactic speech about how the law should be about protecting the innocent and not finding guilt in them for administering rightful street justice. The message felt jackhammered into my consciousness and Zhang doesn’t know when to stop when he is ahead. Will it change the courts of law? I think the jury is still out with that. It feels more like a fairytale wish of an ending. Only time will tell if the message has been embedded in the people. (3.5/5)
Reel Thoughts 