Movies: Legend of Hei 2, 青春18X2, Love Letter, Resurrection
Legend of Hei 2 (2025): Enjoyed this SO much more 1) as a rewatch, 2) on the big screen. Not only was I forced to focus, I could also see the narrative structure more clearly and filter the plot through the correct PoV (Luye's). Everything makes so much more sense if you take this as a road trip movie for Xiao Hei and a character journey for Luye who's lost so much and loves so much, both of them meeting halfway through Wuxian—but still not really seeing eye to eye. I love them so much!!! I apologize for my hater comments last year, I just really wanted to see more cat!Hei. I mean, that's my son.
18x2 Beyond Youthful Days: Oh, I loved this. Lighting was gorgeous. Timelines (past and present) were easily distinguishable by color grading and styling—Daisy and Helena, whom I previously watched Someday or One Day with, noted that they use the same visual shorthand of putting glasses on Greg Hsu to age him up. Well, if it works, it works. XD
I was really skeptical about this at first (as Daisy can attest) because I'm iffy about cross-cultural soul-searchy romances, but this movie understood that the romance and the soul-searching were just facets of the human experience and that the only way to understand the world was to live in it. Rather than being a destination, love is portrayed as being part of the journey to becoming who you could be. To the characters, love was a possibility, a path out of themselves, appearing when a connection was made. Honestly a 5/5 movie for me, I'm sorry I doubted you lol.
PS. One of my hand-written journal notes says "Certainly it's hard not to notice how men have the privilege of being adventurous (sic)". XD And the duality of Greg Hsu’s character being a Slam Dunk fan who reads Hana Kimi to increase his emotional range was inspired. Bro was getting two flavors of sports feelings and becoming a well-rounded young adult as a result. One of us! One of us!
Love Letter (1995): An epistolary movie about grief, memory, and coincidences of similarity: When Watanabe Hiroko's fiancé Itsuki Fujii dies in a hiking accident, she writes him a letter and mails it to his hometown. She gets a letter back from a different Itsuki Fujii. An Itsuki Fujii who... looks almost exactly like herself?
Watched this because it was referenced in 青春18X2. It's a really nice play on memory where the audience only gets to know boy!Itsuki through how the other characters remember him. I've been having a lot of anxious thoughts about, among other things, the flimsiness of my own existence. There's this one scene where a white curtain billows in the wind, and boy!Itsuki disappears behind it. It’s probably a visual reminder of his death, but it's pretty much how I feel about myself, one careless gust of wind away from vanishing completely. Anyway [kicks depressive thoughts under the bed] it's a lovely movie about grief and healing from emotional trauma and remembering.
Content warnings: death, loss, medical emergencies
Resurrection | 狂野時代 (2025): Definitely a movie to see in the theater... And the third thing I've seen this month that had Mark Chao in it 😂
Resurrection is a love letter to cinema nested in a science fiction story about a world where people who have the ability to dream are an endangered category. Shu Qi finds one such dreamer and mercifully sends him into deep sleep. He dreams through time, in the language of movies, and the audience sits back and pays vigil. Each short film is of a different style and genre, and each represents a significant period in Chinese history as well as one of the five senses: a silent movie about opium (sight), crime/noir about musical madness (sound, so much sound, it actually made me appreciate the theater sound system), a folk tale about a former monk and the Spirit of Bitterness (taste), a con adventure about a thief and a little orphan girl (smell), and a doomsday romance (touch).
Overall: Not really my thing as I prefer my movies driven by characters and not concepts and I don't actually care about the ~spirit of cinema~ (sorry!), but it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do in a very artsy way and I liked the entire theater experience of it. The soundscaping was crazy, definitely pushed the boundaries of my expectations. My favorite film segment is the one with the father-daughter con for being very cohesive and tropey.
Content warnings: drugs, violence, torture