films watched in 2025 (notes)

honestly i have been burnt out on movies for a few weeks now, always disappointed after finishing anything. this one was a pretty good distraction.

takeshi kaneshiro is so cute in this. i absolutely loved the segment of this movie that is just the retelling of chan kar-fu's novel. i enjoyed this much more than the previous kelly chen/takeshi kaneshiro movie "lost and found" from 1996.

the concept unnerved me when i was fifteen... i kind of wish this was just a more realitsic drama with a fantastical element of the stairs

you just have to love HK movies... this film looks great and is fast-paced and fun. also i like the brief dance sequences and the action set pieces, and i always adore when the soundtrack with pop/rock songs isn't just 80s synth

also i don't know why its tagged gay male lead, the 2nd/3rd most important character is gay with no ambiguity  but the main/lead character is potrayed by chow yun-fat and his characters not gay

saw the gorgeous poster and the on-the-nose title and decided to give it a try. some of the set design and imagery was as ephemeral and beautiful as the hourglass sanatorium. fairly good

the title slowly becomes an insignificant premies as the 'plot' carries on. i really admire the poster, but its yet another case of the beautiful dress on the cover/poster not being anywhere in the movie.

i was caught off guard and disturbed by the ripping off of the high school girl's uniform, and cat death...  the appeal was a wide assortment of action setpieces.

also, characters played by toru nakamura seem to just emit a love-at-first-sight beam, huh?..

not a terrible way to spend 70 minutes. i have a soft spot for single-location movies and some of the details about what just happened to be in the house was interesting. it would probably feel more fulfilling watching it when i was younger, but what can you do.

i'm not a huge fan of watching kpop behind the scenes stuff, but i feel like you can get just as much out of a music video behind the scenes clip, where they just talk about how they've been awake for 40+ hours waiting for each next shot to be set up... 

to not sugarcoat it, i think that my enjoyment was majorly hindered by the scenes irrelevant to the main plot. i.e. i hated every scene with koji yakusho, especially the egg yolk scene. truly i felt sick watching it. 

the majority of the non-sequitor scenes were about how food can be made sexual, (or is inherently sexual,) and then to have the ending/credits be an extremely slow extreme zoom-in on a woman actively breastfeeding, as if to say that its the pinnacle of food being sexy... just not my cup of tea.

also, theres some device in this movie thats also in marquis de sade, its something that involves a man opening his mouth wide as some kind of steam is being pushed into his mouth via some glass mechanism. i have no idea how to figure out what this is or what the purpose is...

not a bad movie at all, doesn't overstay its welcome in any aspect/subplot.  *BUT* since every little piece of the future/second day is choreographed in the first day, and most of the lines in the script aren't trying to stray too far from the premise, its hard to 'forget' what the movie sets up. 

the movie is much more simple than other spinning plates movies. for example, the movie "nosies off" must have a screenplay that's at least 5x as long as this one, to the point that it would be understandable if the viewer of that movie forgot about certain things that were set up as "could go wrong", until they actually did go wrong.