Reviews

I came across this one accidentally browsing amazon instant video. I had little idea what I was expecting except the cast. At first, I thought it was one of the very old (90's) gangster movies by Ekin Cheng and Jordan Chan. It took me a while to realize that it is a rather recent movie.

As a HK born native (though no longer lives there), I found the dialog very witty and can imagine how most dialog cannot be well translated. So I can understand the relatively poor reception from non-Cantonese speakers. Probably people outside HK will also have difficulty to appreciate some of the references. For example, it did some on-going blatant reference to the controversial election system in HK. Probably only locals will find that funny.

Overall, it is an entertaining movie (if you are from HK). Despite predictable, the script is well written with believable twist.

I guess many try to relate this to the original from genshiki and were disappointed. I only watched the first episode of the original ova and I didn't watch genshiki. Comparing to the first episode of the ova, the quality of this TV series is actually much better in every aspect. In any case, 5.4 stars is outrageous underrate. As a short series, I found it very enjoyable and actually is even better than many recently over rated series (no. 6 and anohana, for example). The ending itself is quite predictable (honestly, very few animes are not predictable these days) but is handled cleverly. It is probably quite hard to remake the same ending better than the current last episode. As always, Tsutomu Mizushima is very skillful in using background to tell a good story indirectly. There are light jokes over the entire series but they don't go overboard. It keeps a consistent slightly dark mood and I think it suits this series a lot. One can see the shadow of Mizushima's directing especially near the last several episodes, which kinds of remind me of how he handles the last several episodes of bokusatsu tenshi. But overall, the series remind me more of ookikufuri kabute.