Xi huan ni

I watched this on a flight (subtitles make following movies a lot better on flights) and I was pleasantly unsurprised. It's a cute rom-com and while it definitely doesn't really break new barriers or tell a new story but it does deliver and enjoyable easy to follow movie. Zhou Dongyu is so cute as hell in this role and her bubbliness ties the entire movie together.

Naming this rom-com This is Not What I Expected is a misnomer because everything that will happen is expected. This is 1 litre screwball comedy, 2 tablespoons of "opposites attract" and 3 slices of food porn. But make no mistake, even though the odd couple seemed mismatched, they will come together like the desert miss the rain.

Lu Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is the CEO of the VN Group and he is scoping Rosebud Hotel in Shanghai for a acquisition. A food connoisseur, he is not impressed by the dishes the kitchen sends up. Sous-chef Gu Shengnan (Zhou Dongyu) is then tasked to try her hand to impress the eccentric man, but unbeknownst to both of them, they actually had a run-in earlier. Lu is impressed with the dish and proceeds to stay and try more delicacies made by her.

This rom-com is formulaic to a T but any movie buff will tell you that is not important. It is a foregone conclusion that the mismatched coupling will be a love-match made in heaven. The secret ingredient is to create hilarious situations to make them loathsome towards each other and yet give them redeeming qualities.

Lu Jin believes that the world is divided into three categories – the pork eaters, the pork butchers and the pigs. He is eccentric, rude and condescending – the world is beneath him in every scene, but OMG Takeshi Kaneshiro is so good looking and so dashing in his impeccably tailored suits. This coming from a guy, you know he is handsome from every angle and my knees got a little weak just swooning at him. Kaneshiro brings just the right amount of detestable contempt but you will excuse him because he is about to be schooled in the art of food tasting and love.

Gu Shengnan is his equal – opinionated and sure-footed. Excluding Lu's father, I think she is the only character in the whole movie (and probably all the cinema patrons) not sucked in by his good looks and powerful stature. There is a sequence where Lu challenges her to make a different egg dish which demonstrates how talented she is. Zhou Dongyu who won Best Actress at the recent Golden Horse for her excellent performance in Soul Mate is in scintillating form. She is a dork, but likable and feisty, like a delectable dish you can't have enough of. Her face feels like a sponge, soaking up everything life throws at her with the spunk of a child who knows no better.

A lot of the success of a good rom-com depends on the chemistry between the stars and the sparks here feel genuine. There is some good character development on both sides for us to buy into their budding relationship, and enough treacherous detours to make us root for them. The food porn is just extra garnishing for a love dish that is already great.

This is a great date movie but do go in with your tummy filled. It's time to check into Rosebud Hotel and do make a special request for room 1123. Oh my… my knees are becoming weak again.

The cuisines in this movie were so colorful and so eye-appealing. Takeshi Kaneshiro, as Lu Jin, was a good cast but too many close-ups focused on his face that inevitably showed he was already a 46 years old actor, maybe a little bit over to play this role, unless this director was heavily influenced by Hollywood's 1940s to 1960s old movies, full of middle aged, even over 50s older actors to play all the leading Alpha roles in romcom movies, such as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Randolph Scott...those who dominated the big screen, played the big lovers to those young female actors like Audrey Hepburn....these old guys were all too old to play such roles, because to those young actresses, they looked more like fathers or even grands. So the director requested the casting agency to find a middle aged guy similar to Gary Grant to play this Lu Jin role, and likewise, signed up Dongyu Zhou to play Gu Shengnan, with an under-developed body, no figures at all, flat all over skinny and short young woman, exactly like Audrey Hepburn.

I have to say Takeshi Kaneshiro and Dongyu Zhou most of the time performed well enough, but the comic screenplay and the scenarios sometimes forced them to overact, broad acting too much. But Zhou's face and skinny body made her look too young and too small, exactly like the leek vegi. Then Kaneshiro, on the contrary, seemed to be too old to play Lu Jin, an already over 45 son who was still harshly controlled by his father.

I have to point out some of the actors in this romcom were terrible and no talent at all even this movie was a farcical comedy:

Chiling Lin, as Lu Jin's Personal Chef; terrible! Absolutely NO ACTING TALENTat all! Ming Xi, as Xu Zhaodi; terrible actor with very limited acting talent. Xiaosong Gao, as Gao Fushuai; what a joke. Tony Yo-ning Yang, as Cheng Ziqian; absolutely no acting talent at all. Yi-zhou Sun, as Meng Xinjie; limited acting talent.

So obviously, this romcom was just an okay movie; a comedy with lot of yelling, screaming, cursing and broad acting.

A Chinese chick flick smartly welds a cookie-cutter template of meet-cute with blatant gastronomical seduction and eye-pleasing cityscape which one might infer it might be clandestinely sponsored by Shanghai travel bureau.

The glob-trotting CEO Lu Jin (Kaneshiro), arrives in Shanghai to assess the buy-out of a boutique hotel nestling in the city center, a choosy gourmet, he is overtaken by the dishes prepared by a young chef of the hotel, Gu Shengnan (Zhou Dongyu), with whom he develops a mutual attraction through the food-ordering-and-preparing contest and consecutively a preposterous co-habitation (sans physical contact though) in the latter's center-located oldish apartment, until a hiccup temporarily severs their growing romance, before a climatic confession routinely rigged up to bring them together. Yes, a synopsis can be applied to most commodities in its often derogated genre.

Lu Jin is not a nice person, obnoxious, disengaged, an insufferable obsessive-compulsive germaphobe, but since he is played by a spiffy Takeshi Kaneshiro, all can be forgiven (his repugnant personality has his upbringing to answer for), not to mention his $350 billion net worth, and all thing considered, he is just a lonesome, friendless man who is fostered to have no emotion connection with anyone because of his wealth and status, which will come undone thanks to a slightly loopy girl, who has only 5-year experience in the culinary business but inexplicably can tame his über-demanding stomach.

It goes without saying that the film's success is predominantly hinged on the performance from the two leads and their chemistry, and the outcome is moderately propitious. Having an 18-year age gap to paper over, a 43-year-old Takeshi Kaneshiro manages to hold court with his impeccable youthful mien, and brings both exigency and absurdity to the fore if he strives to without winking at the facile script. For Zhou Dongyu, who was discovered by Zhang Yimou in UNDER THE HAWTHORN TREE (2010), has now magnificently matured into a young, bankable leading actress of her generation, she is the heroine who precludes the film from sinking into an abysmal vanity project through her vaguely cutesy but visceral outpourings when the movie needs them the most. No room is left for its sidelined peripheral roles though, Chiling Lin is vouchsafed with a glamorized cameo and a much cherished reunion with Takeshi since her screen debut in John Woo's RED CLIFF diptych (2008, 2009).

First-time Hong Kong directer Derek Hui does input a few ingenious brainwaves into the cliché-ridden plot, a trippy folie-à-deux occasioned by consuming poisonous pufferfish has serves both as visual novelty and romantic nectar; choosing a local food market when the crunch arrives hews to the tenet of prioritizing Shanghai's vernacular loci over modernized anonymity; and the setting-sun watching finale is an opportune legerdemain to this unapologetically old-fashioned, overly chaste, roundly castle-in-the-air fluff, and this is exactly what I expected!

I watched it again, I still like it very much, it is really well made. Food, color, and the character's character are also closely related to these two instincts, blending to tell stories. The food knowledge is very interesting. The so-called Hollywood sentence "watching a movie, learning a knowledge", even more rare is that the food participates in the plot, assisting the plot and characters. The type of Chinese chick movie, this one will definitely be in the forefront.