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.

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.

Takashi Kaneshiro is a dope actor but his movies in recent years have been pretty bad. It is too much of the same "romantic comedy" that many guy actors do. This movie has some funny and charming moments, but for the most part it is a very typical asian comedy drama. Nothing really stands out.

Anyways, it is ok for a lazy afternoon watch, but that is kinda it.

6/10.

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!

This Chinese romance comedy is a purely tasteful, G-rated comedy of rich, uptight man with a fine taste for food encountering a young, beautifully plain girl with a knack for putting together amazing cuisine. There is a lot of nicely executed pratfalls between the two and embarrassing situations that never really seem overdone. With good pacing, nice dialogue, there are cute laughs and an exotic description and appreciation of culinary preparation. While there isn't anything deep, this is a fun, sweet and light romantic comedy to just sit and enjoy the rising sun.