Yi nian zhi chu

Admittedly, I don't watch many movies these days, but made an effort to head up to Berkeley to check out "Do Over." For a director's first major film, Cheng Yu-Chieh shows an amazing mastery of the camera, and it does worth very much.

The film farrows the different journeys of five people over New Year's eve into the new year. There's an overall youngness to the film since three of the characters are around the age of 20. These three deal with coming of age, existential themes such as self-worth, young love, and personal secrets and guilt. Since some stories were drug-fueled, I felt I was watching a Taiwanese version of "Groove" interspliced with a Wong-Kar Wai film and a dash of Tarantino for good measure. Undoubtedly, the film will resonate stronger with the college crowd.

What really makes this film out though, is Cheng Yu-Chieh's camera work. The film opens up with a light-hearted shot in the country, reminiscent of Spanish foreign films, then switches over to a somber, high contrast, heavily saturate Wong-Kar Wai world. Following that, there is a fight scene with the camera fixed on the profile of a character. It could've came out of a video game like Max Payne. From all these beautiful scenes, we see Cheng Yu-Chieh's creativity and willingness to experiment as a young director.

However, what keeps this film from rising to the top is also this variety. Sometimes, I felt I was watching a gallery of scenes shot in different styles versus a cohesive film. Furthermore, at just shy of two hours, the film ran longer than it needed to. More than once, I thought the film was going to end, only to have another scene emerge. Right now, the film is quite young and raw, which is perfectly fine. Cheng Yu-Chieh has the talent, the foundation, but he needs to learn how to edit his work more critically, both in story and style. Once he does so, he will create a masterpiece that flows.

An interesting movie about how something at a specific point in our lives can change it. The approach of the subject is nice, without ''educative'' attitude (like you have to be good, or what ever things like that). We are not paying attention at one character (or two) throughout the hole movie, even if at the end some of them are seeming more important than others, but we are watching the way different persons, whose lives are connecting somehow, are living the last hours of one year and the first hours of the next one. I thing that except the main ''mesage'' of the film, you can read in this movie other small things. It' s a movie you have to watch!