Van Pao-te

Acting is actually very good in this movie. However, the story is very simple and boring. I get that many Taiwanese movies try to be humble and down to earth, but it's painful to watch and not much happens in the stories. It does not have a coherent storyline and it's hard to figure out what the writer thought was interesting. It's like watching an average person's life story, and most people's lives are quite uninteresting. The message of the movie is very simple and kinda pointless. Just everyday average people's stuff and you will come away with nothing after watching it and never think about it again.

This is a typical old fashioned Taiwanese movie, telling a story about some ordinary Taiwanese people and families, the head of a hardware and plumbing repair store's owner suffering incurable late pancreatic cancer. Instead of trying to get some medical treatment, he decided to go to Japan to find out the whereabouts of his father who dumped him long time ago.

This is a no big deal story narrated in a very very slow paced speed, trying very hard to be more artful in camera arrangement, but the storyline itself was somewhat unbearably boring due to the director too obsessed in shooting a movie in the traditional way.

The topic of such story also felt quite cliche'd and unimportant. 99.9% of the dialog was spoken in southern Fu-Kien province dialect which is the main language spoken by most of the Taiwanese people.

I didn't feel any compassion or empathy when watched this no-big deal movie, although it was seriously made. Actors in this movie all performed naturally but failed to connect a viewer like me. Just a barely okay movie, quite forgetful.