Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is DeeDee Skelton, and this is my review of
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART 1&2.
2011's DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART
was Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai's entry
(entree?)
into the mainland film market.
Yes, the same people who brought us ELECTION
were now trying to suck up to the big red box office.
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART
is a breezy romantic comedy without sex.
And no violence, or political overtones, or anything else
that might offend... y'know.
It's about a young woman
who comes from Suzhou to Hong Kong.
But luckily for her, she is soon being wooed by two men.
Louis Koo plays a habitual womanizer
who lacks the... moral fortitude
to take responsibility for allowing his
c*ck to lead him through life.
Daniel Wu plays...
an alcoholic who drinks two quarts of whiskey a day,
but doesn't need rehab.
All he needs is to go on a date with this woman,
who is apparently some kind of Chinese Betty Ford.
Daniel starts the film off as a bearded, irresponsible,
and artistic kind of guy,
but that character disappears completely after he
gains architectural recognition and of course, money.
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART
isn't necessarily that bad.
It's no more vacuous, puerile, and saccharine
than most other romantic comedies,
including the ones that Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai
used to make with Andy Lau and Sammy Cheng.
Maybe it's just my own prejudice that sees this one as
especially dumbed-down for its intended audience.
Maybe the materialist subtext
has always been around in these kind of movies,
where a young woman is wooed by rich men.
It just struck me as especially apparent
(transparent)
here.
Daniel Wu only becomes attractive
after he gets a job and shaves.
The film isn't put together badly,
and it's acted pretty well,
I just didn't care about anybody in it.
Then again, I'm not a young professional female
from the mainland.
Though I have rented a few.
So in fairness,
I'm not the intended audience demographic
for this movie.
Which is one of the reasons why
I had less than no interest in seeing the sequel.
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART 2
stars three of the same people from the first movie:
Daniel Wu, Louis Koo, and Gao Yuan-Yuan.
Added into the cast are Miriam Yeung and Vic Chou.
I didn't want to watch this movie because
I knew that I didn't care about the characters
because I had seen the trailer.
But, for some stupid reason I decided,
"Well, maybe I'm being overly prejudicial."
Hey, at the very least,
people tell me that I'm very entertaining
when I dislike something or someone.
Well, speaking of Barbara Wong,
the product placement whoring in
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART 2
makes Ms. Wong seem like a
paragon of anti-capitalist virtue.
The product placement in this movie
has all the subtlety of a seizure-prone sperm whale.
The watches and the yogurt drink show up enough
that they could have been on the poster
as cast members.
But you know what? If the watches and the yogurt
were part of the cast,
maybe there'd have been somebody in this movie
that I could have cared about and not hated.
I hated all of these people.
Not because they're filthy rich.
Not because they drive Ferraris and yachts.
I hated them because they're all too stupid to have
achieved everything their material wealth signifies.
They're smart enough, somehow,
to become multimillionaires,
but apparently nobody's smart enough to go
"Oh, who's that?" Then again, if they did,
half the movie would be unnecessary.
Not that the whole godd*mned movie isn't unnecessary,
I'm just saying.
How am I supposed to have any kind of sympathy
for these horrifically shallow people
and their 1% problems.
You can't park your Ferrari.
I feel so bad for you, especially when you say
"I wish a cute guy would come to my rescue."
Yeah that's what a powerful female executive
who makes millions of dollars would say.
She'd also let a stranger drive her car,
let her get him drunk,
let him drive the Ferrari drunk,
take him home, let him sleep over,
and then leave him alone in the house the next day.
To be serious for a moment,
I'm actually kind of sick and tired of Chinese movies
insulting women so thoroughly.
I hope all of that character's ancestors
get @ss-raped by the ghost of Jiang Qing,
because that woman had a c*ck
and she wasn't afraid to use it.
I hated these characters
for allowing a bunch of their personal and
business decisions to be made by a
f*cking CGI octopus.
What a bunch of f*ckwits!
We're apparently supposed to feel bad for people
who are dumb enough to be victimized by other people
whose sh*ttiness is already known to them?
F*ck you too!
I hated these people because they were selfish,
and ignorant, and completely unconcerned about
anybody but themselves.
"As long as I'm happy, f*ck everybody else."
Which is, let's face it,
par for the course for banker types.
What's in the suitcase, fat boy?
You know when somebody says
"Somehow I ended up outside her apartment,"
it's called stalking, you psycho f*ck.
By the end of the movie,
some people's lives are destroyed
by other people's selfish bullsh*t.
But hey as long as they're happy, right?
And rich, don't forget rich!
Y'know, I've heard some people say that
maybe this movie is actually trying to send up
materialism and make a sly commentary about
mainland consumerism, but I doubt it.
The filmmaking is too witless, facile,
and pedestrian for that.
Besides, the audience for this movie
subscribes to materialism like a religion.
I've heard this movie,
as well as Barbara Wong's recent films,
described as 'OL porn.'
Not the Japanese kind,
I'm talking about the Chinese kind.
These movies are made to appeal
to single women in China of a certain age,
education, and class.
What single woman in her 20s or 30s
wouldn't want to dream about having
Louis Koo and Daniel Wu fighting over her
in an environment full of luxury cars,
nice watches, and expensive restaurants?
so looked at it that way,
you could kind of say that the
DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART movies
have a lot in common with TINY TIMES.
And we know how popular those movies were.
And how good.
Y'know ELECTION 3 ought to be a hoot.
I can't recommend either of these movies,
except to watch them as an example
of what some people in the world think is good.
In the description,
there's a link where you can buy the first movie,
and when the second one is released,
I will update the description to include that link as well.
If you enjoyed this review, please leave me a comment.
If you didn't enjoy the review,
please leave me a comment.
If you enjoy the channel, please subscribe.
Thank you for watching.