See you tomorrow? More like see you next time.
Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is Dasher Nance
and this is my review of
SEE YOU TOMORROW.
SEE YOU TOMORROW is the directorial debut of
Zhang Jiajia, who first came to prominence as a writer
whose stories gained popularity on the Internet.
but I watched SEE YOU TOMORROW anyway.
I don't know if Zhang Jiajia is or isn't a good writer.
I do know he's not a good scriptwriter.
SEE YOU TOMORROW is,
according to the writer-director,
supposed to be
"a Wong Kar-wai movie as if made by Stephen Chow."
Try again, [censored] head.
Being funny, y'know like Stephen Chow,
is actually serious business.
It's just that people like Stephen Chow
make it look easy.
Zhang Jiajia makes it look impossible.
Anybody who's watched my reviews,
especially my reviews of
what we could call 'China market films,'
has heard me talk about one of my
biggest pet peeves with them.
It has to do with
the way that jokes are told in some films,
and that method seems to be aimed...
more at the China audience than others.
In movies, sometimes there are jokes,
whether it's dialogue or
the movie sets something up, like a gag.
But then in some other movies,
the movie not only tells a joke, the movie also tells you
"Look, look! That is a joke! Isn't that funny?
Hahahahaha!"
I've used phrases like 'relentless mugging'
to refer to blatant overacting, whether physical or facial,
in the pursuit of laughter. I've been trying
for some time to find a way to express this idea
succinctly.
Clarence Tsui's review of SEE YOU TOMORROW
in The Hollywood Reporter
expresses this idea of mine perfectly, and I quote,
That sentence is so clear and so exact and
frankly so useful to me
that I can almost forgive him
for elsewhere using the phrase
But never mind.
Having thought about this idea
and having sat through
this excruciating cinematic exercise
in how not to be funny,
I've decided for 2017 to unveil my first acronym.
I got most of this idea from
some comments a while back,
I added my own twist to it, and so here it is:
labored, unfunny, China-market humor
is now
SEE YOU TOMORROW is a sh*t sandwich.
The only way this movie could be more...
over-the-top
is if...
they had Sylvester Stallone in a cameo
arm-wrestling at the bar.
I just really find LUNCH unbearable.
A tedious bar crawl segment
that would have resulted in alcohol poisoning
at the first stop seems to take forever,
but you can say that about the entire 128 minute movie.
SEE YOU TOMORROW is the first film
to be distributed by Alibaba Pictures,
which may partially explain why
there's nothing original in the film.
Just cheap, shoddy copies of other things.
Not even the appearance of the
wonderfully tomboyish Li Yu Chun
could make me like this movie.
I admired Takeshi Kaneshiro 's willingness
to debase himself, his image, and his reputation,
but I didn't enjoy it.
Especially the music video segment. Ugh.
At least I know that I'm not alone in loathing this movie.
Not even Chinese people liked it.
Online reviews in China were so bad
that People's Daily,
the Communist Party's mouthpiece newspaper,
ran an editorial reprimanding negative reviewers for,
and I quote,
Why didn't they reprimand the director?
I wish there was a karaoke version of this movie.
It's visually interesting and
(most of)
the music is good too.
I could have done without Bob Seger.
It's the trite, shallow,
overwrought dialogue that I could do without.
I honestly wondered therefore,
what SEE YOU TOMORROW would look like
viewed as basically a... like a silent film.
You'd be spared the banalities of the
dialogue and the plot,
and could probably just convince yourself
of a much better, more interesting story
that you would just
make up by putting together the visuals.
All of that facial overacting could just be chalked up to
some kind of throwback silent-movie homage.
Problem solved!
Actually just don't watch this piece of sh*t;
problem really solved!
Obviously I didn't enjoy this movie,
and a lot of people in China didn't either.
It looked nice, but it was just so...
It's awful.
But that's just my opinion,
maybe you'll love it, I don't know.
If you want to watch this movie,
I think you're gonna have to wait
for the home video release,
'cause as far as I know it's already out of cinemas.
Maybe you can see it at a film festival.
It wouldn't look bad on a big screen,
like I said it looks really nice.
Otherwise, wait 'til you can rent it or
otherwise pay for the privilege of watching this film.
Don't steal it.
Hey, just 'cause I don't like it, that doesn't make it okay.
When it gets released to home video,
as much as it might pain me to do so,
I will update the description with a link
where you could buy a copy of a blu-ray or a DVD.
If you enjoyed my review, please tell me.
If you enjoyed SEE YOU TOMORROW,
keep it to yourself!
If you enjoy the channel, please subscribe.
Thank you for watching, I'll see you again soon.