Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is Joseph Sadler and this is my review of
THE MESSAGE.
There's a lot of different ways to evaluate a movie.
My bottom line is this: does the movie entertain me?
Is there something about a movie that I can enjoy?
Is the story good? Is it well acted? Is it well-made?
Does it make me laugh?
Does it make some kind of
emotional or intellectual impact?
2009's THE MESSAGE
tells the story of a group of people brought together
in war-torn China in 1942
to discover which one of them is a spy.
The star-studded cast includes some of the
biggest names in mainland Chinese cinema.
Huang Xiaoming plays a Japanese officer
tasked with unmasking the traitor.
"Do you find me repulsive?"
He's dubbed, and not just because
he can't speak Japanese.
It's also apparently because he can't speak Mandarin
with a Japanese accent, or so I've been told.
He's as impressive as he usually is,
and that statement could be interpreted in a lot of ways.
"Heyyyyyy..."
I leave it up to you to finger out
exactly what I mean when I say that.
Li Bingbing, Zhang Hanyu and Zhou Xun, among others,
play the... unusual suspects, and they play their roles
very very well.
As their interrogator pushes them, they push back.
"Stop staring at her ass! I saw you! "
The best thing I can say about THE MESSAGE
is that the acting is highly commendable.
The characters come to life in vivid detail
and it's easy to know and care about them.
The credit for that obviously goes to the actors.
They bring a depth and subtlety to their characters
that's unfortunately not very common these days,
so watching them do it is a very rewarding experience.
These people are being constantly interrogated,
sometimes with rather unusual methods.
What's he doing with that ice cream scoop?
The suspects face mounting pressure
and some of them start behaving strangely.
I wish...
Another thing about the movie is that it looks
really nice too.
There's some interesting exterior locations
and the interior sets
are not only interesting but convincing.
There's even a bar mitzva!
The movie opens very strongly
with a nice brutal surprise.
I guess I'm just easy to please that way .
It don't make me a bad person.
The story is engaging because
it is difficult to outguess the narrative,
though a lot of the tension is pretty obvious.
[growling]
The plot and its details are engrossing.
As the search becomes more desperate,
it also becomes more vicious.
A lot more vicious.
One scene in particular made me really uncomfortable
and... I'm not even a woman.
It was so nasty that I
couldn't even enjoy Zhou Xun looking like this.
So you've got a well-made movie
that's well-acted, entertaining, and looks nice
What's not to like?
Well, the story for one thing.
Or, to be more specific, the ending.
I don't want to spoil it,
but it's one of those endings
that's probably the result of laziness
as much as anything else.
I see it happen a lot,
and frankly it's kind of annoying. You've seen it too:
"Ha ha ha! You thought I would fall for your inane trap,
but in fact I have known all along that you would do this.
Which is why I did that,
and what you thought was this was actually that,
and he is not who you thought,
and I always knew what you were thinking,
even when you thought you knew what I was thinking,
and I fooled you like the fool you are,
and this is the song of my people.
Uh... no, really.
I was disappointed because until the ending,
THE MESSAGE was a very good movie
and I enjoyed it a lot.
I felt as though the writers just got
kind of stuck trying to find an ending,
and took the simplest, easiest, laziest way out.
it was frustrating because
everything else about the movie had gone so right,
at least up to that point.
I enjoyed this movie more than I expected to,
at least until the ending,
so it was especially irritating.
In a way, I could recommend watching this movie,
because all the performances are so good.
You just don't want to get too caught up in the story
because the way it all gets resolved
is kinda disappointing.
But that's just my opinion, maybe you'll enjoy it.
In the description,
there's a link where you could buy this on disc.
Most importantly don't steal it.
If you enjoyed this review please let me know.
If you didn't enjoy the review, let me know.
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Thank you for watching.