That's great story writing,
thank heavens for realistic people
Remembrance of Thing Past,
is a 12 episode short drama that's been aired on
mango tv right now
the drama is led by Zhou Yutong,
Jin Jing, Sun Qian, Bai Yufan and Ren Suxi
As i'm making this video.
Today, i've watched the first half exactly six episodes of the drama.
So this is a first impression / halfway review.
This drama is one of ten,
short, 12 episodes dramas planned to come out this year
on mango tv
Hunan television is the most
profitable provincial television station in china,
beginning of 2021.
There was actually a very important regulation or
suggestion that came down
basically saying we're going very,
very hard on watered down,
draggy content that are unnecessarily long.
So mango television as the top player of this industry immediately
at the moment decided we're gonna change the name, which is,
I think is qin chuan or youth or something used to be of
this category of dramas and we're just gonna call it the
new name and it will be made up with ten different dramas.
Each 12 episodes.
And this one i'm talking about today is the second
first one being the Hunter drama with Qin Hao and Yin Fang
the drama Remembrance of Things Past started shooting at
the very end of february this year and they wrapped
early may
literally 2 months after they wrapped.
They finished post production,
they've sent it to censorship, got it back.
And now it's on air.
That's like one of the fastest production speed i've ever heard.
Based on the first 6 episodes of this drama,
I will give it a two gold mine rating on my
seven level scale and it's a high high high gold mine.
If the rest of the drama the next 6 episodes are.
As good as the first six.
I think this is probably gonna be my second
3 gold mine drama of 2021.
and I'll be more than happy to see that coming true
unusual thing about this drama is
It is about 70 minutes per episode.
This drama focuses on a group of girls
working in big metropolitan city, beijing,
the capital of china.
They all come from a northeastern smaller city.
One of the four girls is actually at least
about 10 years older than the other three.
And she is the cousin of one of the girls in the three girl group.
They are the type of tightest female friendship that you can have in life.
Before I went into this drama
I had no expectation,
and I thought it was just gonna be yet another contemporary
drama set in a big city of a couple of young girls
how they fall in love with other people
that will provide little refreshment.
and I was wrong.
I'm sure anybody who watches the first episode, will
get really wowed by so many things happening to the characters unexpectedly,
but also expectedly
it builds up to the point when something epic happens,
it really hit you hard.
I was like.
That's great story writing.
So let's talk about the details, before that.
Let me just warn you this drama does have very shocking start.
First two episodes,
emotional bombs,
very heavy,
but very well written.
So if you are very sensitive to basically tragedy happening to ordinary people,
good people getting crushed just by unfortunate events,
one after another,
then this drama may not be the best thing for you to go into
I wanna reverse the order first talk about the things that I think it could
do better and then all the good things
The not so ideal things for me.
First is trivial thing.
I don't like its color palette.
It's not skin smoothed that type of drama,
but it's still a little bit too low contrast and color,
are graded to the point that you feel like,
did you just take out the raw footage and didn't do
any color grading and just slapped it on
visually not my preferred style,
but that's very,
very minor doesn't impact the storytelling quality at all.
The second thing is to do with casting.
Actually this drama has great casting,
but the reason I still pick a few things of that out and I
thought compared to the story of writing quality, right?
Certain things just should have been worked on more.
The first actor is Bai yufan who is an actor that I really like.
He is De Bao from Shan Hai Qing
Min Ning Town, my three gold mine drama this year
He was once a member of people's liberation army and he's a soldier.
And he actually took part in fighting against flood previously
before he became an actor.
So he has a really rare working record and
background and experience as an actor.
And he in this drama plays the love interest of Zhou yutong's character.
He is the director of the marketing
department of this big company that mainly
do coffee.
I'm not saying he's not acting well
I like him, I like his interaction with zhou yu tong,
I like their plot line,
and there's nothing wrong with the story itself.
It's just he doesn't feel quite suitable for this role
Bai yifan comes with a very strong,
grounded quality and average guy vibe
His styling like the clothes he wears and the hair style in this drama
just doesn't help to make you believe he would be a beijing,
big metropolis,
big company's
helicoptered in director of marketing.
He should look like.
It's really like sophisticated businessman
who's been working in marketing for years.
If you are leader of marketing,
you probably are meeting clients all the time.
You are running around,
doing businesses in this slightly bourgeois.
circle of people,
particularly doing coffee.
There's no way that he'd be dressed like that
and having that haircut and go out and say,
i'm the director of marketing of a company.
Nobody would believe you because you don't even look like one.
Then the actress Sun Qian who plays one of the four girls group role
Internet doesn't treat her very nicely.
I think it's because she was in the Yan Yuan Qing Jiu Wei
Actors please take your place, acting competition show and didn't perform well.
I don't think she did a bad job,
but because the other three actresses,
those were on a different level.
Therefore, she kind of in comparison became
the weakest link of the four girls group.
So those are not so ideal things that are really not that significant.
Now i'm gonna say the good things about this drama
First and foremost,
the leading actor pack
the casting and their acting.
I'd say the best i've seen in this particular genre.
This year,
the four girls group definitely is the highlight
you have Jin Jing playing a girl who actually I cannot spoil it for you,
but she kind of has a special position in this drama
and her story really propelled everybody else's storyline.
I never thought she could be this good serious actor.
She is known in china as a comedy actress.
and she often shows up in all kinds of entertainment variety shows
doing funny things on stage and she has that tiny eyes when
she smiles that into two curved lines,
very distinctive look,
but almost never think of her as a classic pretty actress,
but wow her acting in first episode.
I think she needs to get an award for her performance in this drama
even with very limited screen time she has
she really validated her character and why the other characters would react
in certain ways in relation to her and why the entire drama's story is valid.
I am just blown away by her
never thought she's that good
Zhou Yutong
she has two dramas running right now and she's
being noticed for, i'd say, a year or two now
Now if you have to pick who is the main narrator,
most important role of the four girls group
She is the one
she's kind of our pov character.
She is the classic she chu
which is an ordinary working,
wage earner in the big city who commutes daily
hours and hours in underground in subway
working in this big company
feeling so small and like a cog in a big wheel,
at any time can be replaced by other people,
very insecure,
trying to stay positive and strong all the time.
And yet, all the difficulties in life as a out of her own small hometown
person in a big city that she can come across all those challenges.
She gets them one after another.
You watch her story and you can go with her,
you feel her emotions,
you can almost picture yourself as her,
or she as yourself,
and she just brings you along this narrative,
provided us with her best acting.
Up to this point in her career,
then Ren Suxi
the goddess of acting
in the credits,
she's still named a special guest actress,
but she actually has a lot of screen time.
So I would still call her the main four roles
And if you're interested in films,
you probably know her
she is a very good film actress and in the
industry she belongs to the category of real actress,
not necessarily the prettiest,
not necessarily the most stunning look person,
but if there's an indie film,
there is an art house film or a drama,
a story that's aimed to go to Cannes and Berilin
she would be one.
Every director want to grab
That type of actress,
this is her first television series.
All previous works are film.
She just shows you how real acting can be
the level of reality of her performance is
incredible.
These are the three people that I pick out and talk about,
but the rest is also very good.
So acting, casting department,
one of the best i've seen this year so far,
the second thing I want to talk about is Director Li Mo
He hasn't really done much work.
All his works are quite recent and some of them haven't really come out yet.
I don't know much about this person,
but I am so curious about what is the
process of them doing scenes
in this drama, pretty much every scene reads like it's improvised.
I feel like they have a version of script which
says for the purpose of this scene we need to get
what information delivered to the audience.
We need to push the plot to what point,
what are the important information,
each of the characters need to bring to the table,
then they say action and you just
play, improvise.
Usually the lines from the characters are still very worked on
very embellished or like people take in turn to speak, right?
So that audiences can hear it well
whereas this drama
They talk over each other,
they throw out all kinds of what we call Kou Shui Ci
saliva words,
which are not meaning anything,
but happens all the time with.
People having real conversations
pretty much every big group scene are shot in that way.
I haven't seen a drama this year,
at least a contemporary drama that has this quality of conversation.
The third thing and I think the most important thing is,
it's just really well written
often you see this type of contemporary setting
big metropolis story comes out of chinese dramaland are very
floating.
Like I said xuan fu (悬浮）
people do not feel like real people,
the conversations do not feel like real conversations
the things they come across.
So dramatized
this drama is the polar opposite and because it's so real,
it just hits the audiences like fist after fist,
bat after bat
knife after knife, if you are a person,
regular 9 to 5
who live in a big city that has like tens
of millions of people like beijing or shanghai,
london or new york and you commute.
Using public transportation day after day trying to make a living.
If you live this type of life,
this drama will stab you so many times
all kinds of challenges and dilemmas that you come across.
If you're living this kind of life,
particularly if you are a woman,
for examples,
personal security,
a very bad roommate that just makes your life that much more harder
fraud people who take money away from you and
makes you already difficult life even harder
struggling between whether
you should rent a really expensive place closer to where you work or
very far away place, but much cheaper.
But then you have to commute 4 hours a day,
the competition within your own company.
And some of the company these days do those kpi and if you are the last one,
you get kicked out all that pressure
anxiety over aging,
over getting old,
over the imperfect body shape or whatever
argument with yourself.
Why am I here?
In this big city living this life feeling being crushed all the time,
all that.... this drama justis so
realistically show all of those problems
like how real
normal ordinary people would experience them
in a contemporary drama that inevitably will have some
romantic element between a
male lead character and a female lead character.
A lot of things are too coincidental and
too romantic and bubble and idealized
This drama doesn't have that
it literally slap across the audiences' face.
I know you guys have been watching artificial sweeteners and
unrealistic portrayl expectations of relationships for too long.
Now I will show you what happens in real life.
For example, at night when she has over worked,
how many hours it's already dark and her boss /slash sort of love interest
and he was like do you want me to drive you to somewhere?
And she's no, we live too far apart and i'm just
going to get at a taxi to the subway station and then
take the subway home
and the guy is like, okay, goodbye.
And then she runs into the problem.
When there's some roadwork, she had to get off her taxi and walk through a
dark tunnel to the subway station and she realized she was followed byit.
Somebody behind her and standard drama
will give you that somehow
out of nowhere,
her boss just comes and save her, but again this drama
wouldn't show you that and the boss is
on his way home driving his own car, okay?
very realistic.
And she's like I think somebody's following me and the guy very making sense
go and find somewhere to hide now and send me where you are,
I'll come.
But immediately after that call
the first thing he did is call the police
and tell the police where the girl is and then he drove to that place
and the police and him arrived at the location almost exactly at the same time.
It just makes so much sense.
This is how real life works.
But for a romantic contemporary drama that we're so used to,
this story development would have changed already like 5 times along the line.
The first step probably wouldn't happen because the guy would
definitely take the girl home because that's romantic drama.
And then the second step wouldn't happen either,
because the guy would just jump out of nowhere to save her
in the traditional narrative of this type of story.
When I saw that sequence of plot, I was like,
thank heavens for realistic people and realistic writing.
My hope for this drama would be for the next 6 episodes.
It would just be as good.
And honestly, if that is the case,
whether I make a second video or not,
that will make this drama a three gold mine
and it will be my second three gold mine.
I pray for it to happen
Thank you for watching AvenueX
I will see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching.