Li Yifeng actually can ACT
because you look away for 5 minutes,
you have no idea what you've missed and it no longer makes sense.
Hello, you're watching AvenueX
where a junkie on good storytelling shares her thoughts,
knowledge and occasional weird ideas on stories
and how they're told.
An Ye Xing Zhe, Daybreake,r is a 24 episodes web drama
that's been aired on the platform iqiyi
it is directed by Fang Tingting
written by Li Yaoce
led by Li Yifeng, Song Yi, Feng Delun, Gong Haibin
This is an original script drama
meaning there is no book to go off on.
We're all gonna have to wait till the end of the drama to see the
daybreak of this story
which just makes it that much more exciting.
This is an anti drug crime drama that has a lot to do with policemen,
different groups of drug dealers,
undercover agents,
undercover agents with multiple layers of undercover
with a lot of car chase, gun fight,
explosion and blood and gore and crime drama stuff.
I've already watched 10 episodes of this drama
very close to halfway point.
Perfect time to talk about it
i will give it a 2.5 gold mine already, at this point
it could go down totally depends on
At the end of the whole thing, whether it has crashed,
because this drama does have the big risk
of not explaining every detail at the end,
making sure that everything is tightly resolved.
It's already a very complicated map at this point, episode ten.
So let's hope it doesn't have a lot of buildup.
And in the last 2 episodes,
crash it epically
if that happens.
This is gonna plummet to the very low part of my scale.
Now let me introduce this story briefly to you without spoiling it.
And also at this point,
it's not clear who is who exactly yet,
so cannot quite spoil it for you.
Even if I want to
the story of Day Breaker is first set at a fictional city,
it's intentionally blurring it and making up a city
name that doesn't exist
probably is just to make it easier with censorship
that you don't have to be specific.
And if you look at the police and different types of police in this drama
it also is not really chinese police,
but one branch probably the interpol level
although it has a different name and then you have the
local police that doesn't look like chinese police either.
And if you watch a lot of Asian drama,
you know what it's kind of based on.
Anyway, it's a very blurry,
ambiguous background of a city that's kind
of completely rotten by drug dealers.
Li Yifeng's role, leading this drama is a policeman
on the interpol side who was undercover in
One of the local drug dealing group.
It starts with something happened 5 years ago.
and now we go to the current 5 years later
timeline where he's a different person,
then he gets kind of dragged into another undercover mission.
So he has to get re introduced to the drug dealer group
to be clear and vague at the same time.
Li Yifeng's role is a multiple layer undercover agent,
who's kind of pretending to be somebody,
pretending to be somebody,
pretending to be somebody
at least three layers of disguise.
That just makes the whole thing very very complicated.
Every moment of his life is hanging on the thread type of thing.
Now, as usual, let's talk about good and bad.
Really, there isn't that significant a problem
I see so far.
In no particular order i'm gonna talk about all the positive things.
Number one, Li Yifeng actually can act
in comparison to hisearlier this year
Tencent fantasy drama Mirror Twin City
he literally looks like a different person
I think he knows he can do much better with a more realistic
possible to find reference,
kind of character for him to grab on and then play.
Than having a completely lifted out of reality
fantasy role that is on the script level.
Pretty illogical and uninteresting.
And it's not his first time that he has actually done a
couple of projects that saved a little bit of his
reputation as a serious actor in the last couple of years.
Those projects
and a lot of people were actually quite disappointed.
Because earlier this year,
Mirror Twin CIty is kind of deleting all his effort
in the last couple of years,
seeing him trying to make a change,
turn people's opinion on him from the idol type of actor
to the more serious one.
And that drama just pulled everything back.
well this one was also made last year
from may to september, something like that.
It really showed he can actually act.
He's just so much more suited for this type of drama
where it's a real person,
because I came in with zero expectation of his performance
it actually made it really surprisingly enjoyable.
I think it just proves for all the actors out there,
whether you're a man or woman,
if your're serious about your career
then stay away from Tencent.
S+ rating period fantasy dramas based on a web novel.
If you just want money,
you know it's still a good place to cut the fandom
Jiu Cai (韭菜/chive）
point no. two, the production quality of this drama is rather unique.
This drama actually gives you a very strong sense of cinema,
which is you can tell they have a lot of scenes
and I think there's a number where the producers said
they had close to 1,600 scenes for this drama,
which is only 24 episodes.
If you divide that number,
it's about 65 scenes per episode.
Every episode is about 40 to 50 minutes,
but that means they have more than one scene per minute.
That's very, very rare in dramas.
it's more likely that it can happen to films.
Usually in the drama of a story,
you have more exposition,
you have longer conversations between people,
more shots that are "standardly" filmed
such as back and forth over the shoulder 2 people talking.
And you have more information such as character's relationships,
background stories, what happened before
What happened Off screen
being explained in a more friendly way to the audiences, slower,
more just not so interesting a shot,
but let you know all the exposition information.
So usually watching a drama,
you don't have to pay full attention to the screen.
You can look away,
you can do a bit other things just listen and you still follow.
Whereas a film,
if it's only 1 hour and half and two and
it talks about a rather complicated story,
then you're kind of required to stare at it all the time,
because sometimes they were just cut in a shot that's super short,
introducing you to a character.
You don't even know their name,
you just know their face for 3 seconds.
It's until 40 minutes later something happens.
And you remember.
okay So earlier they put that shot there so that now I
realize this person is that person and they're doing this.
It's much more common.
You see that in film because film has only that short of a span
so they have to be super super calculated with how many seconds I exposed,
one character or one scene
And drama has much more freedom with that.
So often you see unnecessary stuff.
When you watch the drama Day Breaker,
it feels like you're watching a film .
They don't waste even one more second or one more shot of the same scene
from a different angle
to give you time to sink in
who is this person?
What did he do?
It doesn't give you time to catch up.
It really runs like a film.
It's like if you don't remember what you've seen,
or if you can't quite catch up,
you have the timeline you know you can drag (the play head)
so when I was watching this drama,
i've had a couple of occasions when I had to look away and do something else.
And when I come back,
I have no idea what i've missed and I cannot follow up anymore.
I have to rewind because i've just missed like two shots and
it kind of broken my link of understanding of the story.
It's really a don't look away drama because you look away for 5 minutes,
you have no idea what you've missed and it no longer makes sense.
The third thing is as a crime drama,
as an anti drug drama,
as a undercover policeman drama,
I think it qualifies pretty nicely
where first, plot is quite page turner
and the main characters are always in danger in some form
and the three main male or
you can say four really, characters play by
Li Yifeng, Gong Haibin, Feng Delun and Gu Bin
they are all just insanely clever people,
which I just love
everyone is more complicated and more intelligent
and more calculative than you first realized.
And pretty much among the four men,
at least three of them have like double identity,
think ten steps ahead of other people
having ten different backup plans.
And that whole brain game
even till now.
When it's already close to halfway point of the whole thing,
you still are not quite sure about at least two of them
within the four,
exactly what's side they're on or whether
they're actually on both sides of things.
And they're just playing the balance game and trying to see which one wins out,
or they actually have other things you haven't discovered about them yet.
But they're definitely not simple like what you see
they're at least one layer more behind them.
Obviously, we have to talk about Song Yi's role as well,
where although she does a pretty good job, I have to say.
So far, the female characters in this drama are not that essential.
They don't have that much screen time.
They are also pretty multiple layered characters.
So nobody has one single identity in this drama pretty much,
but they're less important to the main line.
Or maybe later they will become, I don't know, but so far i'm happy with it.
so these are the main good things i've discovered about drama.
I really would say this drama delivered 99.99% good surprises.
The only thing I worry about this drama at this point
is crash at the end
with this type of complicated
character setup of almost every character you come across
and already so many different lines in this drama
that's already laid and waiting to get pulled
up closer to the end and resolve till the end.
There's always risk of the ending wasn't worked out,
I think until it safely lands,
i'll always have my heart and hanging in the mid air worrying for it,
because I really want it to have an explosively impressive good ending.
There's very little to go off on because this scriptwriter really didn't
have too much of a previous work that you can reference to
the director.
She has worked on many different previous projects,
probably as an assistant director or executive directors onset.
On different teams,
big productions usually have team A team B team C
multiple team that shoot at the same time.
I found her name in dramas such as Tribes and Empiress
such as Jiang Ye (ever night)
First one
where she worked as Team B directors onset.
So she definitely has experiences,
but for this type of drama,
that's a contemporary crime drama that has so much
of a cinema and films way of telling stories.
I mean so far i'm very happy,
I just hope that and towards the end
it keeps is there
overall iqiyi tends to have the higher quality dramas
among the four major platforms,
although they're just so petty.
At the copyright
recently, I had a video.
I edited for the drama,
love and destiny.
Can you remember?
It's 2019 it's 3 years ago drama
that I put on weibo.
They've taken it down with a copyright strike.
what is like, What?
you just remembered 3 years later?
about doing that, like what the heck?
Anyway, those things are irrelevant.
I'm just ranting.
so at the end of this video,
I would recommend you check out Day Breaker.
It's one of the better crime dramas of 2022
and probably in the last couple of years.
As long as it doesn't crash,
it's gonna have a position in my heart
among the contemporary crime dramas
from chinese dramaland as
the good ones
that will be the end of this video.
Thank you for watching AvenueX
i'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy drama watching
and stay away from drugs,
from a chinese person
whose history had two major opium wars with the Brits and
ingrained okay in our national subconscious
just stay away from drugs.