Youku, really knows nothing.
I can totally tell why it sells to a lot of people,
director of Rattan, come on!
Why do you need to be in this drama at all?
Hi,
you're watching AvenueX where a junkie on good story telling
shares her thoughts knowledge and occasional
weird ideas on stories and how they're told.
Rattan, Si Teng
is a 30 episodes drama that has finished airing on
the web platform youku back in march when it was airing,
it was really popular pretty much the most popular BL drama
at the time was Word of Honor and bg drama was Rattan
Interestingly, both dramas are YouKu's projects.
And interestingly,
neither of them actually had high expectations,
Word of Honor.
We already know.
Youku didn't even care about it until it's start
to collect a lot of popularity and heat
as for Rattan
You probably also know that it airs on the other two platforms as well,
because although Youku made it
Youku before it aired,
thought it wouldn't do that well
Therefore, it sold part of its airing right to the other platforms
in exchange for an exclusive right for this drama.
That is totally ....
youku really knows nothing
and it only succeeds purely by lucky strike.
Also a very funny fact about this drama is the
singer liu yu ning again shows up with his voice
n this drama
as my audiences probably know, because I am still
pretty much on the mountain and not getting off it at any time soon.
While this drama was airing, I had no time, no energy.
I was making too many videos on word of honor
so I didn't watch it.
It was about a week ago that I finally managed
to watch the entirty of 30 episodes of Rattan
So this is my late review and opinion on this drama.
I'm gonna give you my honest opinion and always remember.
That's my personal opinion.
I'll give this drama a one gold mine rating,
but if possible,
I will actually give it 1.5.
But since I don't do the middle one,
it will still be one.
I just don't think giving it to can convince myself personally,
but I recognize why it's popular and there are certain elements of it.
That's really good.
Now let's get into the details.
I'll first talk about the positive points in my opinion,
and then the negative points,
although this drama is also a low budget drama,
pretty much as word of honor.
And I think two producers of these drama (woh and rattan)
because they both did this with Youku
They actually had a combined interview and compared who is poorer
So Rattan didn't have money either,
but they did a good job of putting the money at the right things.
When it comes to location,
they went to real location,
the beautiful yunnan province and shot there, landscapes, forests,
the lake and the mountain.
That's just breathtakingly and beautiful.
It almost gave you the impression that.
They have a lot of money,
particularly at the beginning stage,
first couple of episodes, wow, impressive,
and later you find out they actually don't have money.
And the whole crew was under such pressure
to save money that they managed to wrap.
I think 2 days before the scheduled day,
the second thing that to me is positive is
although emotionally, intuitively, gut-wise
I don't get too strong a reaction.
With the leading couple,
their chemistry worked on some people like magic
didn't work on me much,
maybe also just because my emotional bank is drained to the other drama.
So I don't have very strong physical reactions,
but logically or with the mind here,
I can totally tell why it sells to a lot of people.
And for this particular screen couple,
what I really appreciate about them is there
is hardly any gong ye tang jing (工业糖精）
The industrial sweetener
the artificially added things, the extremely tiring ... tropes
with slow motions and weird music and people staring
into each other's eyes for like extensive long period
that just makes everybody feel like cringy
It doesn't do that,
and the leads don't fall for each other
right from the beginning without any reason
which happens to too many dramas these days.
And it is a really slowly simmering,
slowly happening process due to the things that the two leads go through,
that they eventually build up that trust and that feeling for each other
and making them do certain things for each other that makes sense.
And although the setup of the story obviously is fantastical,
but there is a level of realistic feeling about their relationship
as a woman and the man living in the contemporary world.
Then we have to talk about Jing Tian's styling,
her hair style, her costume, her makeup,
this time really did her justice.
Previously.
She's been in different things,
sometimes looking really pretty, sometimes,
questionable
sometimes and just literally giving you question marks,
what have you done to this lady to make her looking that weird?
This drama found her right style,
the makeup style, the very thin eyebrow that's very Min Guo (republic of china era)
And it's no longer popular these days.
But when it brings that back into this drama, it makes so much sense,
her styling itself needs to get an award.
If at the end of this year,
we're gonna give an award to the best styling of a character,
a female character.
I see, like the later dramas that will come, will have a very big competition.
Jing Tian's styling needs to get mentioned on itself as super successful.
Then related to that,
I think to me,
this drama for the two leading actor, actress
is their best role and their best drama.
For a long time, Zhang Binbin
a member of the Jia Xing (Jaywalk) company also a member of the jia jing da li bao (嘉行大礼包）
If anybody knows about that joke in chinese dramaland
the company that he belongs to
where Yang Mi holds part of the share.
...is a very questionable company because they sign a lot of
really good looking people, zhang yun long, gao wei guang,
zhang binbin and many other guys and plus Dilraba
one of the hottest most popular actress,
but they just do shitty productions, their production quality
the script quality particularly from Jia Xing
are just so questionable bad
the people who are signed
under this agency when they go out to make dramas with other
companies that have nothing to do with Jia Xing
they look like proper actors and they can do proper roles and they
get better reviews and better criticisms and they shine more.
Whereas when they act in all,
jia xing messed up dramas,
the drama flips or their roles are just ridiculous
because the script is not good anyway.
So ... Zhang Binbin like many of his colleagues that
is under jia xing, really hasn't had a good script.
For years.
Let's be honest.
And this really is his best role I can think of to date.
He balanced that high romance and really
grounded real person feel really, really well.
He did a great job,
he used his own voice,
his acting made me believe he's a properly trained
actor who can actually act as a proper actor.
So I am very happy that he got this opportunity playing this
leading male role that I think made a lot of people notice him.
I hope this could change something for his career.
I appreciate his performance plus he sings really well.
There's one song in this drama, is sung by him
that I was impressed.
I didn't know
it was him
I heard the song first time and I was like, it's a beautiful song.
It's really well sung
It sounds a little bit familiar and then live comments spoiled it for me.
It's like it's sung by the actor
I'm like, oh, okay
didn't know he could do that.
Thanks to jiang xing, the company that just
never shows what your actor is actually good at.
As for Jing Tian
She's been around for a while and she had a lot of
previous titles, and reputation that are not ideal, say,
for actresses, often she is,
the wallflower from the general public's opinion of her.
And whenever people mentioning her name,
they would first mentioning that she is titled as a beauty in every way,
but a lot of people don't agree with that.
And then she's been so many productions that are
really crappy and her acting is always questioned.
So for a very pretty actress who has never had a solid role that she can
basically stake that in the ground and say this proves i'm a proper actress
Si Teng finally gave her that opportunity
and it definitely changed
a lot of people's impression and opinion of her as an actress.
so that's also to her, a really good improvement and step up.
So interestingly this drama kind of means
very similar things to both of the leads.
These are to me the very positive things about this drama.
Now let me talk about the things that I don't quite like about
this drama and what I wouldn't give it a higher rating
1st starting with things that are less important, but very annoying.
dubbing the leading actress
Jing Tian's own voice is okay, I don't see
what's the problem with her that you have to dubb her
and they dubbed her with Ji Guanlin
I I am too familiar with Ji Guanlin and I think chinese drama audiences are
generally super familiar with her because
she has dubbed so many classic roles
but these days she has kind of given up designing
specific styles for her specific characters,
and she just sounds the same for every role she dubbs
The moment.
Jing tian opened her mouth,
i'm like "Ji Guanlin!!"
holy....
after watching the 30 episode plus the extra episode,
I still couldn't sit correctly 100% with
that sound that comes out of Jing Tian's mouth
It has seriously impacted my viewing experience.
Second thing, the director who also play the role Bai Jin,
you have too much added moments for yourself.
His role does nothing.
You can totally delete his role.
It's useless.
And I think in the original book,
he pretty much has no importance to the story,
but as the director,
He probably just couldn't control the desire and urge and he added
so many unnecessary moments and time and scenes for his role.
And his acting is not good.
Leave that to professional actors.
I know you are a poor production that doesn't have money.
Well then just don't do this role
Why can't you learn something from word of honor?
Which is this guy in Word of Honor is actually the casting director
and he recommended Zhang Zhenhan
and he played this role
that actually makes sense for the whole narrative.
Plus he saved the crew hundreds and thousands of dollars
for only taking one salary instead of two.
Whereas director of Rattan
Come on
Why do you need to be in this drama at all?
You didn't offer oscar winning performance to the drama
You just made it
unnecessarily boring when you show up
Then the third point on the negative side for me.
For this drama is, it is still unnecessarily draggy.
During the middle section, particularly
the beginning is interesting, leading up to the point where they
killed the mushroom, that part is watchable
after they've killed mushroom,
the whole pacing starts to~~~
melt like wax.
I have to confess I did double speed through quite a
big chunk of this drama because it's just so boring.
It's like nothing is happening.
skip skip
supporting roles spend so much time
making jokes talking to each other.
Can we move on to the main plot line?
Like I don't quite care about what you want to say,
although I do have to say this supporting actor's acting is the best,
he's probably the best actor in the main cast.
I would love to see a lot of his future works.
He probably would never play a lead role,
but he will be a golden supporting role.
I also don't like Bai Ying (Li Yixiao)'s performance,
but she kind of always annoys me every drama she is in any way.
So watching this drama does give me quite a lot of pains at
different things that I have to kind of bite my teeth to get through.
And I wouldn't say that wouldn't affect my rating for this drama eventually.
Then the final thing is, I haven't read the original novel
so I don't know what's the difference.
I've heard from a lot of people that the original novel
has an even lighter touch of the romance story.
This drama also did the word of honor thing, which is why, again,
I would say this is a very weird fateful thing for the platform.
Youku
They pretty much air at the same time
They pretty much also both got really popular as their particular genre drama,
and then they also both had 2 kind of endings
or an extra chapter after the proper ending.
Is that gonna be something that we will
see more and more for a lot of web dramas now?
I don't think it's a good thing for
all the dramas to do that in the future.
I wouldn't appreciate that really
the ending that you see in the proper drama
is the ending of the director likes
the ending that he thinks is romantic.
These 2 go back to the forest and kind
of just turning to plants and ends there.
Whereas the extra half an hour is an ending.
That's a little bit based on the ending of the original novel,
but not 100%.
so It's neither a 100% replicate of the original novel
nor a version that the director likes,
but then they made it so that they think the fans would be happy about
since when a story telling on camera has to become so complicated.
I'd say the extra chapter does have very good looking costumes for both leads
So eye-candy wise, right
I like the extra chapter version,
but due to the fact that i'm not very emotionally
invested in this couple or in the story,
i don't quite care which ending they do
We can always argue,
as the content creators,
do you have the responsibility to say we're just gonna decide =
make a decision and whether we're gonna get hate or love from it,
we're gonna take it
in a way.
We can say offering multiple endings is a way to cheat.
It's a way to try to get out of it, easy
to try to have your cake and eat it at the same time.
Maybe that makes sense for certain productions
due to censorship and all kinds of reasons.
Something just cannot happen.
Therefore, you find a leeway to do that,
but probably not every story needs that.
And I would always be very cautious about
offering multiple endings for a story.
Plus you always use that to get more money
from the audiences
morally quite questionable.
At the end of this review,
I would say Si Teng, Rattan
is a better bg drama than most of the bg dramas that
was on air at the same time when it was on air,
Rattan is not a drama that I would re watch.
I'm definitely not a shipper of this main couple
or any of the relationships in this drama.
So be aware where I'm coming from looking at this drama.
And my opinions about it are all based on my personal preferences
apart from the platform Youku that in invested money into this drama,
the two production companies that did this drama,
one of them is the company that did Guardian.
Interesting, isn't it?
I feel like there's definitely some kind of like invisible script.
The universe has decided for all the major streaming platforms in China.
They are all role playing a particular type of company that do a
particular type of things and they will each have their particular
success and their particular downfall.
For sure.
If you know anything about what has recently happened with copyright stuff in China,
we are in for a crazy time now
as a big editor who doesn't get paid in any way
editing those absolutely time consuming videos, there's a
very ambiguous future for me to continuously doing these things.
I have no idea what's gonna happen,
let's say when June hits
but I promise to a small amount of audiences
probably who actually care about me,
editing,
music videos
if it's something I really like.
I will still keep editing stuff,
even if it cannot be seen in any public ways.
I'll figure out a way for people to see it.
But if it's something that I do not like,
no matter how much money you pay me,
I wouldn't even bother to click open my FCPX
thank you for watching AvenueX
Avenue x i'll see you in my next video,
meanwhile live long and happy.
Draw watching.