Am I watching a drama or am I listening to a radio play?
Why?
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
Hui Lang Ting
the murderer in Kairoutei
sorry about the japanese pronunciation.
It's a 12 episodes,
mystery crime thriller drama from the platform Youku.
It's led by Zhang Xincheng and Deng Jiajia
directed by Li Yatao, written by Zhang Shidong, Cao Fei
and at the point I'm making this video,
it has aired 8 episodes which means there's only four episodes to go.
This is AvenueX's rant video about this drama
If you happen to have already watched this drama
liked it very much
quit now, ok?
mental peaceI think is always the priority for everybody,
particularly living in 2022.
If you're ready to hear what I wanna say about this drama
well
sit tight.
This drama is based on a Japanese novel,
written by the very famous japanese crime detective story
writer Dong Ye Gui Wu
that his name pronounced in chinese.
Higashino Keigo
You probably have heard of him and his works have
been adapted not just in japan but in china.
And other places
the drama is shot in Chongqing.
There's no way to escape from the fame that my hometown
now is the crime city capital of China on screen.
The unfortunate thing about this drama
and probably the only thing that I can excuse it
I can think of for it to have such an embarrassingly bad quality is
they were so unlucky.
They started shooting January 2020
right after they started shooting
pandemic,
they got stopped and locked down for 3/4 months
until they resume in April
for a production that is detrimental because that
means you're losing a lot of money budget on things that you didn't plan for.
Then once you got back to filming,
it could be because not everything has gotten back to normal operation.
Your plans all get screwed,
renting a place to shoot.
Your locations could totally be scraped.
and you can almost tell in this drama, if you're watching.
There's so many scenes taking place in places that looks like.
They just grabbed that place on the day.
They didn't plan to do it there or originally they
had different places now they couldn't get to it.
Those are some of the basic information of this drama.
I'll give it at this point one landmine rating and it's
a pretty low rating already from AvenueX
regarding the dramas we've seen this year
and then if you've read the original novel and then go and watch his drama,
you'll find it's almost unrecognizable.
Briefly telling you what the story in the drama is,
which is there's a girl played by Deng Jiajia
who is in charge of this big company's finances.
I don't know how she can get to that position when
she's like what, in her early 30s
just doesn't happen.
In reality, you have to be at least 40 to helm that kind of company,
but hey doesn't matter.
Main characters are super humans.
And she was entrusted with this task to go and search
for the illegitimate son of the big big boss so
that the guy can inherit this old man's money,
because the old man is dying.
The logic of that makes a lot of sense.
he entrusted an employee of his to go and do such
a private matter
Deng Jiajia plays this woman who
goes out to find this guy who ends up being Zhang Xincheng
And that's the story
before I start to rant about everything I wanna rant about about this drama.
There's one thing that I think it may make it watchable
for you or i've heard people like it for that reason,
which is the two leads and their chemistry.
Cause there's a lot of romantic thing going on between them.
If you really like ZXC or DJJ
it may still be watchable for you.
Also, if you get the chemistry,
it may be enjoyable because i have seen multiple
people telling me that they really like it.
So you could definitely be one of those
people where that chemistry works on you.
And if that's the case good for you,
cause you're not wasting your life,
not like me watching 8 episodes and feeling i'm being tortured.
So i've said the good thing about it from other people's
perspective that I couldn't personally understand,
but I respect.
Now let me talk about all the things that makes
me super confused about the quality of this drama.
Number one, over saturation of handheld.
This drama, at least by 8 episodes of what the drama itself is
needs no handheld,
although it's advertising itself as mystery, crime, thriller.
It really has none of that.
By this point,
there's not even one scene that is super high pressure and it's on the
brink of some kind of dangerous action and you need the handheld to feel
the disturbed mental state or whatever of the main characters.
And yet this drama uses handheld whenever it can.
I've ranted about handheld overuse of it from the Yang Yang
Special force soldier drama recently
and this one is worse.
It makes that drama's handheld looking like masterpiece of camerawork
because there are so many scenes when handheld is happening,
it feels like they haven't rehearsed it.
The actors directors cameramen haven't walked through
or blocked the scene at all before they shoot it.
The the cameraman doesn't know where to point his camera.
It's like the home video that your father makes,
cause it's happening in real life, and there's no rehearsal.
So this person doesn't know where to point.
You have to see what happens and then move the camera.
Therefore, it has that time lag.
In this drama, you'll see
It happens.
It's like they haven't walked through it.
And oh god it's so bad.
Number two, I think that probably annoys 99% of people watching this drama
voice over.
You hear this guy's voice,
mature male,
a narrator of a audio play or a radio play.
He's there.
All the time
he would literally be explaining in his very smooth mandarin,
what is happening on screen that people can see with their eyes.
For example,
this old guy at this point didn't expect he'd received
this letter telling him that he has an illegitimate son
While this guy on screen is taking that letter out, reading it,
what part of visual storytelling do you not understand about
You can show that on camera,
you don't need to have a person say it out
at the same time!
and this happens all the time.
It happens at when they want to introduce a character who they are,
what they're doing, what they have done,
it even happens when there's the character just sitting there and
smoking and the voice comes in and telling you what he's thinking about.
Am I watching a drama or am I listening to a radio play?
Why?
Third thing
I've already said it.
I'm just gonna quickly mention that again
has nothing to do with the original story.
The other thing about this drama is
it's been promoted from day one as a 悬疑 in chinese which means suspense.
So it's basically suspense drama to be most accurate translated,
more sort of common in the west.
You call it mystery, thriller crime,
you know kind of mixture of those elements.
From day one, it's been promoted like that.
And because it's based on the book who is written by the
author who is known for this kind of genre of stuff.
And original story is like that, so
everybody believed that they're in for a thriller
And then, like I said,
if you're watching this drama by episode four,
you still don't see any of that element.
And by episode eight,
you're like, seriously, what am I watching?
They really didn't bother to do any suspense.
I am so baffled by the whole existence of this drama.
So the next point is,
what does it look like if it's not a thriller
or suspenseful story or crime story or mystery?
well It's like a romantic story about 2 rather attractive young people,
um um who kind of get forced to fall in love,
because the plot says so.
And then as they are doing that along the line,
there's a super child's play business war story attached to it.
If like not having any suspenseful lement isn't the worst crime of this drama,
then the child's play business war part definitely
will make you just like laugh.
It's very hard for a drama reviewer trying not to spoil the drama for you,
but then also like telling you exactly what they're doing.
You don't even have to go through business school of any kind.
You don't have to know anything about how to run modern company.
You just have common sense.
And then you watches drama about how they play the game of
power play between different members and you're gonna laugh.
It's so funny how big money gets used,
how one person is like pretending to be
super clever and I have out smarted you.
But then how they did it was like
this s like what you're thinking of? Really?
The drama is filled with that
every time it comes to business decisions and business war,
supposed to make the female lead looking super clever or whatever
oh my god
clap for the script writers.
The audacity of basically writing that and also put your name to it,
at least I know if I happen to somehow unfortunately wrote this thing
out of whatever reason
i'm not gonna want people to know about that.
After I've watched the first four episodes or something,
I had this metaphor made up in my head and
I said it on my social media in china.
I'll repeat that here,
which is what this drama makes me feel as an audience member,
but I also feel actually probably the main
creatives of this drama is also feeling like this,
which is watching this drama feels like
you are queuing a big queue,
and you think you're queuing it for taking a covid test.
and you've queued for 3 hours, finally, It got to you.
and you realized, shit!
this is actually a queue for buying limited edition of cake that only bakes
like 100 every day
and it's not just for the audiences to feel like that,
watching this drama.
I feel like when the people who are making this drama
they probably feel like that too.
and that also feels like the director doesn't know what the cameraman is doing.
The cameraman doesn't know what the director wants.
The actors do not really know who their characters are
they're trying their best.
I just feel so sorry for Deng Jiajia and Zhang Xincheng
I hope they did get paid properly, they probably did.
So wouldn't feel so sorry in that respect,
but as actors right who are both known to be very good at their age
and they can do phenomenal work given the right script,
proper script,
proper directing, proper production,
basically picking them to play those two roles
is a total waste of their talent.
The production doesn't deserve these two lead actors.
So at the end of this rant video,
like I said earlier,
you can still watch this drama for a bit
just to see if the chemistry thing work.
and if it works on you, it's still watchable.
But if that doesn't work on you
don't waste your life on watching this drama
You have much better things to do.
That would be the end of this rant video from AvenueX
my genuine honest opinion on the drama Hui Lang Ting
which I wish I could
erase from the work portfolio of Deng Jiajia and Zhang Xincheng
And this drama has has a very ridiculous
sports car racing scene
there's so much slow-mo use.
And for one moment, you're like,
what am I watching?
And why does this happen?
andthen what happens afterwards is even more ridiculous
defies every understanding of the world we live in
and how things work anyway.
If you get to that point and you're still watching,
you'll know
if you don't, don't worry, you're not missing anything.
Thank you for watching AvenueX
hope this has saved your time,
not wasting life on things that really doesn't worth your attention.
I'll see you in my next video, meanwhile,
live long and happy drama watching,
lucky drama picking.