Hou hui wu qi

Three twenty-something friends live on a remote island in the easternmost part of China. When one of them, a school teacher, is transferred by his employers to the westernmost part of the country, his friends decide to accompany him on the journey. They all have their own motives to leave home and during the trip they will get to know their country and the people that inhabit it, as well as each other and themselves.

Director Han Han is one of China's most famous writers, so with only one other IMDb user review thus far, I'm surprised to see this film doesn't have received much more attention. A shame, really, for it's an entertaining road movie, with some quirky characters and fun story developments. Of course, I may have missed a layer or two. Chinese moviegoers may very well view it as a satire of Chinese society. I don't know enough about this fascinating country to be sure about that.

The pacing is calm, perhaps a bit boring to some, but the Chinese cityscapes and countryside make for breathtaking visuals at times.

Not a great movie, but worth a watch.

i often found out that most of the Chinese people, or more strictly speaking, the Chinese writers or screenplay writers, are lack of logic whenever they are trying to write a story, a novel and/or a screenplay. let's just take this film as a sample written and directed by a popular blogger:

• 3 guys with three different accents, but they were written by the screenplay writer/director as best friends growing up on the same tiny island, the most absurd one is the so-called 'teacher', with taiwanese accent.

• how could it possible a guy with taiwanese accent become a mainland china's teacher? with dirty long hair and beard, a homeless/bum-like guy being a teacher? administered by the Chinese education authorities and to be relocated to the far western region of china? give me a break. An extremely stupid screenplay with boring dialog and bad acting.

• there's no chemistry among these three guys that showed a strong bond and friendship to each other. they were more like strangers to me but were forced to be the best friends by a stupid casting job.

• the guy who owned a sedan that was left behind on the island until one day he came back, and decided to use it to send his best friend, a taiwanese guy three thousand plus miles away. yet, after such a long period of storage, the car's battery never died, and could be remotely activated without any problem. what kind of battery was it? after 2 to 3 years, still got plenty juice, yeah, right. and how about this car's 4 tires? still in full inflated condition and none of them became flat?

• what made the more matured guy suddenly jump onto the platform and started speaking(?) or more precisely, yelling with a microphone that suddenly muted by itself. was he some kinda communist party official who was invited to give a speech? to whom? why those people suddenly turned their back to him and left him stranded on the platform? what's the purpose of this stupid scene?

• the guy threw a torch through the window opening into his old brick house and started a fire? when there's no obvious piled up stuff in the house, how could it possible for him to start an arson? you think the local Chinese communist authorities would allow him to do whatever he liked? then the fire ignited the gas tank(?) in it and caused an explosion that collapsed the house on each side, and nobody gave a crap about it?

• when the movie started, we heard a song that praised this island and the people(the islanders) never abandoned their hometown and never left. what a ironical song, man.

• there's obviously a very obvious yet at the same time, a very goofy hidden agenda of this pathetically written and crafted movie: this movie was a product of advertisement to promote the tourism of this nothing-worth-seeing-visiting island. the blogger turned screenplay writer and director was well-known for his connection with so many commercial parties and business, as his popularity is an ensured investment for tourism.

so as long as nobody cares for the logic, the consistency, the reasoning, the believability of all the above-mentioned falsehood, inappropriateness, the wrong storyline, the wrong casting(all the 3 actors are bad, especially the taiwanese guy and the 3rd younger guy), the hidden commercial agenda that i've just found out in the first 10 minutes; as long as nothing matters, you can always keep watching this crappy movie but not me.