Tag: WorldFest

I am happy to say that I chose Trouble Makers (Xiongdi, bie nao!) at the festival. I was debating between it and another movie, and looking for anything to tell me why I should pick one or the other. The description of a sentence look looked humorous, and the fact that it involved twins that didn´t look like twins just made it seem like a comedy. But my book listed it as a modern drama.

So it was between a Chinese Modern Drama, and a Turkish War Drama, which definitely wasn´t funny.

And I am glad I chose this one, because like I imagined, it was actually a comedy and the genre was just wrong. I just wanted to laugh, damn it.

Especially laugh at others misfortunes.

Zheng Hao (Xiaopan Gao) is a bit of a bad ass. He is a criminal, he is a thief, he has been to jail, and he doesn´t give a fuck. He only gives one fuck, actually. And that is about his brother, Zheng Zhong (Xianchao You). His twin brother, although they don´t look too similar. Some issues with child birth. Zhong is a bit slower, but he is protective of his smaller brother, the brains of the operation.

Either way, Hao finds himself in hot shit after leaving prison when he immediately causes a lot of destruction and has to pay it back.

The good news is that a local station has an idea for a new reality show! It is about bad guys wanting to become good. If they can turn their lives around, get forgiveness, right their wrongs, and do good things (please!) then they will win a big cash prize. Enough to pay off his new debts, and hey, money yo.

So sure, they will put in the effort to do good things, at least originally just for the money. But then Hao starts to fall for the very pretty worker who is putting on the show, Xia Tian Fan (Shasha Yu). It helps. But being good is hard, and they are going to have to change a lot to get better.

Also starring Sam Lee, Samuel Pang, Sky Li, Xi Chen, Ziming He, and Yu Tian as the Steve Perry looking director.

I mean he looks like Steve Perry when he has his wig completely on. Bald Steve Perry without it.

Trouble Makers was full of laughs, and they came on hard and strong. Sure, it ended on a serious note. Including an excessively long fight scene, but ended up right in the feels and morally strong.

The director is also the star of this movie, and he has officially directed and been in only one movie, this one. It is an extremely impressive feat for a first timer, and honestly, I feel like a liar just typing that out. It is truly hard to believe.

This is a slap stick movie, with subtle gags, non subtle gags, and sure, just pure misfortune going to our characters. It did have some other interesting aspects, like a scene where four clearly Chinese individuals were in brown make up to act like Indians. And you know what, I am not an expert on Chinese/Indian relationships, but I am sure that is totally fine, although it wouldn´t fly at all in America.

This film has a lot of energy and surprises, tackling its own satire on the reality television fads going across the world strong for some decades now.

Time Trap is one of the few science fiction movies to come out of the festival, at least full length ones. The shorts usually have a good number of them, but it is harder to get it to the full film length, usually for budget reasons.

Sci-Fi as a genre doesn´t have to be more expensive than other genres, it just can be if they go heavy on the effects and future technology. Also, last year I watched a Sci-Fi movie there and it made my worst of the year list. That one was Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter, which the title practically promised would be terrible.

But Time Trap looked like it would keep itself small scale, maybe go for a good story over dazzling CGI, and it the description made it seem like a man and his harem going out to find a missing person.

Almost a harem, turns out the Furby character was a boy.

Set in the modern day, we start with Professor Hopper (Andrew Wilson, of the Wilson family) scaling the caves with his dog, looking through a weird book, and finding strange sights in the cave. You know, like people being in them and not moving. Natural stuff. Originally he was out there looking for a van of lost hippies from decades before, but due to these strange occurrences, he is going to check them out alone and not bring his two graduate students Taylor (Reiley McClendon) and Jackie (Brianne Howey).

Welp, two days later, the professor is still gone. No one has heard from him, he isn´t answering his phone, and time to panic. Taylor and Jackie know where he went roughly, and have decided to look for him. They bring along Cara (Cassidy Gifford), who likes Taylor, because she has access to her dad´s nice truck. Cara has to bring her younger sister Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich), and they also bring along Veeves´ friend, Furby (Max Wright), for some reason or another.

Needless to say, when they get to the caves, they start to explore, start to spelunker, and shit gets weird really quick. Like they are trapped. In time.

Everyone looks like a really realistic statue in pictures. Or like they are trapped. In time.

I went in expecting the worst, and left pleasantly surprised. As the movie unfolded, I started to write down potential plot holes that might occur, or questions that were maybe going to be left unexplained, but the movie handled them all. I also am generally worried about anything in a movie that deals with time (especially time travel (and no, this movie isnt really time travel)), but it still handled it very well. It was consistent, it was cool, it was fun, and it was a bit scary.

The good news about casting young people in a movie is that they often will act like young people in scary situations. The cast did a fine job of reacting to their surroundings and showing appropriate emotion. None of them really stood out as rising about the rest, but I will point out that it was a great idea to make the cast relatively intelligent. They weren´t constantly tripping over themselves to run away while scared. They knew science things, questioned the weird, knew technology, and trusted each other.

The story is also relatively entertaining. The hole they are digging in that cave just keeps getting deeper and deeper and it seems like there will never be a way out. It is very hard to predict where they are going with the story and it does reach a satisfying conclusion.

Time Trap is a simple story with big ideas and expanse. It is a really great idea for science fiction problem, while relating it to mythology of the past at the same time. Definitely worth a watch in the future.