So here we have an amazing slice of life movie.  To me, these movies rarely work because let's be real, slice of life isn't very interesting and the only thing that makes it interesting is extremely colorful characters and that's where most of them fall short.  However, that is not the case here.  Here we have three friends, two guys and a girl who need to find a new place to live and end up renting a room from a retired Peking opera singer.  She's a lounge singer who, at the start of the film, ends up injuring an audience member and is eventually required to pay his medical bills, and she also has an alcoholic and dysfunctional family.  One of the guys has a dad who is remarrying and he is basically resentful about this, not to mention, blames his dad for his mom's death.  The other guy is extremely overweight and that seems to be the extent of his problems, lol.  Throw in the fact that he (the first guy) and she (played by Berlin Chen and Fan Bingbing respectively) have feelings for each other that they hide and the other fact that the opera lady is still grieving the loss of her son in an auto accident and hey, things are pretty interesting already.

I can't really give away much more without sort of ruining it, but the movie essentially follows these four characters through a point in time and it doesn't even have a real conclusive ending, further emphasizing the slice of life that it is.

This is one of these movies though that I felt so strongly that I have a hard time describing how good it was.  I will say though, that Fan Bingbing hit it out of the yard with her performance.  I have seen some decent stuff from her, but this movie really cemented in my mind how good of an actress she is.  The movie was both funny and affecting and easily kept my interest through the hour and forty run-time.  Highly recommended.

Mood impressed Tags: drama, fan bingbing, slice of life