[Weekly Update] January 3rd, 2021

Hello, 2021! Hope you had a great holiday season. It is a new year, but please remember to continue staying safe!

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

• Script for our next video was done, and it'll be about The Autobots. But  just as new year came, something big happened inside China's creative industry, and I had to make adjustment to the script. It will be finalized tonight, and uploaded tomorrow!
• I will also set up a new poll in a couple of days to decide which rom-com we'll be covering for our Valentine's Day video. If you have a movie in mind, let me know down below!
• The rest of the schedule has not change. I look forward to sharing more Chinese movies for the first few months of 2021!

ABOUT MEDIA

• Last time, we briefly talked about some blockbusters in 2020. And you may have noticed, I'm actually a mainstream normie. I do wish I have more stamina to watch indie production and more intellectual stuff. But 2020 was so exhausting. Whenever I booted up Netflix, I just wanted to relax. As a result, there are a lot of stuff I wanted to watch but never did.
• The big one being The Mandalorian. Yes I know it's also a mainstream thing. But to me, this is less of a Star Wars thing, and more of a continuation of Samurai flicks that I loved, mainly, Lone Wolf and the Cub. I absolutely love Japanese serialized Samurai movies, especially the Zatoichi series. Seeing a Star Wars series capturing that style and storytelling feels kinda surreal. And it definitely caught my attention from there.
• Mangrove. There was quite a bit of buzz surrounding this movie, which caught my attention. In my own pursue as a writer, I specialized in bottle movies: Movies that are predominantly, if not entirely set inside one location. Court room drama, to me, is the ultimate form of bottle movie, because there is NO action allowed. Everything is spoken, gestured, and announced. You can imagine how hard it is to maintain audience interest with such limitation. If anything, Mangrove will be a great case study.
• Mank. The whole reason I haven't watch this is because this came out late in the year, and I haven't have time to sit down and appreciate it. While I'm not a big David Fincher fan, Gary Oldman, on the other hand, is always a fascinating actor to me. A man with a thousand faces, what used to describe Lon Chaney, can perfectly describe Gary Oldman, too. Part of being a filmmaker with ambition of a director, is that you have to learn how to act, and how to direct actor's performance. What better way to learn, than to watch a master perform?
• The Assistant. Here's another one with a lot of buzz. From what I heard, The Assistant is almost like a slow burn thriller. Nothing much really happens on the surface. But knowing the subtext, makes this one of the most unsettling movie of the year. Slow burn thriller is something I'm very bad at. To control the atmosphere to a point of entertaining audience without action always feels like black magic to me, and it is something frequently seen in indie art films, and I want to learn that. If you have seen the film, let me know how you feel about this one!

And that's it for our first update of the year! Our video will come out later this week, so I'll be seeing you soon!