can't make 'em just like the old days
I Don't Want To Sleep Alone: Yeah, yeah, I've never seen any other Tsai Ming-Liang movies, yeah, yeah, I'm a philistine, whatever. It cracks me up that this film is regarded by film critics as "dream-like" and "edgy", whereas the only adjectives I can think of for this film are "silent" and "quiet" and "when are the characters going to speak already....." I swear, throughout this entire two-hour film, only one of the three main characters says a line dialogue, and that's not even to any one of the other characters-- it's to some random person who happens to be in the scene.
So the story is that a homeless man, after being beaten by a mob, is rescued by a migrant worker, who cares for him and lets him have a place to sleep. The homeless man is in love with a young woman who's a waitress as well as a care-taker for a comatose man.
...That's it. "What?" you say. "That's not a plot. That's a setup." I agree! But nothing else happens in this movie that qualifies as a "story". The homeless man and the immigrant worker share a bed in a crowded illegal loft. Eventually they move the mattress to an abandoned building whose bottom levels have already been filled with water, like a gigantic dark lake. The homeless man relentlessly stalks the young woman. The young woman eventually responds in kind. They try to have sex. Nothing happens. In the end, the three of them sleep together on the mattress as it drifts out into the center of the dark lake.
Do you guys remember in Eva where Rei and Asuka share an elevator and for a long, long time, there's silence? That's what this film is like, but for two hours. Not that it's necessarily a silent film. For a movie that features no dialogue, there are four languages (Taiwanese, Malay, Mandarin, and Bengali) actually in the movie, and in the background there are always the sounds of music (something that even sounds like Bollywood intrudes at one point), people talking, machines, radio, TV announcers, cars, shuffling. It was almost too raw. The movie frankly made me feel like a voyeur or a security camera. All the shots seemed to be very static, as if the cameraman just left the camera somewhere and walked off to take a piss and returned fifteen minutes later. It's all very calming, sure, but I don't know if I could have lasted without the use of the fast-forward button. Honestly, there's only so much I can take of watching a young woman sleeping, or watching someone smoke while nothing happens.
There are some great moments in the movie that can only exist in the context of something as quiet and fragile as this movie, though. In one, the immigrant worker wakes up, realizing that the mattress is infested with bugs. He wakes the homeless man up. They go downstairs. The immigrant worker sprays the mattress while the homeless man hunkers, waiting. After spraying the mattress, the immigrant worker makes his way over to the homeless man and hunkers down as well. He keeps scratching at his back, unable to catch the itch. After a moment, the homeless man looks over and starts scratching the worker's back. They sit there like that for a little while, one of them scratching, the other just enjoying it. Somehow it was so much more intimate and heart-stopping and better because no one had said a word. And anyway, it allows you to recognize Tsai Ming-liang's wonderful talent for using space and light just that little bit more.
The Good German: Anybody who misses the fact that this is Steven Soderbergh remixing Casablanca has either never watched Casablanca or was sleeping through the entire movie. From the poster to the bar scenes, from Lena pulling a gun to the ending as Jake sends Lena off, all of it was so Casablanca-by-a-student-of-modern-film that it was at once endearing and painful. I won't say that I didn't enjoy The Good German, but it wasn't actually an enjoyable film. I've never seen a film where I've liked Tobey Maguire least, and though I didn't dislike Clooney's or Blanchett's character, I didn't feel like they were wholly there. Sure, Casablanca didn't like showing us its full bag of tricks with regards to the characters backgrounds, but at least I felt like the air of mystery was enjoyable. Here, it just kind of made me grind my teeth.
Clooney is a reporter--Jake-- who is sent to Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference. While there, he realizes that his driver Tully (Tobey Maguire) is screwing none other than his ex-girl, Lena. Lena happens to be married to a presumably dead mathematician-cum-secretary named Emil Brandt, whose wanted by the Russians and the Americans for God only knows what reasons. Lena just wants to get out of Berlin. Tully tries to help, but winds up dead and drowned in a river for his troubles. So Jake finally has his chance to come to Lena's rescue.
In some ways, The Good German is the anti-Casablanca. While the three main characters of Casablanca (Rick, Laszlo, Ilsa) are very noble and sacrificing characters, Jake, Tully, and Lena are very ignoble and selfish characters. Jake doesn't care a whit about what Lena may or may not have done during the war, Lena will do anything just to get herself out of Berlin, and Tully is a boy who doesn't really understand how to play outside of his own desires. They're not likable characters probably because they wouldn't be very likable people, and watching them parade around onscreen as they sink deeper and deeper into issues of guilt and survival and war crimes just ends up making you want to watch Humphrey Bogart in the good ol' days again. The plot seems wandering and of doubtful believability, while the plot revelations about Lena and her husband seem to beat the theme of good and evil to a bloody pulp in your head.
But at least the movie has its aesthetic value to live it up. Cate Blanchett has cheekbones made for harsh black and white and a body made for the fashion of the times, no matter what the New York Times tells you, and George Clooney as the classic Hollywood brooding male star is actually terribly fitting. The mix of old war reels and modern faces gives out vibes of vertigo that only heighten the overall dark suffocating mood of the movie. And there's something to be said for that lost Hollywood sense of romance, after all. Jake's cigarette burning on the floor of the theatre. Lena's eyelids fluttering as she takes off Jake's clothes. How, even at the end, Lena's touch makes Jake hesitate. Sadly, The Good German is all about how we damn ourselves, how sometimes we can only hope to survival, not to be happy. If Ilsa and Rick will always have Paris, then unfortunately, Jake and Lena never get to leave Berlin.
I made blueberry muffins completely a la Susan's recipe, even with walnuts on top. They turned out delicious, but more and more I'm beginning to doubt Splenda's ability to function as real sugar. I used 3/4 a cup of Splenda, because that's what my mom uses to bake and we didn't have enough real sugar for me to use, and they turned out good, but not sweet at all. :/ But oh the blueberries were so delicious. It was incredible. Then Bing came over and we did something I know all of you are going to be jealous about.
for all of you who want to know, the characters, from top to bottom, left to right: (1) Taka, (2) Eiji, Momo, Kaidou, (3) Inui, Oishi, (4) Fuji, Tezuka, (5) Ryoma
Yes, boys and girls, China made good on its promise (even though, according to Bing, the motherland shut down My Hero and all its relatives because it was afraid of the message these shows were sending-- whatever, China was just afraid of it turning into a near-religious experience) to gives us a Prince of Tennis live action adaptation unlike any other. 22 episodes at 45 minutes each, this show stole as many members of the 2006/2007 My Hero contestant pool that it could get its hands on, renamed and altered and tweaked the storylines and characters to fit their needs, and sewed it all together with an opening, closing, and various insert songs to remind us of its actors humble roots. Utterly shameless but in the end not utterly tailored to fanservice, it's entertaining, confusing, and somehow simultaneously gayer and straighter than all of its source material.
The Prince of Tennis (the cdrama remix) stars Long Ma (Ryoma), a tennis prodigy whose won 4 successive American Junior Tennis Tournaments. Long Ma is pulled back to China by his father, Long Zheng Nan, to attend the college (yes, you heard right, college) that his father went to when he was younger. His first day at Qing Chun College (Youth College, the sadly unfortunately named Seishun Gakuen) finds Long Ma picking a fight with second year Chen Hai Tang (Kaidoh), which culminates into a tennis match interrupted by Captain Zhong Guo Guang (Tezuka), who forces the team to run 30 laps and Long Ma and his classmate Huang Jue Wei (Horio) to turn their registration forms to the correct personnel. The next day, the regulars go to a practice match, leaving second year Tao Cheng Wu (Momo) behind to look after the new students and heal his twisted ankle. Of course Long Ma and Tao Cheng Wu have a match. Tao Cheng Wu reinjures his leg and the whole thing is found out by the Captain (dui zhang, the Chinese equivalent of buchou). Madness ensues. Meanwhile Long Zheng Nan accosts Coach Lin (Ryuuzaki) with a proposal: Long Ma will help her team win nationals, but she has to teach Long Ma (a bratty, angsty, rebellious teenager if there ever was one) to learn the value of friendship and team.
Fat chance, the audience thinks, as the next few episodes are devoted to Long Ma pissing off everyone he meets.
Bing turned to me during one of the episodes and said, "This is like someone's fanfic, only they got somewhat attractive guys to act it out," and in a way, that's the perfect way to describe this. Prince of Tennis cdrama remix allows you to self-indulgently play out fantasies of an alternate Seigaku. For once, Eiji, Oishi, Tezuka, and Kaidou's Chinese counterparts Ju Wan, Da Shi, Guo Guang, and Hai Tang live in the same dorm room together and are frequently visited by Qian Zhen Zhi (Inui) and Zhou Zhu (Fuji) in their free time. The first few episodes star Zhou Yu (Yuuta) as a prize member of Seigaku's tennis team, with all the hopes of being the future of Seigkau's tennis pinned on him. Coach Lin is young and quiet pretty and chats with Long Zheng Nan as if they had once been classmates. Long Zheng Nan is a caring, somewhat meddlesome father who just wishes he could better communicate with his self-contained son. And Long Ma. Well, one wonders what Ryoma would have been like if he stayed the way he was pre-Seigaku all the way until he was 17.
This game of What If? is both fun and perplexing for the show. For instance, the question "What if Ryoma was a college student when he came to Seigaku?" apparently led the writers of Wang Qiu Wang Zi (Chinese for Prince of Tennis) to answer, "Well, he'd be a gigantic asshole, that's what." Long Ma is independent, easily nettled, prone to random acts of defiance, and always threatening to quit this whole China charade and go back to America. Above all, Bing thinks that the kid is essentially bipolar. For instance, in Wang Qiu Wang Zi, Sakuno's character, Xiao Ying, is an artist whose submissions to a gallery have been rejected seven times. She befriends Long Ma early on, and he spends afternoons lying on a couch in her classroom studio (which looks out on the tennis courts, of course) griping and complaining. He treats her rudely but is also exceptionally vulnerable to her. For another, Long Ma befriends a mute ballboy at the local tennis courts named Xiao Bo. I mean, literally, he meets Xiao Bo and is instantly taken by him. He even offers to teach Xiao Bo tennis. Yet the only person on the regulars team Long Ma even vaguely connects to is Tao Cheng Wu, and even they get into arguments at the drop of the hat. Long Ma is snide to almost everyone, spends about two episodes angsting over how he refuses to pick up the balls during afternoon practices just because first years always do, and threatens to quit after he's told he's going to play doubles in the round against Gyokurin.
There are other character changes too. Fuji is nothing like himself at all; his only remaining character trait is his overprotective nature towards Yuuta. Instead, he's this emotional but ultimately bland "tennis genius" with none of Fuji's wickedness or humor. Yuuta, too, has his rebellious nature magnified several fold, and does a quick 180 in the space of three episodes from a devoted younger brother who asks to play doubles with Fuji to a raving emo child who is taken under the wing of Guang Yue Chu (Mizuki) at a new college. Xiao Yin has some of Sakuno's temerity, but for the most part is one of those kind-hearted understanding heroines in Chinese dramas who always just end up making the main character feel good. Long Zheng Nan is so caring and worried about his son (and prone to hugging and trying to sleep in the same bed as his son) that, being a girl who has deeply invested into the Nanjirou-Ryoma relationship, I was frankly disturbed.
Some of the character changes, or at least the tweaks, actually made Bing and I enjoy the characters more than from any of the source material. Tao Cheng Wu, for example, is far more mature and big-hearted than Momo ever was. Hai Tan is much more belligerent than Kaidou was, sure, but without the snake-sounds and overbearing gruff voice, he's much more of a younger brother that you adore and tolerate. Inui has finally found his calling as Chinese college student Qian Zhen Zhi, and Xue Hao Wen makes He Chun Long (Taka) look almost attractive. Ju Wan is much less of a cartoon than Eiji, and Da Shi (probably because of his suave actor Zhang Chao who I best remember as cosplaying Gackt in the 2007 My Hero) is so cool and collected that he's impossible to conceive as the mother hen that Oishi was.
Maybe the weirdest change of all, though, is that somehow Wang Qiu Wang Zi manages to up the angst and drama factor of Prince of Tennis-- but without changing a single major event. For instance:
(A) Inui loses to Kaidou in the ranking matches and comes back as a trainer.
(B) Hai Tang and Qian Zhen Zhi have a relationship that seems cemented much more firmly and early on than Kaidou and Inui's. Qian Zhen Zhi lets Hai Tang win, which sends Hai Tang into a fit of depression. Hai Tang tears up the picture of the team he has taped on his locker and even cries to the Captain that he would give up his spot on the regulars so that Qian Zhen Zhi can come back on the team. Captain refuses. Ju Wan, Da Shi, and He Chun Long (Eiji, Oishi, and Taka) go begging Coach Lin to let Qian Zhen Zhi back on. She refuses, but at the dinner, announces that Qian Zhen Zhi will remain on the team as a trainer.
(A) Yuuta used to be a student at Seigaku. He didn't join the tennis club but instead went to a private school to learn tennis. He's introduced to Mizuki, who convinces him to transfer to St. Rudolph.
(B) Zhou Yu was both a student at Youth College and a member of the tennis club. In the most recent ranking matches, he's placed in the same bracket as Tao Cheng Wu. Due to his nervousness and his general weaker skill level, he almost loses. In his last tie breaker, he serves a shot out of bounds. The Captain, who is for some reason the referee of the game, judges it in. Zhou Yu screams that they are all looking down on him and leaves. Zhou Zhu tries to convince him not to, but Zhou Yu is having none of it. He transfers to St. Rudolph, where he is next seen training with Guan Yue Chu. Finally, Guan Yue Chu comes with Zhou Yu to visit Youth College. The regulars at Youth College serenade (no I'm serious) Zhou Yu and try to convince him to come back. Ju Wan accidentally slips that no matter what, he'll always be Zhou Zhu's little brother to them. Zhou Yu flips out and storms off, swearing that the next time he seems them all, they'll be enemies on opposite sides of the tennis court.
(A) Ryoma and Momo play doubles against Gyokurin. They fail miserably at it and end up drawing the court down in half. They win, to the delight and ridicule of the audience there, but Ryuuzaki pinches their cheeks and punishes them. Ryoma sits out as substitute once during the Tokyo District Preliminaries, as does Momo. Ryoma is put in as singles two against Fudomine.
(B) Long Ma and Tao Cheng Wu are assigned to play doubles. They try everything, including trying to get Da Shi and Ju Wan to teach them the Australian Formation. They lose their first four games. Then they win. Everyone is silent, the audience and their teammates. Coach Lin angrily forces them to sit away from the court (they can't even see the matches where they are) and tell them to think about what they have done. Coach Lin then tells Tao Cheng Wu that he's forbidden to play in the next match against Fudomine. Long Ma is assigned singles two.
SUPER DRAMALLAMA, GUYS. We only saw up to episode eight, and it doesn't seem like it's going to get any less drama-licious. Captain is seen with Zhou Zhui getting his arm checked out, He Chun Long is obviously under pressure from his dad to take over the restaurant, and with the conclusion of the series being the Hyoutei (Bing Di) vs. Seigaku (Qing Chun) match, anything and everything will be epic. In any case, if any sub group ever picks up Wang Qiu Wang Zi, I think it's worth the time. It may not be a faithful adaption, but it's oddly not unfaithful either. The acting is pretty good, and though this might get me some flak, it doesn't have some of the usual affectedness of Taiwanese dramas that tend to drive me up the wall after an episode. That could be because instead of making a romance, they just got together a bunch of guys to be, well, themselves. The one super cool thing about Wang Qiu Wang Zi is that it serves as a perfect complement to the actual Prince of Tennis canon. While so much of Konomi's Prince of Tennis happened on the courts or around the courts or about what would happen on the courts, Wang Qiu Wang Zi spends most of its time with the boys as boys. Remember when we watched episodes like "27: Karupin's Day Off" or "71: It's a Date", and it was weird and hilarious to see the guys out of uniform and around town? That's this Prince of Tennis, for 22 episodes straight.
So the story is that a homeless man, after being beaten by a mob, is rescued by a migrant worker, who cares for him and lets him have a place to sleep. The homeless man is in love with a young woman who's a waitress as well as a care-taker for a comatose man.
...That's it. "What?" you say. "That's not a plot. That's a setup." I agree! But nothing else happens in this movie that qualifies as a "story". The homeless man and the immigrant worker share a bed in a crowded illegal loft. Eventually they move the mattress to an abandoned building whose bottom levels have already been filled with water, like a gigantic dark lake. The homeless man relentlessly stalks the young woman. The young woman eventually responds in kind. They try to have sex. Nothing happens. In the end, the three of them sleep together on the mattress as it drifts out into the center of the dark lake.
Do you guys remember in Eva where Rei and Asuka share an elevator and for a long, long time, there's silence? That's what this film is like, but for two hours. Not that it's necessarily a silent film. For a movie that features no dialogue, there are four languages (Taiwanese, Malay, Mandarin, and Bengali) actually in the movie, and in the background there are always the sounds of music (something that even sounds like Bollywood intrudes at one point), people talking, machines, radio, TV announcers, cars, shuffling. It was almost too raw. The movie frankly made me feel like a voyeur or a security camera. All the shots seemed to be very static, as if the cameraman just left the camera somewhere and walked off to take a piss and returned fifteen minutes later. It's all very calming, sure, but I don't know if I could have lasted without the use of the fast-forward button. Honestly, there's only so much I can take of watching a young woman sleeping, or watching someone smoke while nothing happens.
There are some great moments in the movie that can only exist in the context of something as quiet and fragile as this movie, though. In one, the immigrant worker wakes up, realizing that the mattress is infested with bugs. He wakes the homeless man up. They go downstairs. The immigrant worker sprays the mattress while the homeless man hunkers, waiting. After spraying the mattress, the immigrant worker makes his way over to the homeless man and hunkers down as well. He keeps scratching at his back, unable to catch the itch. After a moment, the homeless man looks over and starts scratching the worker's back. They sit there like that for a little while, one of them scratching, the other just enjoying it. Somehow it was so much more intimate and heart-stopping and better because no one had said a word. And anyway, it allows you to recognize Tsai Ming-liang's wonderful talent for using space and light just that little bit more.
The Good German: Anybody who misses the fact that this is Steven Soderbergh remixing Casablanca has either never watched Casablanca or was sleeping through the entire movie. From the poster to the bar scenes, from Lena pulling a gun to the ending as Jake sends Lena off, all of it was so Casablanca-by-a-student-of-modern-film that it was at once endearing and painful. I won't say that I didn't enjoy The Good German, but it wasn't actually an enjoyable film. I've never seen a film where I've liked Tobey Maguire least, and though I didn't dislike Clooney's or Blanchett's character, I didn't feel like they were wholly there. Sure, Casablanca didn't like showing us its full bag of tricks with regards to the characters backgrounds, but at least I felt like the air of mystery was enjoyable. Here, it just kind of made me grind my teeth.
Clooney is a reporter--Jake-- who is sent to Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference. While there, he realizes that his driver Tully (Tobey Maguire) is screwing none other than his ex-girl, Lena. Lena happens to be married to a presumably dead mathematician-cum-secretary named Emil Brandt, whose wanted by the Russians and the Americans for God only knows what reasons. Lena just wants to get out of Berlin. Tully tries to help, but winds up dead and drowned in a river for his troubles. So Jake finally has his chance to come to Lena's rescue.
In some ways, The Good German is the anti-Casablanca. While the three main characters of Casablanca (Rick, Laszlo, Ilsa) are very noble and sacrificing characters, Jake, Tully, and Lena are very ignoble and selfish characters. Jake doesn't care a whit about what Lena may or may not have done during the war, Lena will do anything just to get herself out of Berlin, and Tully is a boy who doesn't really understand how to play outside of his own desires. They're not likable characters probably because they wouldn't be very likable people, and watching them parade around onscreen as they sink deeper and deeper into issues of guilt and survival and war crimes just ends up making you want to watch Humphrey Bogart in the good ol' days again. The plot seems wandering and of doubtful believability, while the plot revelations about Lena and her husband seem to beat the theme of good and evil to a bloody pulp in your head.
But at least the movie has its aesthetic value to live it up. Cate Blanchett has cheekbones made for harsh black and white and a body made for the fashion of the times, no matter what the New York Times tells you, and George Clooney as the classic Hollywood brooding male star is actually terribly fitting. The mix of old war reels and modern faces gives out vibes of vertigo that only heighten the overall dark suffocating mood of the movie. And there's something to be said for that lost Hollywood sense of romance, after all. Jake's cigarette burning on the floor of the theatre. Lena's eyelids fluttering as she takes off Jake's clothes. How, even at the end, Lena's touch makes Jake hesitate. Sadly, The Good German is all about how we damn ourselves, how sometimes we can only hope to survival, not to be happy. If Ilsa and Rick will always have Paris, then unfortunately, Jake and Lena never get to leave Berlin.
I made blueberry muffins completely a la Susan's recipe, even with walnuts on top. They turned out delicious, but more and more I'm beginning to doubt Splenda's ability to function as real sugar. I used 3/4 a cup of Splenda, because that's what my mom uses to bake and we didn't have enough real sugar for me to use, and they turned out good, but not sweet at all. :/ But oh the blueberries were so delicious. It was incredible. Then Bing came over and we did something I know all of you are going to be jealous about.
for all of you who want to know, the characters, from top to bottom, left to right: (1) Taka, (2) Eiji, Momo, Kaidou, (3) Inui, Oishi, (4) Fuji, Tezuka, (5) Ryoma
Yes, boys and girls, China made good on its promise (even though, according to Bing, the motherland shut down My Hero and all its relatives because it was afraid of the message these shows were sending-- whatever, China was just afraid of it turning into a near-religious experience) to gives us a Prince of Tennis live action adaptation unlike any other. 22 episodes at 45 minutes each, this show stole as many members of the 2006/2007 My Hero contestant pool that it could get its hands on, renamed and altered and tweaked the storylines and characters to fit their needs, and sewed it all together with an opening, closing, and various insert songs to remind us of its actors humble roots. Utterly shameless but in the end not utterly tailored to fanservice, it's entertaining, confusing, and somehow simultaneously gayer and straighter than all of its source material.
The Prince of Tennis (the cdrama remix) stars Long Ma (Ryoma), a tennis prodigy whose won 4 successive American Junior Tennis Tournaments. Long Ma is pulled back to China by his father, Long Zheng Nan, to attend the college (yes, you heard right, college) that his father went to when he was younger. His first day at Qing Chun College (Youth College, the sadly unfortunately named Seishun Gakuen) finds Long Ma picking a fight with second year Chen Hai Tang (Kaidoh), which culminates into a tennis match interrupted by Captain Zhong Guo Guang (Tezuka), who forces the team to run 30 laps and Long Ma and his classmate Huang Jue Wei (Horio) to turn their registration forms to the correct personnel. The next day, the regulars go to a practice match, leaving second year Tao Cheng Wu (Momo) behind to look after the new students and heal his twisted ankle. Of course Long Ma and Tao Cheng Wu have a match. Tao Cheng Wu reinjures his leg and the whole thing is found out by the Captain (dui zhang, the Chinese equivalent of buchou). Madness ensues. Meanwhile Long Zheng Nan accosts Coach Lin (Ryuuzaki) with a proposal: Long Ma will help her team win nationals, but she has to teach Long Ma (a bratty, angsty, rebellious teenager if there ever was one) to learn the value of friendship and team.
Fat chance, the audience thinks, as the next few episodes are devoted to Long Ma pissing off everyone he meets.
Bing turned to me during one of the episodes and said, "This is like someone's fanfic, only they got somewhat attractive guys to act it out," and in a way, that's the perfect way to describe this. Prince of Tennis cdrama remix allows you to self-indulgently play out fantasies of an alternate Seigaku. For once, Eiji, Oishi, Tezuka, and Kaidou's Chinese counterparts Ju Wan, Da Shi, Guo Guang, and Hai Tang live in the same dorm room together and are frequently visited by Qian Zhen Zhi (Inui) and Zhou Zhu (Fuji) in their free time. The first few episodes star Zhou Yu (Yuuta) as a prize member of Seigaku's tennis team, with all the hopes of being the future of Seigkau's tennis pinned on him. Coach Lin is young and quiet pretty and chats with Long Zheng Nan as if they had once been classmates. Long Zheng Nan is a caring, somewhat meddlesome father who just wishes he could better communicate with his self-contained son. And Long Ma. Well, one wonders what Ryoma would have been like if he stayed the way he was pre-Seigaku all the way until he was 17.
This game of What If? is both fun and perplexing for the show. For instance, the question "What if Ryoma was a college student when he came to Seigaku?" apparently led the writers of Wang Qiu Wang Zi (Chinese for Prince of Tennis) to answer, "Well, he'd be a gigantic asshole, that's what." Long Ma is independent, easily nettled, prone to random acts of defiance, and always threatening to quit this whole China charade and go back to America. Above all, Bing thinks that the kid is essentially bipolar. For instance, in Wang Qiu Wang Zi, Sakuno's character, Xiao Ying, is an artist whose submissions to a gallery have been rejected seven times. She befriends Long Ma early on, and he spends afternoons lying on a couch in her classroom studio (which looks out on the tennis courts, of course) griping and complaining. He treats her rudely but is also exceptionally vulnerable to her. For another, Long Ma befriends a mute ballboy at the local tennis courts named Xiao Bo. I mean, literally, he meets Xiao Bo and is instantly taken by him. He even offers to teach Xiao Bo tennis. Yet the only person on the regulars team Long Ma even vaguely connects to is Tao Cheng Wu, and even they get into arguments at the drop of the hat. Long Ma is snide to almost everyone, spends about two episodes angsting over how he refuses to pick up the balls during afternoon practices just because first years always do, and threatens to quit after he's told he's going to play doubles in the round against Gyokurin.
There are other character changes too. Fuji is nothing like himself at all; his only remaining character trait is his overprotective nature towards Yuuta. Instead, he's this emotional but ultimately bland "tennis genius" with none of Fuji's wickedness or humor. Yuuta, too, has his rebellious nature magnified several fold, and does a quick 180 in the space of three episodes from a devoted younger brother who asks to play doubles with Fuji to a raving emo child who is taken under the wing of Guang Yue Chu (Mizuki) at a new college. Xiao Yin has some of Sakuno's temerity, but for the most part is one of those kind-hearted understanding heroines in Chinese dramas who always just end up making the main character feel good. Long Zheng Nan is so caring and worried about his son (and prone to hugging and trying to sleep in the same bed as his son) that, being a girl who has deeply invested into the Nanjirou-Ryoma relationship, I was frankly disturbed.
Some of the character changes, or at least the tweaks, actually made Bing and I enjoy the characters more than from any of the source material. Tao Cheng Wu, for example, is far more mature and big-hearted than Momo ever was. Hai Tan is much more belligerent than Kaidou was, sure, but without the snake-sounds and overbearing gruff voice, he's much more of a younger brother that you adore and tolerate. Inui has finally found his calling as Chinese college student Qian Zhen Zhi, and Xue Hao Wen makes He Chun Long (Taka) look almost attractive. Ju Wan is much less of a cartoon than Eiji, and Da Shi (probably because of his suave actor Zhang Chao who I best remember as cosplaying Gackt in the 2007 My Hero) is so cool and collected that he's impossible to conceive as the mother hen that Oishi was.
Maybe the weirdest change of all, though, is that somehow Wang Qiu Wang Zi manages to up the angst and drama factor of Prince of Tennis-- but without changing a single major event. For instance:
(A) Inui loses to Kaidou in the ranking matches and comes back as a trainer.
(B) Hai Tang and Qian Zhen Zhi have a relationship that seems cemented much more firmly and early on than Kaidou and Inui's. Qian Zhen Zhi lets Hai Tang win, which sends Hai Tang into a fit of depression. Hai Tang tears up the picture of the team he has taped on his locker and even cries to the Captain that he would give up his spot on the regulars so that Qian Zhen Zhi can come back on the team. Captain refuses. Ju Wan, Da Shi, and He Chun Long (Eiji, Oishi, and Taka) go begging Coach Lin to let Qian Zhen Zhi back on. She refuses, but at the dinner, announces that Qian Zhen Zhi will remain on the team as a trainer.
(A) Yuuta used to be a student at Seigaku. He didn't join the tennis club but instead went to a private school to learn tennis. He's introduced to Mizuki, who convinces him to transfer to St. Rudolph.
(B) Zhou Yu was both a student at Youth College and a member of the tennis club. In the most recent ranking matches, he's placed in the same bracket as Tao Cheng Wu. Due to his nervousness and his general weaker skill level, he almost loses. In his last tie breaker, he serves a shot out of bounds. The Captain, who is for some reason the referee of the game, judges it in. Zhou Yu screams that they are all looking down on him and leaves. Zhou Zhu tries to convince him not to, but Zhou Yu is having none of it. He transfers to St. Rudolph, where he is next seen training with Guan Yue Chu. Finally, Guan Yue Chu comes with Zhou Yu to visit Youth College. The regulars at Youth College serenade (no I'm serious) Zhou Yu and try to convince him to come back. Ju Wan accidentally slips that no matter what, he'll always be Zhou Zhu's little brother to them. Zhou Yu flips out and storms off, swearing that the next time he seems them all, they'll be enemies on opposite sides of the tennis court.
(A) Ryoma and Momo play doubles against Gyokurin. They fail miserably at it and end up drawing the court down in half. They win, to the delight and ridicule of the audience there, but Ryuuzaki pinches their cheeks and punishes them. Ryoma sits out as substitute once during the Tokyo District Preliminaries, as does Momo. Ryoma is put in as singles two against Fudomine.
(B) Long Ma and Tao Cheng Wu are assigned to play doubles. They try everything, including trying to get Da Shi and Ju Wan to teach them the Australian Formation. They lose their first four games. Then they win. Everyone is silent, the audience and their teammates. Coach Lin angrily forces them to sit away from the court (they can't even see the matches where they are) and tell them to think about what they have done. Coach Lin then tells Tao Cheng Wu that he's forbidden to play in the next match against Fudomine. Long Ma is assigned singles two.
SUPER DRAMALLAMA, GUYS. We only saw up to episode eight, and it doesn't seem like it's going to get any less drama-licious. Captain is seen with Zhou Zhui getting his arm checked out, He Chun Long is obviously under pressure from his dad to take over the restaurant, and with the conclusion of the series being the Hyoutei (Bing Di) vs. Seigaku (Qing Chun) match, anything and everything will be epic. In any case, if any sub group ever picks up Wang Qiu Wang Zi, I think it's worth the time. It may not be a faithful adaption, but it's oddly not unfaithful either. The acting is pretty good, and though this might get me some flak, it doesn't have some of the usual affectedness of Taiwanese dramas that tend to drive me up the wall after an episode. That could be because instead of making a romance, they just got together a bunch of guys to be, well, themselves. The one super cool thing about Wang Qiu Wang Zi is that it serves as a perfect complement to the actual Prince of Tennis canon. While so much of Konomi's Prince of Tennis happened on the courts or around the courts or about what would happen on the courts, Wang Qiu Wang Zi spends most of its time with the boys as boys. Remember when we watched episodes like "27: Karupin's Day Off" or "71: It's a Date", and it was weird and hilarious to see the guys out of uniform and around town? That's this Prince of Tennis, for 22 episodes straight.