A Cool Fish

In the lazy afternoon, I watched the film with tears and laughter. Especially at the end of the film, when the brilliant fireworks set off the black and white confession, the tears are hard to control.I was moved by ordinary people or people struggling on the edge of ruin. Several people with different fates had been misunderstood, ridiculed and banished in order to prove themselves in reality. But they were pulled together by "love" and aroused their desire and courage to live. It is worth seeing ...

Taking photo for the girl is abrupt,the director didn't handle well.

I chose this movie to see only because I want to find some fun to kill time in a bored afternoon. At first, I really did laugh a lot. Then I couldn't help crying for many times while watching the rest of the movie. Every characters were funny. But I could not laugh at them. Instead, I felt deep sympathy about them. In Chinese, "wu ming zhi bei" means a person lives in the bottom of the society. Such a person isn't worthy a penny for his name. In this movie, the security guard, the two thieves, and the lady on the wheelchair, they were all small persons. But they still fought and struggled against the destiny. In addition, the episode song sang by the guitar player was very very fair-sounding. I chose this song as my cellphone's bell for a long time.

Beneath the surface of absurd comedy, film is the bitter core. The little people who are struggling at the bottom of society are crushed by fate, their hopes and dignity broken, their inner desires crumpled and discarded at will. In this gray world, the heart's desire is insignificant. Unknown men who live in the depths of the ocean struggle to swim to the light of the sea.

Well, sure I hadn't even heard about the 2018 movie titled "A Cool Fish" (aka "Wu ming zhi bei") prior to sitting down in 2021 to watch it. But with it being a Chinese movie that I hadn't already seen, I needed no persuasion to sit down to watch it.

And while "A Cool Fish" was watchable, it was by no means an outstanding movie. For me, the storyline was just too much of a scrambled and random mess, so I don't really grasp what writers Zhilong Lei and Xiaozhi Rao were trying to accomplish with the different storylines that they tried to tie together for a unified movie. It just felt out of sync with each other.

I will say, though, that the acting in the movie was good, despite of the storyline being such a scrambled mess. But the acting performances were definitely good throughout the course of the story, and I was in particularly impressed with actress Suxi Ren and her performance, especially since she virtually had no body language to use in her acting, given her role in the movie.

While I managed to sit through the entire course of the movie, I must admit that I was starting to drift off once or twice along the way. For me the movie was just not really delivering a wholehearted and coherent storyline. So I am not giving any praise to director Xiaozhi Rao for this 2018 movie.

My rating of "A Cool Fish" lands on a four out of ten stars. If you enjoy Chinese cinema, this is hardly a noteworthy movie, nor is it one that I will recommend that you rush out to watch. "A Cool Fish" was good enough for a single viewing, albeit not an overly impressive viewing, but it is hardly a movie that warrants more than just a single viewing.