Hua li shang ban zu (2015)

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1. 

   Siskoid

   Guys, Johnnie To made a MUSICAL and it's AMAZING. Office (AKA Design for Living) tells several intertwined stories of people working at the executive level of a company (import/export? doesn't matter) about to go public - their lives, loves and ambitions, and there are enough of them to call it an achievement that the audience can not only remember their names, but care about them as people. To rakes in the bonus points on production design alone, creating a giant neon-lit abstract set with transparent walls that evokes the stage, but doesn't look like a play on film. In fact, there's so much to look at in the frame - design, choreography, emotion - the subtitles become a little hard to follow during the musical numbers. My eyes want to be up here, but I don't want to miss anything down there! Not every song is memorable (the language barrier is a factor), but enough of them are (despite the language barrier) to make this satire of capitalism a successful musical, songs either being used for comic effect or to reveal the characters to us. There's more than one note. I love Chow Yun-Fat doing comedy and he has a crucial role as the CEO, though my heart was usually with Sylvia Chang, Tang Wei and Wang Ziyi (this last one by design, as he's the innocent who could go down the wrong road). Ultimately, Office may be about how we do wrong without morally committing to wrongness, simply by working for wrong-doing corporations, but it's also about the myth of the happy wage slave, and so the lies we tell ourselves and others to successfully achieve in the corporate culture. A lot to unpack and good replay value. 3 years 4 months ago

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