Movie Review: Shanghai Kiss
As a young girl, I often listened to my classmates discuss their music and movie crushes and also the plans to eventually marry them in huge weddings with lots of photographers and celebrities present. First it was Jonathan Taylor Thomas, this was the Backstreet Boys, it was Leonardo DiCaprio. I always felt different and left out. For reasons uknown (perhaps since most of my male classmates and my first crush were Chinese. I’m still longing for an AMWF romance here!) I just never found myself desirous of the same individuals who my classmates drooled over, while i simply wanted an AMWF romanceI thought white guys looked strange. Besides Mulan’s ever-delicious Shang, I never really found any male characters who piqued my interest.
Shanghai Kiss
When a friend informed me about Shanghai Kiss and also the AMWF relationship inside it, I had been skeptical at first. I’d seen Hiroshima Mon Amour and Anna and also the King, but them was terribly modern and that i couldn’t connect with them. I hadn’t yet seen an AMWF relationship that felt believable to me, the one that I really could have experienced myself in. However while i started watching Shanghai Kiss I had been a little more hopeful. Ken Leung was good-looking and I recognized Hayden Panettiere from her spitfire Remember fondly the Titans days. Ken Leung I did not quite so readily recognize until I watched Rush Hour the following day; he plays the part of an evil henchman and possesses had minor successes ever since then (Law and Order, Lost, Saw).
Shanghai Kiss
Panettiere and Leung were phenomenal selections for the characters of Liam Liu and Adelaide Bourbon. They worked very well together immediately and also their dialogue didn’t seem forced, that is a problem for movies billed as romantic comedies. Leung’s Liam Liu results in as awkward and unclear about himself, whereas Panettiere’s Adelaide is practically nauseatingly bubbly. Two completely opposite personalities, yet I found myself attempting to obtain them succeed as a couple. I thought which i would watch the development of a believable AMWF relationship that would finally set aside my girlhood thought I used to be strange for having fallen madly in love with a Chinese boy when I was eight.
That is… Until it became clear that Adelaide only agreed to be sixteen and Liam is at his late twenties. That’s right, this “romantic comedy” is not created using the typical recipe of two thirty-somethings realizing their differences and uniting within an amusing fashion. Actually, following the initial scenes I used to be left wondering how Shanghai Kiss may have been billed as a romantic comedy whatsoever. It looked in my experience like Adelaide was seriously crushing about the cool, older guy and the man was only humoring her because she created for interesting company. This difference was obviously a recurring joke throughout the movie, references to potential incarceration included.
It quickly became apparent that Shanghai Kiss was less about Liam and Adelaide’s questionable friendship and much more about Liam’s development as a man. Liam was instructed to leave behind the bubbly and overattached Adelaide to get a vacation to Shanghai. From this reason for the movie it was subsequently apparent that Liam was attempting to distance himself from his heritage up to possible, so it came as no surprise if you ask me he left for Shanghai just for the opportunity monetary benefit rather than while he actually wanted everything to use his family.
It’s understood that does not every first-generation American connects well along with his or her culture and upbringing, and that i cannot personally really fault someone because of maturing fobby like his parents. Liam is so definately not anything Shanghainese that I would have believed you if you explained he was adopted by white people growing up. However, when it came here we are at Liam’s Shanghai trip I'd gone from loving his character and wanting to see him succeed to really despising him and telling myself which i wasn’t surprised he was unsuccessful in life. I was thinking he was lazy, incompetent, inconsiderate, the epitome of stereotypical American behavior when confronted with unfamiliar and foreign situations.
But his initially stereotypical American-type behavior forms the basis for the attractiveness of his character’s development. I don’t wish to explore too many details and ruin the movie, but Liam’s in time Shanghai transforms him in the typical, rude American tourist that I wish to hate right into a character that I am again rooting for. He produces a few completely selfless decisions that may entirely change people’s lives, decisions that I’m unsure I possibly could are making myself easily were because situation. The rude American stereotype probably features a excellent reason behind existing, but it’s refreshing to see that turnaround.
Adelaide does eventually find her in the past into the story and back to Liam’s life, but not in the manner that I would have hoped. Despite how old they are difference, I'd hoped to find out more rise in the Liam/Adelaide relationship than I was given. I’m playing more questions than answers. Liam finally realizes the error of his ways and wants to help others realize their dreams, but what about their own? After things are said and done, who's Adelaide and what does she mean to him? It’s refreshing to find out a show where it is the white character that is the accessory for the Asian star and never the opposite way round, however want to see Liam and Adelaide grow into something substantial. The moviegoer stays seeing the beginnings of what might become a friendship, a romantic relationship, or who knows what else.
I have to give Shanghai Kiss 4 out of 5 joss sticks mainly because of that. I enjoy that it’s the Asian man that is finally the star. I really like that he actually shows development of character and doesn’t remain as some shallow, stereotypical bit part. I really like that he is shown as some average man who isn’t limited to Asian women. I especially love that we are in a position to watch an Asian male character in the modern setting who I possibly could reasonably become considering if I were to see him within the streets of my native Atlanta… however want to see greater than I'm given. Personally i think just like the movie ended way too soon will be able to get what I wanted out from the story.
I suggest the film as it’s an infrequent bit of genuinely positive character development, but be prepared to feel like things have been left short.