Tigertail (2020)

I’ve been seeing “slow burn” as a tag for movies on Netflix.  I’m not sure if this is a new tag or if I just haven’t noticed.  However, I think Tigertail fits the bill.  It’s not rushed.  It’s not drawn out, either. 

The movie tells the tale of Pin-Jui, who grew up in Taiwan.  His childhood wasn’t perfect, but he had a mother that cared for him.  His dream is to go to America, so that he can earn more money and bring his mother over.

While living with his grandmother for a while, he meets Yuan.  Years later, they meet again and become romantically involved.  While working at the same factory as his mother, Pin-Jui is presented with a choice.  He can marry his boss’s daughter, Zhenzhen, and move to America or he can stay with Yuan and take his chances.

Pin-Jui sees Zhenzhen as the safe choice.  Yuan is from a more affluent family, who probably wouldn’t accept him.  If he marries Zhenzhen, her father will finance their move.  Pin-Jui accepts the offer.

The story is told both in the present and through flashbacks, using both 16mm and digital formats.  We see how life in America progresses for Pin-Jui and Zhenzhen.  We even see their daughter, Angela, at a piano recital.

Pin-Jui seemed to be happy and more energetic before moving.  As an adult, he’s distant towards his wife and harsh with Angela for forgetting part of the piece she was playing.  He chastises her for crying, pointing out that it accomplishes nothing.

The movie isn’t so much about the move as it is about choices.  Pin-Jui gave up a lot to move to America.  He sacrificed the woman he loved to move there.  We see Pin-Jui opening the store where he works, mopping and closing.  Repeat enough and we know it’s been a long, hard time for him.  Granted, it was something he wanted, but he had also hoped to move his mother over.  When the mother refuses, it takes its toll.

We’ve all had a few decisions we’d like to do over.  It might not be a lost love, but playing it safe isn’t always the most gratifying path.  As I said, he might have made it to America anyway.  Also, who’s to say Yuan’s parents wouldn’t have accepted him?  He might very well have spent the next thirty years at the factory if he had turned down the boss’s offer, but he would have done so on his own terms.

IMDb page

Altered Carbon (Season 2)

It’s great when you can change actors without losing the character.  If you have a shape shifter, they just look different next week.  Altered Carbon sort of has that in that characters can swap bodies.  The rich can afford clones of themselves, so the character can die without being recast.  But for the poorer people, it might mean using someone else’s body.

Takeshi Kovacs is back for the second season of Altered Carbon.  This time, he’s played by Anthony Mackie, whereas the character was played by Joel Kinnaman last season.  To make matters a little more confusing, he was also played by Will Yun Lee in both seasons.  (Will Yun Lee plays the body that Kovacs was born into.)

This time, he’s looking for Quellcrist Falconer.  It would seem that she’s killing those rich, immortal people.  Falconer is known for not liking the technology that allows for immortality, but murder is out of character for her.  The hope is to find her and get an explanation before the authorities do.

The second season does have a more subdued tone to it.  There wasn’t as much of a sense of wanting to see the next episode, as I did with the first season.  This isn’t to say that I didn’t want to watch it.  It’s more that I didn’t mind watching an episode before dinner.  There wasn’t that need to watch the next hour right away.

I think part of it is that most of the actors are new.  Even most of the characters are new.  In fact, I think Kovacs, Falconer and Poe are the only three characters to return.  Poe’s presence was a little strange.

For those that didn’t see the first season, he was the AI that ran the hotel Kovacs was operating out of.  At the end of the season, he was attacked.  Now, he’s glitchy and hesitant to reboot.  He might lose his memories, which would be bad.  It would have been easy enough to write this a little differently.  Instead, it’s used to hinder Kovacs here and there.

My main complaint with serialized stories is that each episode is rather slow and usually ends with a hyped-up cliffhanger.  At least we didn’t get the latter here.  It was also a little more evenly paced, but I felt it was slow at times.

Some of the series was spent looking for Konrad Harlan.  I wasn’t exactly sure where that was even going.  Poe was sent in to the VR world to look for him.  Once it was discovered that he wasn’t there, Poe and Kovacs all but gave up on it.  It seemed like a lot of screen time just to show what kind of person his daughter was.

Much of the season was like that.  It was so slow that I usually felt like I was missing something.  It’s like someone is telling you a story and constantly leaving out important details.  I felt like there should have been more going on.

I’m curious to see how the third season will turn out, if it is actually announced.  The series has a way of letting characters come back to life and were left with a pretty nice setup at the end of the final episode.  We’re teased with a big question of what exactly Poe and another AI character found.  The question is whether or not we’ll get our answer

IMDb page