How Long Will I Love U - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

How Long Will I Love U



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


​

Movie
Well Go USA has really been making a name for itself with it’s passion for bringing Asian cinema to the U.S. shores in it’s uncut form. I remember growing up with New Line Cinemas and other major Hollywood big guys bringing in lots of Asian films, but most of them were sadly cut up for U.S. audiences and given atrocious dub jobs so as to make it in theaters. Jackie Chan’s earliest works were some of his best, but it’s taken YEARS and YEARS for us to get many of those films in their uncut form with the original language track on home video due to the hack jobs that went on. Well Go USA is a small studio, but they have focused on bringing us a lot of stuff that normally wouldn’t make it from the big boys, and usually all in their uncut forms. This has been a big boon for an Asian martial arts fan like myself, but they don’t ALWAYS stick with period piece dramas and high flying action. Over in China there is a HUGE demand for romantic comedies, but most of them really don’t work well for American sensibilities, thus I think studios like Well Go USA has stuck to it’s action/horror/drama bread and butter. However, they have brought over a few of them, and most have been excellent choices for the small studios. My favorite was the 2015 Korean film Beauty Inside (a must watch in my opinion), and the latest being last years How Long Will I Love U box office smash.

How Long Will I Love U takes elements from the Rock Hudson/Doris Day classic Pillow Talk, and infuses it with bits of The Lake House, About Time and several other time traveling romances together in a strange mixture that ACTUALLY works. If you haven’t seen the trailer then the film keeps it’s time traveling nature close to the vest for the first 10 minutes, showing you the struggles and seemingly boring lives of an aspiring architect named Lu Ming (Jiayan Lei) and a broke “ex rich girl” named Gu Xiaojiao (Liya Tong). The two go through their day with begrudging force, only to come home to their apartments………..only to wake up next to each other. After the panic wears off about having a strange person in their bed, Xiaojiao and Ming realize that something else is going on. Their apartments are there, but they’re blended together. The front door also has two sides, with one side opening into Ming’s world of 1999, and the other side opening to Xiao’s world of 2018.

After coming to grips with the fact that their apartment has now been bridged over 19 years apart, the two try to figure out how to live with each other. The two couldn’t be more polar opposites either, with Xiao being a gold differ looking for her next sugar daddy to bring her back to the riches she had when her father was alive, and Ming is a sweet and kind young man who definitely has a hard time getting ahead. Xiao tries to get her riches by using Ming to “cheat” the past (the classic time travel trope of going into the future world to find the winning lottery tickets for 19 years ago), only for the strange laws of time travel to foil her every time.

It’s here that the film really snowballs into your typical rom-com scenario, with the two moving in the obvious direction of falling in love with each other, even if Xiao can’t see herself with a “commoner” like Ming. There’s some unneeded melodrama between the two characters, and then the typical bridge scenes that bring out the final act’s conflict, but it’s in the third act where things get interesting. Ming comes to find out that HIS future self is actually at the heart of all this, and not exactly the nicest guy either. Realizing that his own time travel invention has brought his past self forward, the future Ming runs his own interference game in the two lovers lives, hoping to shift the balances of fate back to where Xiao’s influence hasn’t caused past Ming to alter the past and ruin his plans.

There’s some obvious time travel mumbo jumbo, and the film sometimes violates its own time travel rules (that’s pretty typical of ANY time travel film if you think about it, Avengers Endgame had some problems with it as well, and that had a HUGE budget behind it), and there is actually an opening scene that feels almost taken straight out of Inception, but overall How Long Will I Love U is a very enjoyable romantic comedy. I felt that for once the story could have used less scientific mumbo jumbo, as knowing the mechanics of the science and how things worked actually bogged down the film in several places. The center act with some of the superfluous scenes and Future Ming’s machinations are a bit slow, but the third act as everything comes together brings back the sweetness that was present in the comedic first act. Ming and Xiao are adorable together, and even though you start to kind of dislike Xiao, it’s not until that final act where you realize how much she’s changed that the audience appreciates some of the subtle things she went through. I will give a heads up, the film will be DECIDEDLY bittersweet unless you watch the after credits end scenes. I actually was sitting there with jaw hanging down saying to myself “this is how they’re going to end it!?” until I started going through the credits.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

This was supposedly shot with Arri Alexa XT cameras and finished at a 2K digital intermediate for the home video release, and the results are quite striking on Blu-ray. There’s are ton of details in the image with several different color gradings depending on where in time we’re at. The apartment seems to stick with neutral gradings which look fantastic, but the 2018 world has more of a light blue tinge to it, and the 1999 world is given a yellowing looking (usually meant to give “age” to a particular film’s look in Hollywood). The darker blue look of the 2018 world sometimes isn’t the greatest for fine details, but it sports the better black levels, while the yellowed 1999 era suffers a bit in the black levels. The film is very lovely to behold with various primary colors coming through wonderfully (the flowers on Xiao’s father’s grave, her dresses, the restaurant apparel) and once more, Well Go USA delivers a film with very VERY little banding in it.








Audio:

How Long Will I Love U sports a very healthy sounding 5.1 DTS-HD MA track in Mandarin (no English tracks on this disc) that is very typical of the rom-com genres. There’s some boisterous activity with the Inception like “meshing” of the apartments, as well as the action near the end, but this is mostly a front heavy mix with a lot of dialog to consume. The surrounds get a goody amount of activity with the surrounding Shanghai city environments (as well as said Inception like moment), creating a nice and pleasing overall sound.






Extras:

• Original Trailer





.

Final Score: ​

How Long Will I Love U is a sweet little rom-com that has a surprising amount of heart within it’s tonally challenged walls. The film has a few issues with tone and pacing in the center act as it goes straight in for the kill with the melodrama. A move that feels a little bit at odds with the more playful and sweet moments in the first and third act. However, but the end it has worked out most of the kings and the ending is truly heartfelt and emotionally powerful. The end credits helps bring the ending back down to earth and let the audience sigh a bit with relief, making for a rather satisfying conclusion. Well Go USA bring us a nice looking Blu-ray with great video, good audio and a very meager trailer as the only extra on board. Chinese rom-com’s aren’t for everyone, but How Long Will I Love U is one of the better ones, and is definitely recommended for a fun watch.



Technical Specifications:

Starring: Jiayin Lei, Liya Tong, Ming Fan, Guangjie Li, Nian Li, Hong Tao, Zheng Xu
Directed by: Lun Su
Written by: Lun Su
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: Mandarin: DTS-HD MA 5.1, Mandarin DD 2.0
Subtitles: English, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional)
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: NR
Runtime: 111 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: August 6th, 2019

Recommendation: Fun Watch

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. Will check it out.