Tiny Times (2013)

Let's be realistic.

A lot of fun.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I was curious about this movie because despite of its success in China, there is a very low ratings and very harsh critics on internet. I wanted to watch it by curiosity at first, and I am surprised to be caught liking this movie ! In my humble opinion (F,25years old,France) nobody would expect anything from this movie according to its ratings. so I think many people will be surprised by this movie ! it have the "drama" print. My first impression comes from the quality of images and filming. Specially in Tiny times 2, there are beautiful scenes and songs. The story is about humans relations, centered on the friendship of 4 women. it's a novel like movie. but behind that common story, there are interesting characters that I got attached to.I couldn't resist to watch the Tiny Times 2 after I saw the first one. Although I still don't understand what makes me quite addicted to it, I would just recommend you to give it a try, specially the female public.

One of the best films about the lives four upper middle class young women in the new Shanghai of our time.Beautiful cinematography. An honest look at the sex and city/gossip girl version of the most powerful/sexy city of China currently (soon to be most powerful city in the world), Shanghai. Shanghai is not NYC, it has more innocence, it's poorer, but also richer. Shanghai girls are more naive, yet more mature...The film may lack soul, or depth for some...but in a "girl's world", living in the "comestic" world of appearances has depth just so. In the moment of appearance has an exquisite feeling of it's own.This movie isn't for everyone, just like Twilight some may hate it, for many others will fall in love with this unpolitically correct, one dimensional aspirational lives of Shanghai girls.

No doubt the box-office success of this movie in China is giving it legs to cross into international territory, but we suspect that 'Tiny Times' - directed and adapted by novelist Guo Jingming from his series of bestselling books - is unlikely to find an appreciative audience overseas. A portrayal of the lifestyles of the new-rich who have rode on the waves of China's recent economic boom, it is as shallow and superficial as the lives of the people it aims to portray - and that's a fact not lost on even some of its Mainland Chinese audiences, who have criticised it for glamourising materialism.To be sure, that isn't a problem in itself - after all, Hollywood has also been guilty of dishing out such trivial pleasures, the most well- known examples being 'Sex and the City' and 'Gossip Girl'. But what makes this 'SATC' wannabe - that should otherwise be known as 'Sexless in Shanghai City' - frustrating is how daft each and every one of its four lead characters are, whether in terms of love or career or simply being responsible friends. Yes, it's appalling how they take turns to screw up, jump to conclusions or demonstrate their ego, which makes it quite impossible for us to rally around them and their supposed bond of bosom friendship.But before we launch into that tirade, let's be clear on one thing. We've no issues about this movie being a vehicle of wish-fulfilment for the masses. Indeed, Guo's tale of Lin Xiao (Mini Yang), Lily (Amber Kuo), Nan Xiang (Bea Hayden) and Tang Wanru's (Hsieh Yi-lin) search for love and success in cosmopolitan Shanghai probably just about epitomises the dream of every young Chinese male and female adult. Ditto for their lifestyle of high-rise apartments, designer bags, cutting-edge fashion and luxury bags - judge them all you want, but those symbols of status are just what every high-achiever in China is after.So we're not here to quibble over the little lapses in logic, even though some audiences are less likely to be as kind. We therefore won't question how Lin Xiao for instance, despite her clumsy and careless ways, manages to secure a coveted position as assistant to fashion bible M.E. Magazine's editor-in-chief Gong Ming (Rhydian Vaughan). Neither will we question how Lily manages to be a Chief Financial Officer despite being fresh out of college. Perhaps even more significantly, we won't even start asking how in the first place the four girls became such inseparable friends, despite the fact that there is little we see which in fact binds them together.And yet even with such concessions, what transpires is just plain dreadful. Why Gong Ming or his other more senior assistant Kitty would put up with Lin Xiao's mistakes time and time again escapes us, particularly since the former is said to be exacting and the latter unsympathetic to under-performing employees; but what really takes the cake is why Lin Xiao would accept Gong Ming's gift of an engagement ring that he says he doesn't need anymore, which then leads to a huge misunderstanding with her boyfriend Jian Xi (Li Ruimin).Lily gets the even shorter end of the stick, confronted with a rough patch in her once rock-solid relationship with Gu Yuan (Kai Ko) after the latter's mother disapproves of her and seeks to marry him off to an even wealthier family. This isn't even a rich-poor divide; it's that of the rich-and-richer, so ludicrous and poorly defined that one feels no empathy or anything whatsoever for what becomes of the two of them. And would you believe it, their rift begins when Jian Xi calls Gu Yuan, hears a female picking up the call, and proceeds to tell Lin Xiao and Nan Xiang of Gu's suspected infidelity - so much for being a responsible friend.Fortunately for Nan Xiang and Wanru, they are spared much of the inanity by simply being afterthoughts. Aside from the contrived finale, Nan Xiang's struggling fashion designer hardly gets much screen time other than an ill-conceived but thankfully barely-elaborated subplot involving a former boyfriend Xi Cheng (Jo Jiang). Ditto for stocky badminton player Wanru, whose crush on another well-chiselled player Wei Hai (Calvin Tu) gets all about five minutes of play. Nonetheless, it also means that for most of the time, we have to put up with idiotic characters whom we just want to slap some common sense into.That's doubly disappointing if you consider how Guo's writing experience should in fact make him a good storyteller; instead, we are not only made to endure a first-time director's poor sense of narrative continuity, but also his half-baked tale of immature characters and their childish whims. And no, the fact that he had cast eye candies Mini Yang, Amber Kuo and Taiwan-born Eurasian model Bea Hayden doesn't quite make up for it - even though there's no denying that Yang and Kuo display plenty of sass in their respective roles.As you can probably tell, this is a movie designed specifically to go easy on the eye. Besides the ladies, the guys have also been chosen from some of the most eligible young actors from the Mainland and Taiwan. It's not about the fact that it's fluffy - we do enjoy our guilty pleasures - but it's about how plain stupid the characters are, trapped in their own little well of incompetence, pettiness and ignorance. Unless you have specifically come to ogle, this is one vacuous romantic fantasy that is as empty as it is tiny and ultimately inconsequential. www.moviexclusive.com

I have never seen such a ugly film and i think 郭敬明 can receive Razzie Award . Tiny Times tells the story of friendship between four girls from high school through college, with each girl also having her own love story. With a bit of a mix between The Devil Wears Prada and Gossip Girl, the story is told from the perspective of one of the girls who is an intern at a fashion and literature magazine. Differently, however, her boss is a handsome young man. Guo's own image is also reflected in the characters, but split into two roles: editor-in-chief of the magazine and an idolized young writer. Just like Guo's real life - a publisher who always prepares a plan B and a boy from a small town who gets famous at 17 and must face the pressure and loneliness of the world - the writer's characteristics and personality are recognizable in the film. The casting fits perfectly into different roles. These good-looking actors and actresses, mostly famous for pop television series or advertisements, all have their own fan base. However, it seems the acting potential of these young stars is not reflected in the film. Lead actor Ko Chen-tung's performance in Tiny Times is said to be not as good as what he did in You Are the Apple of My Eye. Few of the roles are fully represented even though the film is filled with voice-over to introduce the background. One of the ex-boyfriends, who can always lead to a strong emotional reaction from the girls, only appears twice in the whole movie. For those in the audience who never read the book, unconnected scenes and unreal details are everywhere. For instance, an extremely rich family does not have a guest room and has to tell the girl staying over the night to sleep in the room with the son - the college student played by Ko. In another example, the girl who carries different Dior bags everyday cries to borrow money from her boyfriend because she cannot afford a crystal glass she broke in her boss' office. The problem of featuring multiple leading characters but not making careful use of them all is a common problem for those new to filmmaking. For instance, Zhao Wei who directed So Young made similar mistakes. Spin off success Nevertheless, from a purely commercial point-of-view, adapting the story for the big screen is wonderful. Long before the film was released, gossips about Tiny Times and Guo appeared all over the place. More than half of the members of the production team come from Taiwan, a place where films specifically target young audiences with its own unique style. As a result, the fashionable setting and glamorous photography are comparable to the best chick flicks Chinese audiences have seen before. Various attractive trailers, music videos and promotional posters all suggested the film's potential of becoming the most popular film of the year as long as the script and film languages reached an average professional level. The film remains loyal to the novel and the script was also written by Guo. The major problems seem to stem from a filming style that looks like a string of TV commercials all stitched together. The result is a collection of scenes that are unlikely to satisfy film critics and industry insiders. What Guo has done is more like producing a mood piece or a long music video as a spin off for the book to fans who admire the invisible "vanity fair" that was created in the book. Controversy as a trend Controversy about a film is no longer a surprise. However, the discussions about Tiny Times have created a phenomenon that audiences could have totally opposite opinions towards almost every part of the film. The series of books, Tiny Times (1.0/2.0/3.0), have boosted controversy since first coming out five years ago. Guo's target readers are teenagers. What he became famous for was mainly beautiful languages and because of this, the excessive desire for luxuries mentioned in his books is seen as having a negative effect on youngsters who are still building up their values and ideologies. Such issues continue to be the main point of contention between the two camps that either love or hate the stories. The most frequent comment, especially by those who have no background knowledge of the novel, is that the story illustrates a warped value system-luxury labels appear every few minutes. The argument that Chinese films generally have been overly "teachy" and perhaps in the past spent too much time on values should allow the critics to switch focus on other problems or qualities that the film has. If the story was constructed upon an imaginary space like Twilight, some of the audience might forgive Guo's unrealistic details. Or, if the story was just about upper-class lifestyle like Gossip Girl, it would also be fine for many film critics. The main shortcoming lies on the contradiction that Guo wants to portray different people from different social backgrounds to reflect the status of the young generation in the current time period, as the name Tiny Times suggests. But the luxurious lifestyle and cartoon like characters are too much of a daydreamer's fairytale. Guo's success as a businessman is indubitable, but the film Tiny Times is exactly the same as the book - full of beautiful surface elements and never enough careful consideration. The disagreement between fans and film critics is a mirror of the gap between different generations. Youngsters would ask, what's so amazing about really deep thoughts?