
The first of the three titles in the screwball Hong Kong "Hearts" series. Alex, a creative director, temporarily fills in as conductor for a choir. Two playful kids give him a big headache. One of them is Wei Man. Her mother is a neurotic single parent. She believes that Alex has an illicit desire towards Man and nearly takes him to task for it. She eventually discovers that Alex is a gentleman and mutual attraction blossoms into a love affair. Soon after, Alex's ex-girlfriend comes back to him, wanting to patch up their relationship. He is torn and must decide between the two.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.