marcmorin Reviews

Go Back to China (2019)

Light hearted and fun from start to finish!

[9/10 · 25 July 2020]

After falling in love with Emily Ting's debut feature film Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong a few years ago, I was very much looking forward to seeing what she would do next. While Go Back to China continues the semi autobiographical theme, she digs deeper into her family history and specifically during a time when she moved back home to help her family's toy manufacturing business. The story is filled with culture clashes and family struggles all told with a comic touch that keeps things light hearted and fun from start to finish.

Go Back to China is an important film when it comes to representation and inclusion within the Asian film community and the story covers a lot of important territory in a really fun way. Ting knows exactly how to balance relevant topics with just the right amount of humor and wraps everything up in a heartwarming package that is a real joy to watch.

I Will Make You Mine (2020)

2020's first truly great film

[10/10 · 8 June 2020]

As a first time feature director, I feel like Lynn Chen had an awful lot to say about women, about being Asian in America, about relationships, about getting older, and about the female perspective on love and just life in general. A lot of these topics are things that don't get explored very often in cinema so this adds a level of importance to the film as well. If these are the types of stories that we are going to see from Chen in the future, I am going to need to know where I can sign up to be first in line for all of it.

I Will Make You Mine will make you fall in love with story telling, with cinema, and with a film maker that I believe is just getting started. This movie not only completes the Surrogate Valentine trilogy, it makes the other two films better. In a year that so far has been quite a bit different from any we have experienced during our time, this movie easily stands out as 2020's first truly great film.