This was crazy. I kept thinking The Gathering was a Taiwanese movie and didn't even put two and two together until the half way mark, when Ipoh was mentioned then I realised this was a Malaysia movie.
I didn't even think twice when the place "Taiping" came up, I thought that was a small town in Taiwan! Silly me.
Even when I heard the forced Mandarin pronunciations from the diva character, I brushed it aside because most of the cast all spoke so well and were able to "fake it" much better than Singaporean actors.
Unfortunately for everything else, the inexperienced nature of the actors and director Bingo Chang, who delivered his first directorial debut with this movie, all were highlighted.
The acting by everyone was just passable. Zhou Zhou though cute as the female lead always use the same shy mannerism which became very inconsistent with her character. Chen Ze Yao fared slightly better as the male lead. But even the veterans playing the parents, didn't look convincing.
Most of this was because of Chang's lack of experience in directing. He was unable to bring out the essence of the emotions in most of the scenes. His direction looked very juvenile onscreen.
And strange how often I have been comparing movies to music videos recently, and this one really looked like one as well. The songs kept coming one after another with video montages that lengthen the whole movie considerably.
Which brings me to Chang's pacing, which was terrible. I would have easily shaved off 20 minutes of the running time and nothing would have been amiss. I felt like I have been sitting in the cinema for 3 hours and the movie still hasn't ended.
The upside of the movie was showing off the beautiful scenic locations in Taiping. The cinematography looked beautiful as well.
And though there was a nice story here which I liked, with great characters like Chen's buddies; the dragging of plot points reminiscent of Taiwanese soap was too difficult to bear.
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