A Side, B Side, Sea Side
A Side, B Side, Sea Side
| 03 November 2005 (USA)
A Side, B Side, Sea Side Trailers

Chen Tian is a schoolgirl in Hong Kong about to leave for Beijing for college. Before she leaves for good, she decides to spend an unforgettable trip with her best friends in a distant fishing village. There she discovers love for the first time. The encounter ever so brief, but has left something she can take away with her forever. At the same fishing village, Ah Mei, a girl who's had a tough time in the big city, comes back home to the village to revisit her past. She finds herself reuniting with two boys from her childhood. But time has quietly tarnished their friendship, without them ever aware of the innocence lost.

Reviews
Steve Schonberger

Honey (Kong Ling) and her three best friends enjoy a summer at a sea-side resort near Hong Kong. On their way there, they stop at a video store and buy a few VCDs. Later, they return to the same resort for one last summer together, before Honey leaves for university in Beijing. TT (McChing Mak) looks like the odd one out, with her unfeminine clothing and hair. Sammi (Isis Lee) seems to be drifting away from the others, thanks to her interest in a boy. Later, Honey gets to know Bitters (Larry Chan), who she had first seen at the video store.Meanwhile, Baby (Dolphin) spends a summer in the same town, on vacation from her Hong Kong job. There she makes friends with local brothers To (Chan Ming To) and Fu (Yin Wong Bong).The title refers to the fact that movies on VCD are typically split into one-hour segments, sides "A" and "B", and that the setting is a sea-side resort.All of the acting performances are at least good. The actresses who played Honey and TT stand out as very good. Scene-by-scene, the directing (by Ah Chiu) was mostly very good. Some scenes were excellent, most notably a dare involving TT, and a couple of nicely-photographed scenes that included a kitten. But the directing couldn't overcome two jarring leaps of focus in the story.The script (by three writers) was good until the first leap in focus. After that, it never really got back on track. The middle segment didn't really have much to say, and the final segment didn't return to a point that concluded the initial story.Overall, I thought the movie was fair -- a big disappointment after how well it started.Language: Mostly Cantonese, with occasional English borrow-words, with English subtitles. One scene also includes Putonghua (Mandarin) and English.

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