In case you\u2019re wondering, \u201cNothing Can\u2019t Be Undone By a HotPot\u201d is not only the best movie title of the year so far, but also a no-frills Chinese whodunit about a pile of stolen cash, a human body, and a long line of dirty laundry. The cash and the body present themselves early on in this sugary Agatha Christie-style mystery, but the laundry gets unpacked at its own unhurried pace.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A cryptic text message summons four friends, who meet in a combination mahjong\/Chinese opera bar run by the group\u2019s leader, a self-serious chiseler who calls himself Nine Cakes (Yu Qian). The assembled conspirators don\u2019t know much about each other since they\u2019d only previously communicated through an internet forum. They still quickly commit to what, on its face, seems like a simple heist: breaking into a soon-to-be demolished apartment and then boosting a suitcase that\u2019s hidden behind the bathroom wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With mahjong-themed nicknames like Fortune (Ailei Yu) and Chicken (Yang Mi), the group\u2019s members struggle to remain on top of their constantly escalating scheme. Because it\u2019s not just one suitcase, but two, and the second one contains a body, and it may not be dead yet. The bag-snatchers hunch over a hotpot table and review their options backstage at the opera.<\/p>\n
The irregular pace and unsteady tone of \u201cNothing Can\u2019t Be Undone By a Hotpot\u201d might seem manic if you compare one scene to the next. The thrill of discovery still matters more than any given twist, doled out with enough panache to make a two-hour-plus caper fly by. That\u2019s not nothing in a movie that\u2019s more about yarn-spinning than wool-gathering. Each new twist inadvertently sets up the next while seemingly announcing itself with unrehearsed spontaneity. Because it\u2019s not a random suitcase full of loot and the guy in the other bag isn\u2019t just a mark. The trick is to let the story cook at its own pace, bubbling and overflowing with such regularity that by the time the movie\u2019s over, the most impressive thing isn\u2019t the integrity of the plot, but the seamlessness of its presentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The frantic but easy interplay between the four principle cast members\u2014plus the body, Director Fu (Tian Yu)\u2014handily distinguishes \u201cNothing Can\u2019t Be Undone By a Hotpot\u201d from other recent programmers. Dialogue isn\u2019t elevated to precious post-Tarantino levels of dramatic bombast; it’s more like unassuming links in a perpetually spun-out chain of exhaustively discussed events. The characters in this movie don\u2019t simply talk, but also perform for and with each other. They have secrets that they need to share, and they also happen to work well together, even when they\u2019re stepping on each other\u2019s toes. \u201cNothing Can\u2019t Be Undone By a Hotpot\u201d has big escape room energy, is what I\u2019m trying to say.<\/p>\n
There are some outstanding one-liners, like when Seventy Grand (Li Jiu Xiao) sees a pile of loot and gasps: \u201cPoverty limited my imagination.\u201d But most of what\u2019s charming about this movie is its characters\u2019 use of dialogue as a frustrated negotiating tactic. I\u2019m still laughing at an exchange from early in the movie when the group briefly considers what to do with Fu\u2019s body. Seventy Grand suggests that they \u201cDismember it!\u201d And after a short pause, Nine Cakes solemnly agrees. They then discuss how much of the body each person should cut up and who among them gets to use the big cleaver, which leads Nine Cakes to insist, \u201cThis is what I can take at most. No arms.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In case you\u2019re wondering, \u201cNothing Can\u2019t Be Undone By a HotPot\u201d is not only the best movie title of the year so far, but also a no-frills Chinese whodunit about a pile of stolen cash, a human body, and a long line of dirty laundry. The cash and the body present themselves early on in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[33,50,47],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-comedy","tag-crime","tag-mystery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}